Sunday Blogging Notes
(1) US GUITAR legend Robben Ford is playing the Camden Town venue Jazz Cafe on November 7th and 8th. It’s not clear from the publicity whether he’ll be in jazz rock or straight ahead 12-bar mode, but either way, the man is unmissable. Stroppy has been instructed to procure tickets. The YouTube clip above shows [...]
David Cameron’s economics speech: ripping off Will Hutton
DAVID Cameron’s speech this morning stole the standard social democratic critique of the British economy under Thatcher and Major, recalibrated it in terms of the present government, and then cynically passed it off as what the Tories have been saying for the last decade. Full marks for sheer cheek, if nothing else. The interesting thing [...]
My internet use is none of Jacqui Smith’s business
MAINLY I spend my time online seeking out delicious home baking recipes and downloading Bible study podcasts. But suppose I was the type of guy who waited until the missus was out and then frantically googled for hot Asian teens? Shouldn’t my surfing habits should be for me to know, and not for Jacqui Smith [...]
Mass unemployment: Labour should do ‘whatever it takes’
THREE million people on the dole in Britain; symbolically speaking, that figure still represents some kind of benchmark, bringing to mind all those sepia photographs of 1930s hunger marches and memories of the grimmest years of rampant Thatcherism. Well, dust off those Right to Work Campaign and People’s March for Jobs badges; several leading forecasters [...]
Why you won’t see Fred the Shred at your local soup kitchen
THE Wall Street Journal, Time and the Daily Mail are all agreed; the financial markets crash of 2008 has somehow – in their words – ‘changed everything’. Indeed, such is the breadth of agreement on this point, it wouldn’t surprise me if NME, Heat, British Chess Monthly, Loaded, FHM, Grazia, Zoo and Angling Times have [...]
Marx and the market: rereading Capital in 2008
DOES Marxist economics provide an understanding of capitalist crisis superior to that offered by its mainstream counterpart? Are those of us who have mastered its basic texts about to emerge as infallible pundits in 24/7 media demand, thanks to a command of Gnostic wisdom denied to the Harvard MBAs at Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers? [...]
There’s gonna be a banking bailout
(1) This blog’s core demographic – the rapidly-ageing ex-punk rocker market – will doubtless recall the Sham 69 anthem Borstal Breakout, released in early 1978. Youngsters, and anyone who needs to refresh their memory, can check out the YouTube clip above. I was actually in the audience at the gig where this footage was filmed, [...]
Yes, British councils were right to invest in Iceland
ICELAND has – to use the technical term employed by trained economists – gone tits up, and such staid bodies as Tonbridge and Malling Borough Council and West Yorkshire Police Authority are suffering the collateral damage. Incredibly, Gordon Brown has responded by invoking anti-terrorism legislation, although rumours that he has asked his friend Dubya to [...]
Simon Heffer is wrong: Britain is still capitalist
NATIONALISATION of the banking system is not quite the Sovietisation of Britain, avers Simon Heffer in today’s Daily Telegraph. Not quite. But it is, he argues, a start. What’s more, I think he is being serious. There’s no other way to read his astonishingly misguided article, published under the headline ‘we’re all socialists now, comrade’. [...]
Bank rescue plan: will it work?
And the $64,000 dollar question– if such a trifling sum can stand metaphorical duty in this context – is whether the government’s bank rescue plan is going to work. At one level, it bloody well better do; ‘failure is not an option’ may be one of the worst clichés of modern management-speak, but just for [...]
