Sir Malcolm Rifkind and the Baghdad Boom
They call it ‘the Baghdad Boom’. The mounting death toll in Iraq has been created a market worth an estimated $2bn for around 100 local and 70 Iraqi-owned private security companies. And until now, one of the biggest beneficiaries has been UK-listed ArmorGroup, chaired by a former Thatcher cabinet minister and Tory leadership hopeful. But [...]
Exclusive: Amicus plans to shaft T&G
Amicus officials seem pretty damn confident that they will secure every single one of the top jobs when their union merges with the T&G early in 2007, and are surprisingly sure that they will win elections that will not be held for several years. The spirit of good old EETPU’s legendary machine politics lives on, [...]
Lib Dems: here comes your 19th non-existent breakthrough
The Liberal Democrats – or the Social and Liberal Democrats, or the SDP/Liberal Alliance, or the plain vanilla Liberal Party – have perpetually been ‘on the verge of a breakthrough’ ever since I was a zealous teenage Bennite who still looked good in tight trousers. Come to think of it, they’ve probably been on the [...]
Edward Leigh on the core Tory vote
Rightwing Tory Edward Leigh – pictured left – reckons that Cameron’s determination to New Labourise the Conservative Party will cost votes, if not the next election itself: ‘”Going too far to attract the floaters is a very high-risk strategy,” Mr Leigh said. ‘He bluntly told Mr Cameron that “freezing out” the Tory right wing and [...]
Bush’s inaction on Darfur: a contradiction for the pro-war left?
The idea of supporting United Nations humanitarian intervention has long been a taboo for the far left. Isn’t such a stance simply a fancy dress version of endorsing the latest imperialist aggression against the third world? Until the mid nineties, I would have gone with the Trotskyist consensus position. I’ve even argued for it in [...]
Amicus gets worker-director on Allianz board
Should the left support the legal right for one or more employee representatives to sit on the board of private companies? As I understand it, the idea of worker-directors was one of the demands of the industrial democracy movement in the sixties and seventies, although this was slightly before my political time. And in certain [...]
Official: Dave’s Part rocks
Last week the Channel Four website carried an article on the twenty ‘most influential political bloggers in Britain’. Dave’s Part made the cut, so I devoted a short post to bragging about it. Three people commented. Then C4 took the post down, leaving me looking a right old wally. I felt I had no choice [...]
Safety standards at BP
BP likes to brand itself as the greenest oil major of the lot, as witnessed by corporate advertising that implies the company is basically a windfarming outfit with a small-ish sideline pumping crude, and therefore somehow ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Don’t you just love the sunflower logo, pictured left? But whichever way you want to slice it, [...]
Harriet Harman enters Labour deputy race
Hattie Harman has officially joined the Labour deputy leadership race, we learn from the Daily Mirror today. Politically speaking, the pitch so far seems pretty much restricted to ‘vote for me, I’m a woman’ Like, duh. But it’s interesting to note that she also makes great play of her backing for Brown for the top [...]
Ken Livingstone: will he endorse Gordon Brown?
According to the McDonnell camp, an unofficial poll of delegates at this week’s TUC conference – conducted by the Electoral Reform Society – has found massive support among delegates for their man. A press release informs us that the results of the poll were: John McDonnell 59% Gordon Brown 10% Alan Johnson 8% Good news. [...]
