Debating the free market right
I’m doing the Blogger TV slot on 18 Doughty Street at 9pm tonight, with other guests including Helen Szamuely, a strident advocated of pronounced rightwing views: Unlike many Western intellectuals who seemingly always find parts of socialist or communist systems commendable, Dr Helen Szamuely has no such illusions. Born in the Soviet Union, Helen attended [...]
Boris Johnson, Tony Lit: celebrity big politics
Welcome to the Celebrity Big Politics house. Want to hold elected office? Forget all that nonsense about dutifully campaigning for your party at local level for a decade or two, maybe serving as a councillor, or getting your head around the subtler nuances of important policy issues. Just concentrate on getting your name into the [...]
Douglas Alexander and the special relationship
Was Douglas Alexander’s speech to the Council on Foreign Relations a mild coded criticism of the US foreign policy under George W Bush? However much Gordon Brown insists it wasn’t, the answer is quite clearly yes. And it is inconceivable that the Secretary for International Development, a Brown protégé, would make such sensitive comments – [...]
RMT: Shop Stewards’ Network conference
In the comments box for the post below, Doug takes me to task for not saying anything about Saturday’s RMT-organised cross-union shop stewards’ event. Fair enough. But as I wasn’t actually there, there’s not very much I can constructively write, except, er, it strikes me as a good idea in principle. Interesting, too, that a [...]
Gordon Brown and housing
The number of housing starts in Britain last year hit the lowest since 1924. The currently total only half the figure for France, a country with a similar population. Yet the UK’s housing stock is the oldest in Europe, with a quarter of dwellings built before world war one. At the current rate of replacement, [...]
Marriage, marijuana and moralism
I am the last person qualified to pass comment on proposals designed to keep marriages together, of course. But personal experience strongly suggests that when a relationship starts heading west, twenty quid a week is unlikely to make much difference either way. Yet exactly this ‘tax break to support marriage’ forms the centrepiece of 119 [...]
Alastair Campbell diaries
Some political anoraks of my acquaintance had been actively looking forward to the publication of the Alastair Campbell diaries, in the hope that they would reveal as much about the inner workings of New Labour in office as Alan Clark’s diaries told us about Number Ten in the Thatcher years. But if the extracts available [...]
Al Gore and Live Earth
The people that launched Rock Against Racism cannot have realised what they were starting. Three decades later, the presumed political impact of electric guitars reaches its aptheosis with the Live Earth concerts tomorrow. I hope the many young people attending any of the events – as well as those sitting at home watching the gigs [...]
Alistair Darling: no more Mr NICE guy?
On most conventional macroeconomic yardsticks, Gordon Brown’s ten year stint as chancellor was something of a success. There was no run on the pound, no humiliating reversals at the hands of the financial markets, no Black Wednesday, and no bail out by the IMF. Unemployment fell. There was uninterrupted growth averaging 2.8% between 1998 and [...]
Sir Ara Darzi and the NHS review
Health secretary Alan Johnson has commissioned Sir Ara Darzi – one of his ministerial team – to undertake a ‘once in a generation review’ of the National Health Service. As a medical man himself – a practicing surgeon, indeed – Sir Ara probably prides himself on his ability to tell the difference between causes and [...]
