Second Life and the Marxist theory of alienation
HAVING a bit on the side in cyber reality is now grounds for divorce, it seems. Married couple Amy Taylor and David Pollard – sorry, I meant to say ‘Laura Skye’and ‘Dave Barmy‘, obviously – are going their separate ways, after she found his Second Life avatar engaged in a spot of virtual nookie with [...]
Unions should politicise the fight for jobs
THOSE of us old enough to remember the early 1980s and the early 1990s have been here before; a cumulative total of 17,000 workers – including 10,000 at BT – lost their jobs this week. Forget the GDP and all that stuff about ‘two consecutive quarters of negative growth’. In human terms, this is what [...]
Social workers, chavs and Baby P
IT IS only the heartbreaking details – the broken back, the eight fractured ribs, the ripped ear, the injuries to lips and tongue, the missing fingertip – that makes the Baby P case appear as something unimaginably extraordinary. But it isn’t. Sadly, the death of a pre-school child at the hands of its parents or [...]
You cannot stop entire nations getting drunk
BOTSWANA brought in a 30% levy on alcohol at the start of this month. Local media reports suggest the country virtually came to a standstill on the day before the ruling came into force, as huge numbers of people skipped work and joined the long queues eager to seize the last chance to stock up [...]
Paul Dacre on the morality of shag & tell journalism
THE PROPOSITION that newspapers run with shag ‘n’ tell stories principally as a means to uphold family values and promote the moral betterment of the nation somehow – how can I put this? – fails completely to convince. Such limited moral rectitude on the matter as they may possess runs little deeper than the desire [...]
Obama: the white supremacist threat
A BLACK British trade union activist I met this week was naturally jubilant about the result of the US presidential election. But just one thing is marring his excitement; he is fearful that even now, someone is planning to gun down Barack Obama. So presumably Monty will be horrified to learn that you can get [...]
Glenrothes by-election: what Brown has to prove
GLENROTHES is the kind of place that a Labour Party that should stay Labour forever; it’s a coalfield town, and parts of the constituency were once sufficiently radical to return a Communist MP to Westminster. Labour secured a 10,000-plus majority there in 2005. But as it goes to the polls tomorrow – the timing of [...]
New Labour and social mobility: room at the top?
THE standard case against redistributionist or egalitarian politics today is that the Britain of 2008 is more or less a meritocracy. Never mind if you’re old man’s a dustman and he wears a dustman’s hat; he probably made a killing after exercising the right to buy his council flat and lives in prosperous retirement in [...]
Obama’s Marxist lies for power: real Americans speak out
I SUPPOSE I am what many Yanks would consider to be a typical smartarse British white boy European political sophisticate. In my case, the Three Degrees is not the name of Prince Charles’s favourite 1970s all-girl soul band, but a simple statement of educational attainment. It would be rather a cheap shot to glean a [...]
