Nick Clegg speech: Lib Dems move right
Your starter for ten: quote soundbites from three memorable Liberal conference speeches. You may choose from any period in the long and distinguished history of the once great party of Lloyd George, Keynes and Beveridge. Toughie, right? Even hardened political obsessives will probably be stumped. The one quote that instantly does spring to mind is [...]
Gordon Brown: TINA to the FAPM
One member of the cabinet – John Hutton, it is widely alleged – famously observed last year that Gordon Brown would make ‘a fucking awful prime minister’. And, not least in terms of opinion poll popularity, a FAPM he has truly proved. Every time you switch on the radio and hear some Labour MP on [...]
Financial crisis: has the left got any answers?
The value of the derivatives market in 2006 was estimated at half a quadrillion dollars. That’s a five with 14 zeros on the end of it, or more than ten times the value of the output of every real economy in the world combined. The usual explanation for its existence is that derivatives are primarily [...]
What Leon Trotsky would say about Lehman Brothers
The first thing that strikes you about the terminology Wall Street types jokingly use to describe each other is a characteristic combination of hubris, immodesty and machismo. They typically call themselves Masters of the Universe or Big Swinging Dicks. Men who are by personality type essentially business school dweebs half believe the propaganda, as if [...]
Fannie, Freddie and the demise of bourgeois triumphalism
Rightwing journalist Peregrine Worsthorne coined the term ‘bourgeois triumphalism’ in the 1980s, specifically to describe the ideological stridency of Margaret Thatcher in particular, but ultimately all those who promulgated neoliberalism at that time. It caught on because it seemed such an effective characterisation of a certain attitude that was gaining ascendancy among ruling classes everywhere. [...]
Harriet Harman says the C word
Ever since its inception, New Labour has preferred resort to ever more tendentious circumlocution rather than mention of the basic and unchanged realities of Britain’s social structure. Listen to a standard speech from a Labour politician these days and you will hear references to ‘the heartland vote’ or ‘families that play by the rules’ or [...]
Now is not the winter of our discontent
As the catalyst that brought Thatcher to power, the Winter of Discontent – as we have come to call the strike wave of late 1978 and early 1979, pictured left – enjoys iconic status as the most important turning point in all of Britain’s post-war history. It is said to mark the dividing line between [...]
Sarah Palin: the British right learns to love again
It is always a bit icky watching middle age men fall head over heels with women that are way out of their league. But a sizeable number of those rightwing pundits whose hearts were broken by the defenestration of Margaret Thatcher appear to have gone gaga for McCain’s US presidential running mate Sarah Palin (pictured). [...]
Charles Clarke: put up or shut up
Legend has it that bloggers are usually overweight and bearded middle-aged white men, driven to vent their spleen into cyberspace because a cruel world does not recognise their innate political genius. Well, I’m clean-shaven, so that stereotype certainly can’t apply to me! No way. But presumably it is only access to the mainstream media that [...]
Bristol Palin and a woman’s right to choose
Like all large working class families, the Oslers on one side and the Gaberthüels on the other have got form. They have, throughout history, been no better than they ought to be. My ancestors and rellies include a bent copper who fathered multiple children out of wedlock, a Methodist lay preacher who put the emphasis [...]
