McDonnell, Hain on Labour leadership
The Press Association has details of interviews with two Labour Party figures, which will be broadcast on GMTV’s Sunday Programme this weekend. Leftwing leadership challenger John McDonnell admits that he only has around two dozen backers signed up so far. That’s the same figure he has been touting for several weeks now, so the assumption [...]
Red Holy Saturday
They called it Sabado Santo Rojo, or Red Holy Saturday. Saturday 9 April 1977 saw the legalisation of the Spanish Communist Party after almost 40 years in clandestinity, and the website of leading Spanish newspaper El Mundo has gone to town to mark the event. The effort is well worth a look. There’s plenty of [...]
Bob Diamond and the national minimum wage
Barclays president Bob Diamond has been in the news of late, after picking up £15.2m in pay and perks last year. Meanwhile, the DTI has announced that the national minimum wage for those over 21 will in October increase to the equivalent of £11,481 a year for a 40-hour week. I’m sure Diamond is a [...]
John Reid, Ruth Kelly and the Home Office split
John Reid – the cabinet’s ‘ard bastard in residence – now seems better placed than ever to live out his 1950s eastern European interior minister manque fantasies, following the decision to split the Home Office in two. Here’s how the Financial Times assesses the changes in terms of its impact on the dynamics of New [...]
National Union of Students conference 2007
It’s been over two decades since I last attended a National Union of Students conference. But reports emanating from Blackpool Winter Gardens – where the 2007 version of this event opened on Tuesday – indicate that some rites de passage remain largely unsullied by the passing of time. Even as I write, then, the cabinet [...]
Solidarity with unions in Zimbabwe
British-based supporters of the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions are organising a picket of the Zimbabwean Embassy in London next week, in solidarity with a two-day general strike in that country on Tuesday and Wednesday. The ZTUC is seeking to get the minimum wage aligned to inflation, which is currently running at over 1,700% a [...]
New Labour, poverty and the welfare state
In the current political climate, welfare entitlement has long been regarded as an unacceptable drain on corporate profitability. Even so, welfare minister Jim Murphy’s recent message that the welfare state is always going to leave significant numbers of people in poverty comes as the clearest statement yet of New Labour’s take on the issue. Here’s [...]
Lawrence Summers on prospects for the US economy
Leading US economist Larry Summers was forced to step down as president of Harvard last year after arguing that there are more men then women in top science and engineering jobs because men are simply cleverer than girlies. But Clinton’s former treasury secretary – pictured – is on rather stronger terrain with this well-written and [...]
Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood and the left
Egyptians are today voting on a set of constitutional changes described by Amnesty International as marking the greatest erosion of human rights in that country for almost three decades. Or to put it more accurately, Egyptians are today not voting on these proposals. Reports from one polling booth in Alexandria indicate that two hours after [...]
Mark Fischer on Gordon Brown’s Stalinism
Thank God I was too hungover to listen to Broadcasting House on Radio Four this morning. That way, I avoided having to hear my old college buddy and fellow Stoke Newingtonite Mark ‘Fischer’ – yes, I do know his real name – of the CPGB, explaining the difference between Stalinists, Trotskyists, Trotskyites, Mensheviks, Bolshevik-Leninists, Marxist-Leninists, [...]
