Stalinism: why we still need to talk about dead Russians
SIX out of ten young Britons say they have never even heard of Auschwitz, according to one opinion poll a few years ago. So it presumably follows that serious discussion of the holocaust is never going to replace football, music and the one night stand that middle manager had with the leggy Irish bird in [...]
DR Congo: what is to be done?
IT LOOKS as if the world is watching the opening days of the third civil war to devastate the Democratic Republic of Congo in little more than a decade. And just as was the case on the previous two occasions, there do not seem to be any realistic resolutions on offer. Situations of this complexity [...]
Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand: yes, they should go
FUCKING a satanic slut is about par for the course when you get lucky in a dodgy Hackney boozer on a Saturday night. And I’m not saying that like it’s a bad thing; I’m sure some of my most fondly-remembered old girlfriends would revel in the designation. It’s just that adding to the all-round embarrassment [...]
The limits to Barack Obama’s radicalism
YESTERDAY the Financial Times – a free market business newspaper not normally considered the voice of the British left – endorsed Barack Obama as ‘the better choice’ for president of the United States. And, compared to John McCain, the only other contender that could possibly win next week, he certainly is that. Not only is [...]
Jack Straw and the prison system: some observations
I’D LOVE to qualify as the type of person Jack Straw once derided by the generic label of Hampstead liberals; the trouble is, I can only afford to live in Hackney. And there was me thinking that New Labour was not in the business of dampening down aspiration. Eight years after the famous speech in [...]
Post-neoclassical endogenous recession theory
ANYBODY remember when Gordon Brown avidly sung the praises of something he insisted on calling ‘the New Economics’? Back in the mid-1990s, the essential premise of his platform as shadow chancellor was that the British economy had long been subject to boom and bust on account of ‘deep structural weaknesses’. Labour in office would – [...]
The class politics of the Deripaska scandal
I FONDLY imagine that Russian oligarchs fit out their superyachts with all the restraint and taste so frequently displayed in the dress sense of the nubile Slavic blondes they tend to favour in the arm candy stakes. So it might even have been the case that the sundry British guests on board Oleg Deripaska’s Queen [...]
Posthumous trial of Franco: bloodless revenge on the Spanish right
THE MEN and women Franco murdered were socialists, progressive nationalists, anarchists, democrats, trade unionists, republicans, liberals, anti-clerical activists, feminists, communists and Trotskyists; in short, exactly the kind of people that read this blog. Now Spain is to reopen 19 mass graves, exhuming the remains of victims of the former clerical-fascist dictatorship, as part of a [...]
Phil Woolas on immigration: he’s not a racist, but …
I REMEMBER Phil Woolas’s unsuccessful campaign in the Littleborough & Saddleworth by-election of 1995. His victorious Lib Dem opponent – knowing that the Labour candidate was a former president of the National Union of Students – decided that ipso facto Woolas must have smoked a joint or two, and argued that Labour was therefore ‘soft [...]
Bye bye Milton, hello Keynes
We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by [...]
