New Labour: losing it in the unions?
Yesterday Patricia Hewitt was booed and heckled as she addressed 1,000 Unison-organised healthworkers in Gateshead. Today there are reports that 20 trade unionists in Northern Ireland walked out on a speech by Peter Hain, the Blair cabinet’s licensed maverick soft leftist. This after RMT’s move to back selected socialists against Labour in next month’s council [...]
Egypt: neither Mubarak nor the Muslim Brotherhood
Egypt is – second only to Iraq – the country where many current theoretical debates in the anglophone blogosphere play out in real life, with real consequences for tens of millions of real people. It’s also a country I can claim to know, at least a little, having visited it a couple of times on [...]
How leftwing is Oliver Kamm?
Let’s return to theme of what it means to be rightwing or leftwing these days, following my quick post on the topic about a week ago. It seems that Blairite blogger and Times columnist Oliver Kamm – pictured left – has rather taken umbrage at Peter Wilby’s suggestion that, while claiming to be leftwing, he [...]
Top neoconservative endorses the Euston Manifesto
William Kristol – editor of neocon house journal the Weekly Standard, pictured left – has been reading the Euston Manifesto, and finds in its favour: ‘The signatories of the document are liberals and progressives. They make clear their commitment to domestic and economic policies with which we at The Weekly Standard heartily disagree. But in [...]
Stand down Tony, stand down please
I remember exactly how elated I felt when I heard that Thatcher had quit. And that’s exactly how I’ll feel again when the long overdue resignation of the Right Honourable Anthony Charles Linton Blair is announced. There was a time when I could never have imagined disliking any Labour politician as much as I hated [...]
Why I don’t support George Galloway and Respect
After having polemicised against the Euston Manifesto over the last week, I’d better make it crystal that I am not now and have never been a fan of George Galloway, either. It is this unique ability to piss off all sides equally that makes me such a popular fixture in leftwing journalism, I guess. This [...]
Kick over the statues
INTERNET CAFÉ, BUDAPEST: One of the popular tourist attractions in Budapest is Szoborpark, an open-air museum on the outskirts of the city that offers a new home for some of the statues erected here during the the Stalinist era. Only a few were designed to immortalise the greats of the communist movement, such as Marx, [...]
Euston Manifesto: what changed for Alan Johnson?
One of the four lead signatories of the Euston Manifesto is Alan Johnson, an academic and a former member of the Alliance for Workers’ Liberty. From the style of some of the passages in the document – and as a journo, I’m quite good at literary detective stuff – I would guess that he wrote [...]
More on the Euston Manifesto
INTERNET CAFÉ, BUDAPEST: Shuggy continues the debate on that damn Euston Manifesto, and queries some of my objections to the initiative. ‘And I’m left wondering if he finds nothing progressive in the co-operation of British socialists in the Labour Party and trades union movement that have in the 20th century co-operated on various occasions with [...]
Elections in Hungary
INTERNET CAFÉ, BUDAPEST A number of recent European general elections have been close-run things. Phil over at Marxsite considers the cases of Germany and Italy, and argues that much of this apparent apathy flows from the continuing convergence between mainstream left and mainstream right. If politicians don’t set out different stalls, the electorate can be [...]
