Max Mosley case: notes on Nazi hookers and press freedom
Human sexuality is a complex field, and let’s just say that we all have our little pecadillos. Fortunately for most of us, we are insufficiently prominent to see them make the front page splash of the News of the World. Among the allegations made by this newspaper in recent years are claims that Lib Dem [...]
50 Cent and Paul Dacre: corrupters of youth
Other than being the Big Swinging Dicks in their very different respective ‘hoods, there might at first sight appear to be little in common between a rap superstar and the editor of the Daily Mail. But following on from a comment in the Shakilus Townsend thread below, I am rather taken with a possible parallel [...]
Shakilus Townsend case: cool to kill?
Shakilus Townsend – reportedly part of the South London street gang scene – may have thought he was ‘well hard’, or whatever the equivalent expression is these days. But he was just a vulnerable 16 year old kid. That much must have been obvious to onlookers who saw him bleeding profusely from multiple kitchen knife [...]
Haltemprice & Howden: vote Trot
I used to visit rural east Yorkshire regularly back in the early 1990s, but only because I then had a girlfriend whose dad owned half of it. Unless things have changed dramatically in the intervening years, there can be few spots on the planet less propitious for the propagation of the Trotskyist weltanschaaung. Nevertheless, I [...]
Why should young people vote Labour?
I’ve always argued that the main reason New Labour won the last three elections was not so much widespread enthusiasm for Blairism as the invincible inbuilt advantage it enjoyed simply by not being the Tories. The problem is, with memories of Margaret Thatcher and Black Wednesday both fading fast in the public mind, the NBTT [...]
The politics of Brownism
One of the great clichés of 1980s vox pops was hearing people contend that you could say what you like about ‘that Maggie Thatcher’, but at least you knew where you stood with her. The basic idea here was that the politics of Thatcherism could be boiled down to a single sentence, such as ‘the [...]
