Will the left gain from the financial crisis?
It is a minor historical irony that the financial markets crash of 2008 comes about at a time when there is no dissent from the neoliberal consensus at any point on the spectrum of establishment politics.
For three decades now, people have been told – by politicians of all parties – that there is no alternative. [...]
Why giving Wall St $700bn isn’t socialism
It’s been a good few years since I last attended a Trotskyist cadre school. But from what I can dimly remember of my Marxist training, it’s an odd definition of ‘socialism’ that equates the doctrine with handing over skyscraper loads of dosh to some of the most immensely wealthy people on the planet.
Yet it is [...]
Sunday Blogging Notes
(1) Here’s a bit of political rock from the last time Britain stood on the cusp of a Tory government. The clip is dedicated to Janine, because I know she’s a TRB fan. The world we knew busted open wide/in the winter of ‘79. You said it, Mr Robinson.
Incidentally, I saw Danny Kustow – [...]
Cameron: more than Maggie masquerading as Morrissey
Now the spotlight shifts to The Novice; with some recent opinion polls putting support for the Tories at 50%-plus, David Cameron is presumably in a buoyant mood as he gears up for the Conservative Party conference that starts in Birmingham next week.
In a set piece interview with Sky – extracts here – he deftly counters [...]
The left, the right and the ‘return of the 1930s’ thesis
The idea that the world economy is about to undergo a re-run of the 1930s is becoming so common among mainstream economic commentators that is in serious danger of becoming a cliché.
But when likes of George Soros toy with that idea, they do so for express symbolic effect. Resort to any notion of a return [...]
Book review: ‘Contemporary British Fascism’ by Nigel Copsey
Fascinating as it is endlessly to debate whether a certain Trot outfit leader did or did not excuse an Israeli nuclear strike on Iran, causing a Boy Wonder activist to flounce out and form a three-person micro-microsect, or to ponder the deeper significance of the decision to reassign the political responsibilities of two SWP central [...]
Gordon Brown speech: a fair Britain for the new age?
Of course it’s never enough to judge a speech simply from reading the text on a PC screen. You have to be in the hall, or at least watch the whole thing on television, to get some idea of its impact.
So I cannot offer a definitive verdict of Gordon Brown’s address to the Labour Party [...]
WTF is a ‘Heseltine Moment’ anyway?
David Miliband may – or may not – have spoke of his wish to avoid a ‘Heseltine Moment’ in a Manchester hotel lift last night. That cryptic remark is widely being interpreted as implying a deliberately destabilising attack on a prime minister of one’s own party.
But is that necessarily the case? Given the many notable [...]
Labour conference: will anyone put the socialist case?
It’s almost amusing to read predictions that leftwing rhetoric will be in ample supply at the Labour Party conference in Manchester this week. One poor minister has even reportedly resigned himself to a ‘retreat into the comfort zone of kicking capitalists’ on the grounds that this would be an obvious and easy populist response to [...]
After the financial crash: who benefits from the backlash?
The Financial Crash of 2008 – or whatever posterity eventually decides to call the events of the last week or so – is potentially an event of era-defining historical significance. It will not fail to have massive long-term political and social consequences, many of which we cannot even guess as yet.
You’d never guess that from [...]
