SWP: flash mobs against repossession?
DIRECT action against housing evictions is a tactic last adopted by the far left in London in the 1930s. You can read the inspiring details in Phil Piratin’s biography Our Flag Stays Red, an excellent book that I once owned but have somehow mislaid over the years.
Piratin, later Communist MP for Stepney, tells how Communist [...]
Israel: how to lose friends and alienate people
ISRAEL is not behaving like a civilised nation; that inevitably raises the question of whether it should be treated as one. Even its strongest supporters must be finding it difficult to mount a positive case.
The third day of the bombardment of Gaza has taken the death toll to over 300, including four young sisters killed [...]
Che Guevara: pin-up or killing machine?
INSIDE every geeky bespectacled leftie bloke who ever stood outside a factory at 6 am on a rainy Friday morning, signally failing to sell Trot papers to the early shift, there is a little bit of Che Guevara trying to get out.
Secretly, we’d all like to make love to numerous beautiful women before launching a [...]
Thatch nutcracker: no thanks, Santa
I NEVER did quite see it myself, but I am told there are those who find Margaret Thatcher sexually alluring. Jonathan Ross famously suggested that David Cameron was one of them, when he inquired as to whether visions of the former prime minister had fuelled the Tory leader’s imagination during a certain act of rite [...]
SWP crisis: the political cost of self-delusion
THE reality-based wing of the socialist left does not occupy a political territory that is keenly contested these days; truth to tell, adherents are distinctly a minority tendency, and it gets a little bit lonely out here sometimes.
So it should be encouraging to see leading figures inside the Socialist Workers’ Party attempting to reintroduce the [...]
Madoff affair: why capitalism needs Ponzi schemes
THE MADOFF affair illustrates the socialist case concerning the nature of capitalism more completely than a dozen polemical pamphlets ever could. It’s just a shame that Nicola ‘Superwoman’ Horlick and HSBC didn’t listen to the far left while they still had the chance. Turns out we could have saved you a few bob, guys.
Indeed, if [...]
Corus pay cut drive: dangerous dynamic
CORUS – in UK terms, basically what’s left of once mighty state-owned British Steel – is nowadays part of Indian conglomerate Tata Group. It makes a lot steel, and makes a lot of cash, too. Only last month, Tata Steel chief executive B. Muthuraman told the Financial Times that the outfit is looking to triple [...]
Whatever happened to the heroes?
‘No more heroes anymore’ was one of the central punk slogans of 1977; I think I can even remember stencilling it on a T-shirt. Yet all of us inevitably have them, and over the Christmas and New Year period, I’m going to be running over my top ten. I will also offer a brief motivation [...]
James Purnell benefit reforms: failing in Falinge
FALINGE, you say? Never heard of it, at least not until this morning. Turns out it’s an area of Rochdale. Not sure exactly how the place name is pronounced, but presumably the enunciation is not dissimilar to ‘falling’. Or maybe you say it something like ‘failing’.
I do know all about Rochdale, though. Never been there [...]
