Ivan Lewis: the man from the Fiction Department
Time was when the efficacy of any given political communication was judged by how well it expressed clear ideas in a simple yet soul-stirring manner. So how is it that these days most Labour MPs seem intent on presenting their message with all the clarity of a particularly taxing cryptic crossword? A case in point [...]
The politics of depoliticisation
For young people getting involved in politics in the early 1980s, the options were stark enough; Thatcherism or Bennism. Post-war Britain was never more polarised. For many of us, family tradition or class background made the choice – be it Labour Party Young Socialists or Young Conservatives – more or less automatic. Then again, more [...]
Why can’t the left do populism?
Like many socialists, I positively enjoy reading telephone directory-sized volumes of heavy duty political theory; most people don’t. That’s why the non-fiction bestseller list is largely composed of cookbooks and tragic childhood pot-boilers. Yet this is something that the left rarely keeps this in mind when trying to get its message across. To put the [...]
The Communist Party of Great Britain and the far left
No far left groups were active in the small town in which I grew up in the 1970s. There was, however, a sizeable branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. I even knew some of the people in it; members included the husband of my mother’s best friend. The first of my pals to [...]
Embrylogy Bill: in defence of liberation biology
Christians are surely the last people who should be getting uptight about healing the sick; after all, Jesus was reportedly a bit of a dab hand at it himself. OK, I’ve never actually read the Douay-Rheims Bible on which I presume Cardinal Keith O’Brien bases his teachings on. But according to the King James Version [...]
Book review: ‘Globalization and its Discontents’ by Joseph Stiglitz
Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz surely ranks as the world’s best-known living Keynesian economist, and not because of his academic work on information asymmetries or the Shapiro-Stiglitz model of efficiency wages, either. It is thanks largely to ‘Globalization and its Discontents‘ that the one-time chief economist at the World Bank came to the attention of the [...]
Iraq: failure of a project
Very few things about Iraq can legitimately be described as clear; but one proposition of which there can be little doubt is that the project that motivated the invasion of 2003 has failed, albeit in ways its framers did not anticipate at the time. The result is a crisis without obvious solution. Unlike Vietnam, or [...]
New Labour: a series of unfortunate events
Pseudonymous author Lemony Snicket is the man behind a popular series of children’s books – a rather clever satire on Victorian gothic novels, apparently – entitled ‘A Series of Unfortunate Events’. The poster for the film version is reproduced left. New Labour’s sequel started with last year’s donations-by-proxy revelations, a few fluffed PMQs, and an [...]
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and leftwing McCarthyism
Independent columnist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown – pictured – is suffering the unwanted attentions of an ‘unhealthy strain of leftwing McCarthyism‘. Yes, the poor love has been mentioned in an article by John Pilger – a man she purports to be ‘so in awe of’ that she could ‘barely converse in his mighty presence’ – on account [...]
The economic outlook after Bear Stearns
We survived the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the collapse of Long Term Capital Management and the Russian debt default of 1998, the dotcom crash of 2000, the 9/11 attacks the following year; for over a decade now, the world economy has given every appearance of being teflon-coated Now something is clearly sticking to the [...]
