I’m a Seoul Man
Posted on Monday 14 May, 2012
Filed Under International |
17 Comments
JW Marriott Hotel, Seoul: OVER the last 30 years, I have watched from afar the transformation of South Korea from a military dictatorship to a parliamentary democracy, and from an emerging market to a card-carrying OECD member developed economy.
This week I am getting a chance to see the country for myself, thanks to a programme for international journalists sponsored by a local television station. There are a lot of heavyweight hacks along for the ride, including a Pulitzer Prize winner, who turns out to be a surprisingly down-to-earth guy with which to have a beer.
Obviously, the scheme is in place for ideological reasons. This is a place where the Cold War lives on, and tomorrow’s visit to the Demilitarized Zone is likely to prove the highlight of the trip. But all of this remains by way of obvious subtext and – so far, anyway – our hosts are not hammering home the point.
Then again, they don’t have to. We all know that on the other side of the DMZ lies a country that officially advocates Juche, or self-reliance, and yet cannot feed its population, even with a considerable amount of foreign food aid. Ironically, much of the assistance was provided by the US, at least until it was withdrawn recently following Pyongyang’s unsuccessful long-range missile launch.
This peninsula highlights a number of questions of socialist theory: are property relations in North Korea in any sense ‘post capitalist’, and therefore some sort of gain that should be defended by the left?; does the recent history of South Korea put paid to the idea that countries can no longer undergo bourgeois revolutions in the classic sense? But common sense alone gives some idea of the answers.
There is a danger that the undeniably lavish hospitality we are enjoying here will compromise the judgement of participants, including me. But I’d like to think I can withstand the bribery element and remain objective in my assessments, of which I hope to provide a few more in the days ahead.
David Cameron: not Tory enough?
Posted on Wednesday 9 May, 2012
Filed Under Conservative Party, Politics, The right |
28 Comments
WHAT David Cameron has achieved in just two years in office should be getting the free market right more excited than Ken Livingstone’s doctor. Instead, substantial sections of his own party are subjecting him to sustained assault for the alleged insufficiency of his attachment to their dogma.
So crazed are his assailants that they seemingly accord no weight to such achievements as the completion of the necessary spadework for the privatisation of the NHS, the end of universal child benefit and the implementation of the deepest cuts in public spending since the early 1920s.
Were I a frothing at the mouth Friedmanite, I would sign off his school report with ’10 out of 10 for effort’, and gleefully look forward to the Coalition sealing the various aforementioned deals. What I would not be doing is start plotting a palace coup over the question of gay marriage.
Book review: ‘Israel and the European Left’ by Colin Shindler
Posted on Sunday 6 May, 2012
Filed Under Book review, Israel |
182 Comments
THE allegation of ‘delegitimization’ is a particular shapeless charge to find oneself having to plead against. Yet as the subtitle to this book indicates, such is the broad brush accusation facing all sections of the European socialist movement over the last century, with Colin Shindler making the case that leftists have been in the business of delegitimizing the state of Israel even before the state of Israel came into existence.
It is of course true that some of those in the dock do have form. Even so, I must direct any fair minded jury to acquit the bulk of the defendants.
This volume is largely written backwards from the final chapter, which documents the peculiarly British – and not, to my knowledge anyway, Europe-wide – alliance between some socialist traditions and offshoots of the Muslim Brotherhood in the UK, which has often been accompanied by anti-semitic rhetorical flourishes.
Shindler’s essential contention is that, at some level, ‘twas ever thus. The troubled history of the relationship between Marxism and Zionism since the inception of both creeds is accordingly given a thorough airing.
Update
Posted on Sunday 6 May, 2012
Filed Under Blogging |
2 Comments
APOLOGIES for the lack of posts over the last week. There has been an election on in London, y’know.
Nor can I promise much in the weeks to come. I have trips to South Korea, Greece and Turkey lined up in short order, although I will attempt to blog observations from my travels. Anybody who has contacts worth meeting in these countries is invited to get in touch via my public email address.
The far left and capitalist crisis
Posted on Monday 30 April, 2012
Filed Under Economics, The left |
85 Comments
RECENT capitalist history has thrown up sharper economic declines and higher levels of unemployment than the ones we are currently witnessing in Greece and Spain. It’s just that they haven’t occurred in nice Mediterranean countries that Britons visit for beach holidays and long weekends.
So while the latest estimates from the local central bank suggest that Greek GDP will fall 5% in 2012, marking a cumulative drop of 13% since 2008, it remains true that the Asian financial crisis of 15 years or so ago was far worse. GDP plunged 13% in Indonesia in 1998 alone, with reductions of 11% in Thailand and 7% in South Korea and Malaysia.
