French leave
As the more observant of you will have noticed, I haven’t posted for a few days, as I’m enjoying a week’s break in Paris. But expect a full report when I get back, including a brief account of my run-in with the Lambertistes for all you sectariana buffs out there. I’m currently sitting in an [...]
The class politics of government bail-outs
In October last year, 150,000 low-income families lost a total of £45m when dodgy Christmas hamper racket Farepak collapsed. As a result, some of Britain’s poorest yet most thrifty people – the very people who don’t whack a few hundred quid on the plastic to pay for their Christmas, because they can’t afford to – [...]
Labour conference: right only with the party?
‘I know that one must not be right against the party. One can be right only with the party, and through the party, for history has no other road for being in the right.’ – Trotsky at the thirteenth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1924 Back in the early 1990s, the [...]
Stephen Twigg selected over Bob Wareing
Ultra-Blairite former education minister Stephen Twigg looks set to return to the Commons at the next election, after winning the Labour nomination for Liverpool West Derby. The seat has a 15,000-plus Labour majority. The sitting MP since 1983 has been 77-year-old Campaign Group stalwart Bob Waring (pictured), who was deselected. As a result, he is [...]
Greek left: election success
The Greek left won an absolute majority of the votes in Sunday’s snap general election. Pasok – broadly the equivalent of the Labour Party – scored 38.1% and secured 102 seats. That’s its worst result since 1977, incidentally. But the Communist Party polled 8.2% and got 22 MPs, while the Coalition of the Radical Left [...]
Northern Rock: let it roll
If you or I exceed our overdraft limit, we get hit with a shirty letter and a £25 penalty charge. When Northern Rock effectively does the same thing, chief executive Adam Applegarth taps the Bank of England for an emergency lending facility instead. The ‘mortgage bank’ – as demutualised building societies like to be known [...]
Sunday blogging notes
(1) I’m just back from Islington’s Little Angel puppet theatre, to which Daddy’s Little Princesses and a bunch of other well-bred middle-class Stokie love children were taken as a birthday treat for DLP Senior. It was only after sitting through the show that I found out it was written by Michael Rosen, a longstanding member [...]
Socialists and squaddies
You could quite easily come away with the impression that New Labour doesn’t care too much for ordinary servicemen and women. Gulf War Syndrome? Doesn’t exist. First world war victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome, executed by British officers? Guilty as charged. The Deepcut Barracks dead? They killed themselves. Today the House of Commons defence committee [...]
A faraway England of which we know little
Seventeen London teenagers have been gunned down so far this year. But it has taken the recent shooting to death of an 11-year-old boy enjoying a kickabout in a Liverpool pub car park really to highlight the issue of teenagers and guns. Maybe it was because he was so damn young. Maybe it was because [...]
Old Trots never die
Back in the early 1980s, I used to be a member of Bethnal Green & Bow Labour Party Young Socialists, where I got to know a Militant-supporting firefighter by the name of Matt Wrack. I’m certain that he deliberately used to turn up to meetings in the uniform that went with his job, just so [...]
