New Labour: on the brink of bankruptcy
It is almost reassuring to see the Labour Party commemorate the colour of the people’s flag in some small way, if only by being around £24m in the red. Over the next five weeks, Labour will need to come up with around £7.45m to pay off the loans from banks and wealthy businessmen secured by [...]
Media appearances: Scotland at Ten
I’m set to do a prerecord for the BBC Scotland radio programme Scotland at Ten later today, discussing the impending bankruptcy of the Labour Party. Financial as opposed to political, of course. In case you couldn’t guess from the name, it should be on air at 10pm. Among the points I’ll be making is that [...]
Bishop Nazir-Ali and the collapse of Christianity
The Church of England has, for the last 40 years, been in the grip of ‘revolutionary Marxist thinking’. I know this to be true, because I read it on the front page of the Daily Mail this morning. Heck, I must have missed that meeting. Let’s just say that if the local vicar has been [...]
So … why aren’t voters turning to the left, comrades?
Suggest that the main reason for New Labour’s current unpopularity is that it has moved too far to the right, and supporters of Blair and Brown usually respond with a point that seems logically unassailable. If the voters want to go back to a social democratic future, how come they are showing it by turning [...]
Bag carriers against Gordon Brown
All journalists hate slow news days, and bank holiday Mondays are often the slowest news days of the lot. Let’s be charitable and assume that this is why the Guardian led its politics coverage this morning with a potboiler of the worst order from Nicholas Watt. It seems that an obscure New Labour speechwriter – [...]
Left List: does my 0.68% look big in this?
We haven’t had a good old intra-Trot happy slap on this site in, oooooh, ages. And how will I ever match the stat porn at Socialist Unity if I don’t facilitate the occasional opportunity for the Socialist Workers’ Party and Respect Renewal to scratch each other’s eyes out? So here is a guest post from [...]
Posh and posher: return of the Old Etonians
The last time an Old Etonian got to head a major British political party, the Beatles had only just released their second single. Back in 1963, Sir Alec Douglas-Home ‘emerged’ as a non-elected prime minister, after not being elected to head the Conservative Party. The voters didn’t get any say on this one, and nor [...]
South Africa: revolution betrayed
At least twenty-two black people have been brutally slain in the townships of South Africa, while hundreds more have been injured. Those doing the killing and the wounding are other blacks. It is all gruesomely redolent of the worst black on black violence of decades past, right down to such retro details as the return [...]
The search for intellectually coherent conservatism
‘Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid people, it is true that most stupid people are conservative’; what wouldn’t I give to be able to come up with soundbites as sharp as that? Sadly, these are not my words, but rather a verbatim quote from John Stuart Mill. Such incisive invective would [...]
Class politics in Crewe & Nantwich
New Labour has been trying to play the class politics card in the Crewe and Nantwich by-election. The tactic seems to have backfired, big time. Is that because – as some commentators have suggested – such themes are inappropriate in a country that thinks it’s so clever and classless and free? Hardly. Social mobility in [...]
