Anthony Barnett is the founder of openDemocracy.net.

A social entrepreneur of wide experience, Anthony helped launch Charter 88 in 1988 and was its first Director. Generating widespread support he turned it into a movement for the democratic reform of Britain (at the end of the 90s the Telegraph described it as the UK's "most influential pressure group of the decade"). Anthony is also a writer and journalist. He is the author of Iron Britannia; Soviet Freedom and This Time; and co-author and editor of among other books, Aftermath: the Struggle of Vietnam and Cambodia; Power and the Throne, Town and Country and a considerable range of articles and pamphlets covering politics and culture, such as (with Peter Carty), The Athenian Option – radical reform for the House of Lords (Demos, 1998) and the television film, England's Henry Moore. He writes regularly for openDemocracy and contributes to many of its debates.

Recent articles

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Thanks to a tip from Gareth Young in the vigorous comments section on his OK post about The way forward for the Campaign for an English Parliament, I’ve just read Bill Bragg here in CiF. Billy defends his call for an English patriotism and makes a lot of what is happening in Scotland to prove his case that progressive politics and civic nationalism can go together. He’s right. Two things strike me. Billy makes an explicitly socialist case - from a socialist addressed to socialists - saying internationalism and patriotism are not incompatible and the right should not be permitted a free ride on England. But the SNP have never been a socialist or an explicitly social-democratic party - even if this is what their government is turning out to be. So we have to ask the question: why is it that the most left-wing government in the United Kingdom is not from the Labour or socialist tradition?

The United States presidential race is the most exciting and energising in years. Barack Obama has made it so, and in a way that opens a new era of political possibility, says openDemocracy's founder Anthony Barnett.

(This article was first published on 6 February 2008)

Attending the launch of the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence, Anthony Barnett weighs both the prevailing and unconventional wisdom on fighting terrorism

There are clashing accounts of whether the move against Hillary and towards Barack is generational or reproduces traditional prejudice against women. Gloria Steinem talkes the latter view in the NYT in a much emailed Women are never the Front Runners. I have a different view in OurKingdom, picking up from Will Smith's I Am Legend.

In the Washington Post, Anne Applebaum argues with Europeans (not me) that a Black can be elected and adds, "Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she is running for election at a moment when the flaws of oligarchy and dynasty are on display as never before". This picks up an issue that Beverly Anderson, a Jamaican-American living in Neww York, takes up in a comment in the OK discussion, "I don’t see how it helps to have a woman candidate running on her husband’s record. I would have had more respect for her if she had run as Hillary Rodham and not pretended that her experience consisted of anything more than her Senate term".

Anthony Barnett, in OurKingdom, chooses the art Britain's commissars deserve