Meacher confirms
This on the BBC website this morning: ‘Former Environment Minister Michael Meacher – pictured left – is to announce he will challenge Gordon Brown for leadership of the Labour Party. ‘Mr Meacher, who is on the left of the party, had said there should be a contest when Tony Blair steps down. ‘He has told [...]
Labour Party: Black Socialist Society relaunch
The campaign to set up Labour Party black sections was one of the key Bennite causes of the early eighties. Technically the battle was successful, in that we eventually got them. But it did not become the bastion of the hard left initially envisaged, and seems to have collapsed at some point in the nineties. [...]
South London gun murders: blame Marxism
Want to know what who is responsible for the spate of murders of black teenagers in South London? Karl Marx, mainly. Oh, and that Leon Trotsky bloke. Yes, him. That’s according to a slightly surreal article by Dominic Lawson – pictured left – in the Independent this morning. You see, the breakdown of family life [...]
Israel/Palestine: is there a democratic way forward?
A two-hour meeting in Jerusalem between Condoleezza Rice (pictured left), Mahmoud Abbas and Ehud Olmert has concluded with the issue of a 90-second statement promising little beyond a commitment to further meetings. No surprise there, then. It was never likely that this most intractable of international problems was going to be resolved by an afternoon [...]
Alan Simpson to quit parliament
Labour MP Alan Simpson – widely seen as the key bagman for the rumoured forthcoming Michael Meacher leadership bid – is stepping down from the House of Commons at the next election. Sounds like a tacit acknowledgement that Nine Homes’s chances are looking none too good. Most of us could have told you that months [...]
Polish antisemitism redux
Last July this blog reported comments made by Polish MEP Maciej Giertych in praise of the former Spanish fascist dictator Franco. ‘Christian Europe’ is losing out to ‘atheistic socialists’ because of a lack of statesmen of such calibre, we were told. Now Giertych has opened his filthy trap again, in a 32-page booklet called ‘Civilisations [...]
New Labour: rediscovering redistribution?
In its February1974 election manifesto, Labour famously promised a ‘fundamental and irreversible shift in the balance of power and wealth in favour of working people and their families’. And in February 2007, one or two Labour politicians – most notably certain deputy leadership contenders – have tentatively rediscovered the ‘r’ word. A case in point [...]
Britpop against Blairism
I have never understood the comparisons between Oasis and the Beatles. To my ears, the Manchester-born rockers always sounded more like Status Quo than the Fab Four. Sure, I’ve got copies of Definitely Maybe and (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? on my CD racks. They were two of the best-selling albums of the 1990s, after [...]
Should the left back road pricing?
As an ecosocialist non-driver I am predisposed to see road pricing as a good thing. After all, British drivers do not pay anything like the full social cost of private car use. Indeed, real motoring costs have fallen by 8% since New Labour came to office in1997. Meanwhile, British public transport is the most expensive [...]
Towards a weightless NHS
New Labour’s vision for the NHS is essentially to transform it into a commissioning organisation, buying in healthcare from private sector providers. But for some of the more radical health care trusts – stuffed full of business people with no medical experience, for whom accountancy conventions carry greater weight than the Hippocratic oath – that [...]
