Labour funding: here’s to you, Mr Robinson
We will presumably never know exactly how much money top businessman Sir Gerry Robinson – pictured – has given New Labour. While the press quotes the figure of £70,000 since 2001, this is certainly a considerable underestimate. Until seven years ago, large scale donations were laughably recorded in political party accounts simply as ‘£5,000 plus’. [...]
If it’s Tuesday, this must be Nigeria
(1) I’m doing five countries in five days this week. Departing from Paris on Monday morning, the itinerary takes in Côte d’Ivoire, Nigeria, Uganda and Kenya. Press trip of the year, hands down. Naturally, a schedule this tight is only possible thanks to the generosity of a French multinational in lending a bunch of hacks [...]
Why Tony Benn is wrong to back David Davis
I’m part of the political generation that arrived on the scene under the brand name ‘Bennite’; the designation denotes a follower of the man who once pushed the Labour Party as far to the left as it was ever to go. During his campaign for the deputy leadership in 1982, Tony Benn – pictured – [...]
Matt Lucas-Kevin McGee split: the politics of gay marriage and gay divorce
New Labour has all too many faults, but lack of application on gay issues can hardly be numbered among them. Sure, I’m writing this as a straight man, and in the full awareness that many gay activists wouldn’t agree with such a conclusion. But to me, it looks rather like the political – rather than [...]
Made in Britain: arms manufacturers and the UK state
There can be only one high tech manufacturing sector in which a substantially deindustrialised Britain still claims world leadership in export terms, and here’s a clue; it isn’t advanced medical equipment. It is rather – as the government proudly revealed yesterday – production of the means of destruction, as the FT reports: Britain became the [...]
Michael Dosunmu: the left’s problem with law and order
MICHAEL Dosunmu – a 15-year-old church-going schoolboy – was sound asleep in a bedroom at his family home in Peckham when two young men he had almost certainly never met burst in, aimed a submachine gun at his heart, and pulled the trigger. Mohammed Sannoh and Abdi Omar Noor have today been found guilty of [...]
Compass: social democracy redux
Social democracy was the dominant trend in the British labour movement throughout the 1950s and 1960s; indeed – oooh I love it when you talk all neo-Gramscian to me, baby – you could even call it the hegemonic ideology of the postwar period. But it was a case of now you see it, now you [...]
Sunday blogging notes
(1) Soundings – a theoretical journal linked to Lawrence & Wishart, the leftwing publishing house – has asked me to plug its online debate on class and culture, which is a prelude to its forthcoming dayschool on the subject on June 28. Go here to read up on some of the themes to be debated, [...]
The class politics of Wayne and Colleen’s wedding
HE’S ON £110,000 a week, so he can easily afford to treat his shell suited mates to stag jaunts in Ibiza, at least when not knocking off fiftysomething hookers in Merseyside massage parlours. She’s a shopaholic airhead WAG with a sideline in best-selling body workout videos and writing witless columns for celeb mags, and we [...]
David Davis: more opportunist than civil libertarian
It was great political theatre, even if it means diddley squat in practice; resigning a safe Tory seat simply to fight it again – without opposition from the Lib Dems, the closest challengers – is hardly a courageous high risk strategy. But David Davis’s clever tactical feint of a resignation will substantially discomfit New Labour [...]
