David Marquand: WTF is a Whig imperialist anyway?
The Labour left has never particularly cared for David Marquand. That much is underlined by an amusing story about Roy Jenkins’ farewell speech to the House of Commons, prior to taking up a job as Britain’s European commissioner. Marquand – pictured left – had resigned his seat to become his mentor’s chief bag carrier. Jenkins [...]
The politics of economic downturns
It doesn’t half make me feel old to realise that nobody under 35 out there has experienced an economic recession throughout their entire adult life. By the time I was your age, kids, I’d already survived two. Now it looks like another downturn is on its way. Capital Economics – one of the most highly-regarded [...]
Israel/Palestine: some parameters for rational debate
In all the long years I have taken an interest in politics, I have never come across any debate remotely as characterised by wilful distortion, obfuscation, over-emotionalism, deliberate bad faith, polarisation, ill-tempered malicious mudslinging and widespread playing of the man rather than the ball than the Israel/Palestine issue. Sometimes it seems that enough straw men [...]
American liberalism ex
Those of us brought up in a European political culture are often haughtily amused to hear US commentators – from shock jocks to serious syndicated conservative columnists – refer to the Democrats as ‘the left’. It rather seems to us that if you take the political equivalent of a tasteless low-calorie banana milkshake and water [...]
Book review: ‘The Great Crash 1929’ by John Kenneth Galbraith
Why – in 2008 – would anybody read and review a book first published in 1954, pertaining to events that occurred in another country in 1929? Well, John Kenneth Galbraith’s classic Keynesian liberal account of the Great Crash is suddenly pretty damn topical, and certain to become required reading for the great grandchildren of those [...]
Dave’s Part: what is to be done?
After being upbraided by a couple of regular readers – in the comments box on the post below – for increasingly frequent lapses into ‘cringeworthy’ populism, I’ve been pondering the issue of whether my current blogging style and strategy is actually the right one. The idea has been for Dave’s Part to mix fairly straightforward [...]
Azmal Hussain and the class basis of Respect
I’m perpetually mystified as to why a diminishing layer of naïve white leftie Respect supporters think that the project ever amounted to anything more than an attempt by the Socialist Workers’ Party to mobilise a mosque-directed communalist bloc vote behind a tankie Labourite MP, which has now all but come to grief. The party’s semi-official [...]
Can George Osborne seduce the middle-class Labour vote?
George Osborne’s piece for the Guardian this morning reads as if has succeeded in getting the middle class Labour electorate back to his place for a coffee. He’s dimmed the lights, and a well-worn Marvin Gaye compilation CD can be heard playing softly in the background as the espresso machine goes about its lawful business. [...]
The class politics of Britain’s Olympic success
Leo McKinstry – one-time Harriet Harman bag carrier, now freelance journo specialising in handwringing potboilers for the right-of-centre press – raises some interesting points about the class background of Britain’s Olympic medallists in the Daily Mail this morning: It seems that six out of the 14 medal winners on the cover that newspaper yesterday were [...]
David Cameron: you broke it, you own it
David Cameron will – according to extracts from a biography published today and carried in just about every newspaper – be ‘as radical a social reformer as Mrs Thatcher was an economic reformer’. He tells author Dylan Jones: ‘[J]ust as Margaret Thatcher mended the broken economy in the 1980s, so we want to mend Britain’s [...]
