Africa: if there is hope
Genocide in Rwanda, two civil wars in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the extensive bloodshed that followed the military clampdown against Islamism in Algeria, the atrocities in Darfur, the Liberian-sponsored blood-diamond conflict in Sierra Leone, anarchy in Somalia, racist pogroms in South Africa and an average of several military coups a year; that’s just a [...]
Sunday blogging notes
(1) Unison has disciplined a number of its leading far left activists over the last period. So are these people really guilty of the various misdemeanours with which they have been charged, or is that union’s leadership operating a co-ordinated policy designed to silence its most vociferous internal critics? Well, there’s a meeting at the [...]
How to win friends and tax people
The Lib Dems have gotten bored of outflanking Labour from the left and have decided to outflank the Tories from the right instead. Well, that’s the interpretation some commentators are putting on the news that Nick Clegg – pictured – has switched his party’s fiscal policy to a reduce public expenditure/cut taxation platform, at any [...]
The left and linguistic taboos: is it ever OK to say ‘chav’?
Grew up on a council estate? Check. Raised by a single mum on benefits? Check. Yes, I come from exactly the kind of working class background that would – in contemporary parlance – typically be described as ‘chav’. The main difference is that when I was growing up, boys only ever wore sportswear when they [...]
Draper’s record: one appointment that won’t help Labour
Scrap all my gloomy prognoses of New Labour meltdown in 2010; thankfully, Derek ‘Dolly’ Draper has accepted an unpaid part-time appointment and will advise the party on how to win the next election. We’re saved! Saved, I tell you! Or maybe not. Few can seriously believe that this discredited and deeply unpleasant little man – [...]
Dangerous driving vs knife crime: you end up just as dead
Imagine ending up in the mortuary as the result of a vicious knife assault perpetrated by some ASBOed up sink estate NEET so high on glue that the Bostik is practically flowing out of every available orifice. Then consider the prospect of slowly bleeding to death after getting run over by a chain store-suited ad [...]
Knife crime: what is to be done?
Bang ‘em up. Bring back (non-military) national service. Nine o’clock curfew for under 16s. These are just some of the remedies being peddled in response to the recent spate of knife crime, highlighted by the tragic deaths of Ben Kinsella and Shakilus Townsend (pictured). And let’s admit there is an issue here; although a welter [...]
British politics: keep talking happy talk
How’s this as a possible scenario for the development of British politics over the next decade or two? Let’s say Brown holds off calling the next general election until the last possible moment, but is forced to go to the country in 2010. The Tories waltz home in a landslide victory, with even the low [...]
What Glasgow East will tell us
Anyone steeped in the traditions of the British labour movement – not a category that includes each and every Labour Party MP these days, at a guess – understands the mythical significance of Red Clydeside. But given that Gordon Brown was once one of the best sympathetic chroniclers of radical Glasgow in the early part [...]
David Cameron: their morals and ours
Good. Bad. Right. Wrong. In a speech in Glasgow yesterday, Tory leader David Cameron inveighed against ‘moral neutrality’, and evinced a desire to reinstate categories as basic as these in British political discourse. Nor will this performance a one off; spindoctors confirm that this theme will be central to Conservative agitation and propaganda over the [...]