Yet Asia recovered relatively rapidly, and the official line from the European Central Bank is that Greece will see stagnation next year, followed by the resumption of growth in 2014.
But given the sharp reductions in wages and public spending, collapsing consumer confidence, capital flight, an investment strike and – most importantly of all – the absence of export-oriented manufacturing industries, many observers regard that outcome as unlikely.
When you’re too skint for Newham, you’re in trouble
Posted on Thursday 26 April, 2012
Filed Under Welfare State |
33 Comments
SAMUEL Johnson famously observed that when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life. But I suspect that the prospect of families suddenly becoming too poor to live in Newham would not even have crossed his mind.
One of the big stories this week has been the revelation that a Labour-controlled council on the eastern extremities of the capital has been seeking to rehouse a fair chunk of the local homeless way outside its patch.
Indeed, it has even asked a housing association 160 miles away in Stoke if it could come up with accommodation for 500 people.
Housing minister Grant Shapps instantly accused it of ‘playing politics’. Oddly enough, he has not ventured the same observation about Tory-run Westminster, which has been following a similar policy for some time.
The case against a US strike on Iran
Posted on Sunday 22 April, 2012
Filed Under Israel, USA |
78 Comments
AS JOHN McCain’s painfully unfunny rewrite of the lyrics to Beach Boys’ hit ‘Barbara Ann’ demonstrates, at least the former Republican presidential contender can see the lighter side of mounting a US airstrike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
Fortunately for the rest of the world, Barack Obama has not only shown no inclination to ‘bomb bomb Iran’, but has so far actively restrained Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu from following Mr McCain’s advice. Had he not done so, the likelihood is that Israel would already have acted.
That is to Obama’s credit, and might give some of his more simpleminded leftwing critics cause for reflection. Washington foreign policy may still not be an untrammeled force for planet-wide benevolence, but at least it has moved on since 2003.
So there are reasonable hopes that the P5+1 talks – which enter into a second round in Baghdad next month – point the way to some sort of settlement of the question on which peace in the Middle East now hangs.
Repsol-YPF: the left and nationalisation today
Posted on Wednesday 18 April, 2012
Filed Under Economics, International |
87 Comments
IT HAS been a long time since people used to get up at Labour Party meetings and casually demand the nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies, even in speeches supposedly addressing the need for better traffic light provision in Leytonstone.
Even so, nostalgia alone makes it likely that many comrades will find their hearts gladdened by news that Argentina has brought oil company Repsol-YPF into government hands.
Moves like this have been extremely rare since the failure of the Mitterand experiment three decades ago. After neoliberal orthodoxy went global in the 1980s, public ownership has been derided as unthinkable.
The principle exception, of course, is when state takeovers have taken the form of bailouts. Even though New Labour’s free market credentials were sadly not in doubt, it felt itself reluctantly compelled to save Railtrack and a clutch of financial institutions when expediency so dictated.
So why is Boris Johnson heading for a second term?
Posted on Monday 16 April, 2012
Filed Under Conservative Party, Labour Left, Labour Party |
35 Comments
LABOUR should be winning in London, and winning big. Yet somehow Boris Johnson appears to be heading for a second term in City Hall, in what is shaping up to be a severe setback for the entire left.
Remember that Labour has a consolidated lead in national voting intentions, and that the capital is one of the party’s strongholds. If the mayoral and assembly contests are thought of as one big by-election, with the attendant scope for protest voting, the Tories ought to be in for a drubbing.
Instead, Johnson leads the latest polls by five percentage points on first preferences and six percentage points after reallocation of second preferences.
Boris will be Boris, as the saying goes, and there is still time for him to do something monumentally stupid. But clearly it would be foolish to build an entire campaign strategy on such an eventuality.
Why the rise of UKIP should worry the left
Posted on Friday 13 April, 2012
Filed Under Conservative Party, The right, UKIP |
90 Comments
TWO Tory MPs are on the brink of defecting to the UK Independence Party, Nigel Farage told the Independent this morning. He may or may not be bluffing, or course.
The UKIP leader spoke after a recent survey put his outfit on 11%, the same degree of backing as the Liberal Democrats now enjoy. That result may or may not represent at rogue poll.
But what can be said for certain is that UKIP secured over 900,000 votes in 2010. By way of comparison, remember that in the 15 years that the far left has been challenging the Labour Party, through one vehicle or another, it has not reached six figure territory.
The arrival of a substantial force to the right of the Conservatives – and one that is credibly able to threaten to contest every seat at the next general election – is a completely new departure in British politics.
