Brown, Bush and the special relationship
The priority that George Bush has accorded to glad-handing Benedict XVI contrasts openly with the polite-but-nothing-more treatment dished out to that other guy visiting the US this week. The Pope famously doesn’t have any divisions. But he does play well with Catholic swing voters in an election year. American Idol cameo notwithstanding, Gordon Brown clearly [...]
Can Gordon Brown survive a house price crash?
The coming collapse in the UK housing market largely flows from events outside New Labour’s control. That’s a sharp contrast to the last crash, which was the direct consequence of the economic incompetence of successive Conservative governments. Remember the late eighties and early nineties, when hundreds of thousands of people lose their homes, as mortgage [...]
Gordon Brown: less popular than Thatcher
Gordon Brown may well be thrashing a few more Nokias this morning after reading the findings of the latest FT/Harris opinion poll. He has just replaced pre-Falklands Margaret Thatcher as the least popular post-war British prime minister. Not bad, given that he is less than a year into the job. Indeed, for a man widely [...]
National Trottery
There’s no way on earth that a leftie would ever be appointed as head of the National Lottery in this country. But in what could be good news for one of the local sections of one of the Fourth Internationals, Sri Lanka has just given the equivalent job to comrade A.P.A. de Vass Gunawardena, described [...]
The far left, the far right and the London elections
So much for that old labour movement slogan about unity being strength; Marxists of one description or another are contesting seats in the London elections on no fewer than five separate tickets. The divisions underline a generalised lack of political seriousness, perhaps driven by some sense that the stakes are low. After all, the pumped [...]
BAE-Saudi deal: some unanswered questions
Saudi Arabia runs a brutal secret religious police force known as the Committee for the Propagation of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice. So in theory, it should be pleased with today’s High Court judgment that Blair acted unlawfully when, in 2006, he ordered the Serious Fraud Office to scrap a probe into BAE Systems’ [...]
Thatchstalgia: the right can’t let Maggie go
Class War has promised to organise a party in Trafalgar Square – scene of the riot against the poll tax in 1990, of course – for the Saturday evening after Margaret Thatcher dies. I only hope those rough anarchist boys don’t try to expropriate my private property Bollinger when I show up. It’s not that [...]
Melanie Phillips slams Labour’s ‘education Stalinism’
Never mind what’s best for the kids; education policy in Britain since 1997 has been characterised by New Labour’s free market-driven determination to turn our schools into one big extended profit opportunity for the private sector. Nothing whatsoever has been off limits. Used car salesmen with a few million to spare have enjoyed free rein [...]
Greg Tucker 1953-2008
Mr Tucker represents all that is wrong with the RMT. An unreconstructed figure of the hard left, and a fanatical supporter of Arthur Scargill’s Socialist Alliance, he was ejected from the Labour Party some years ago. He, along with several other RMT leaders, is a throwback to the trade unionism of the 1970s – an [...]
Richard Desmond: the porn king who funded New Labour
A Bentley sped straight past a National Union of Journalists picket line outside an office block in central London this morning; the boom guarding the entrance to the car park had been raised in advance, allowing the chauffeur to drive right in. Inside the luxury vehicle, girlie mag and tabloid billionaire Richard Desmond – pictured [...]
