Good night and good luck
Word reaches me of a journalist stepping down from the editorship of a prestigious business magazine to take up a position with in Zurich with the wealth management arm of a major Swiss merchant bank. What’s it worth not to have me post those documents from that unfortunate faction fight to your new bosses in [...]
Francis Maude on the Labour-Union link
Cameron’s Conservatives are busily shredding one policy after another, in their increasingly frantic efforts to convince us they are no longer the Nasty Party. But probably the one hang-up they are genetically incapable of ever overcoming is their gut hatred for the organised working class, and the idea that working people should have any kind [...]
Ted Grant: 1913-2006
When I first got involved in socialist politics in the early 1980s, Ted Grant’s Militant Tendency were the largest grouping on the British far left. As a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists, I even flogged the paper a few times outside Whitechapel tube station. If I am entirely honest, the major reason I [...]
McDonnell: why Labour is falling in the polls
Labour leadership contender John McDonnell explains why New Labour is nine points behind the Tories in an opinion poll published in the Guardian today. That’s a 19-year low, by the way: ‘This is just one poll but it adds further evidence to confim the trend of the 2005 general election, the 2006 local elections and [...]
British business inside the Beltway
It’s not just British politicians that are bought and paid for by British companies. It seems that BAE is the 18th largest political donor in the US, giving more to the two major US parties than either Microsoft or ExxonMobil: ‘US subsidiaries of British companies have doled out about $3.7m in political contributions ahead of [...]
Labour Party: mass redundancies?
Labour’s financial crisis is serious stuff, according to today’s FT: “It’s a pretty drastic situation,” said one senior Labour figure. “There are indications that Labour is looking to cut at least 40 per cent of its workforce as part of the restructuring programme and that’s a horrible backdrop with which to go into party conference.” [...]
Economic outlook: ‘very late cycle’
As the joke goes, Trotskyists have correctly predicted 18 of the last three recessions. One of the biggest failings of the post-war British far left – and the Grant and Healy traditions surely stand out here – has been its propensity for catastrophism. Year after year, perspectives documents were premised on the idea that, however [...]
Labour Party: financial crisis
They sold all those peerages. But somehow New Labour still can’t make ends meet. This from the Daily Telegraph this morning: Jobs, pay fears as Labour’s debts pile up By Katherine Griffiths and Christopher Hope Labour insiders fear that the party is facing a cash crisis so serious that it may not be able to [...]
Saudi fighter deal: embarassed silences on the left
New Labour backed Bush’s invasion of Iraq because of its principled concern to bring about democracy in the Middle East. At least that’s what we are told by the pro-war left and the Euston Manifesto crowd. So surely they must be feeling that little bit puzzled as to why the Ministry of Defence has given [...]
Sheridan calls for new party
I suppose this was inevitable really. Still sad, though. Tommy Sheridan has signalled he intends to sever his ties with the Scottish Socialists and form a new party. The Glasgow MSP last night said the eight-year-old party he helped form and once led seemed to have “reached its historical limits” and he thought “a new [...]
