Labour leadership: Sunday update
Jack Straw is to manage Gordon Brown’s leadership bid. That is (a) the first formal confirmation that Brown is running and (b) acknowledgement that Straw is ruling himself out for the job. Meanwhile, Blair reportedly reckons that the Boy Miliband could beat GB if it came to a contest. Doubt it, personally. Bookmark It
Adam Curtis’s ‘The Trap’: what is it trying to say?
I will be glued to BBC 2 between nine and ten o’clock tonight, watching the concluding installment of Adam Curtis’s three-parter ‘The Trap: What Happened to our Dreams of Freedom’. But while I found the first two chunks interesting viewing, politically speaking they have been about as satisfactory as a pint of low alcohol lager [...]
Airbus wildcat: class struggle at the point of production
Last time I checked the stats, working class militancy in Britain was at the lowest level since records began in 1893. This I would attribute not so much to an utbreak of mass contentment in UK workplaces in recent decades as the emasculation of the labour movement – and the consequent decline in working class [...]
Diane Abbott: should she stay or should she go?
Hackney North and Stoke Newington’s Socialist Campaign Groupie MP Diane Abbott – pictured – faces a trigger ballot next month. While she is thought likely to win, the result could go pretty close, and even her supporters do not rule out the possibility of her having to face reselection. The feeling among many mainstream party [...]
John Bird and the rise of independent candidacies
Big Issue founder John Bird is to stand in the next contest for mayor of London. But despite having been approached by the Tories as a potential Conservative candidate, he has decided to run as an independent. Blimey. Bird was once a member of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party, although these days apparently admits to being [...]
Pundits on the budget
BBC economics editor Evan Davis makes these observations on the budget: ’The spending side is tough, as expected. Gordon Brown will see spending grow at about 2 per cent above inflation, instead of the 3.6 per cent they’ve been used to in the last seven years. It’ll feel like a cut … ‘Overall though, this [...]
Biggest certainty in political betting history
After today’s budget, a spokesman for bookie chain Coral has little doubt about who will be the next occupant of Number Ten: ‘Gordon Brown has saved his best budget speech for his last and he is surely now the biggest certainty in the history of political betting to become the next leader of the Labour [...]
Gordon Brown and Stalinism
Gordon Brown is not – whatever Lord Turnbull would have you believe – a Stalinist. Joseph Vissarionovich Djugashvili at least advocated socialism in one country. That’s one country more than Mr Brown. Then again, I don’t suppose the former permanent secretary to the Treasury was deploying the unflattering soubriquet in that sense. The idea was [...]
Neocon Tory Ancram addresses Stop the War Coalition rally
Tomorrow sees the Stop the War Coalition hold a ‘people’s assembly’ at Westminster Central Hall. There’s an eclectic bill of speakers on offer, including a whole number of Labour parliamentarians, several prominent SWPers … and Tory MP Michael Ancram [pictured left], former shadow foreign and defence secretary and a founder of the Henry Jackson Society, [...]
Housekeeping
I don’t usually do those ‘viral meme’ thingies. But I am a bit flattered to have been named as a ‘thinking blogger’ by Iain Dale. Yes, I do know he’s a Tory and will probably have to be one of the first up against the wall come the glorious day. But he is the most [...]
