Why the left still hates Thatcher: reply to A.N. Wilson
A.N. WILSON takes up a page of the Daily Mail today to ask: ’So why, 30 years on, do the Left still hate Maggie so?’ Hmmm, tough question, that. Where to start?
Occasion for this polemic is an outburst from Derek Hatton, deputy leader of Liverpool City Council in the 1980s while ‘a supporter of the [...]
Labour war on middle classes: let it rock
‘LABOUR war on middle classes’, proclaims the front page headline of the Daily Mail this morning. Sounds kinda serious, doesn’t it? Posterity will no doubt look back at the conflict that unexpectedly kicked off in early 2009 as one of the most brutal episodes in all of British history.
Our descendents will argue long and hard [...]
National Challenge Schools: even £10,000 a teacher won’t do the trick
IF YOU want to get some idea of how hard it is to be a teacher these days, take a look at the titles of some of the books available in the education department of your local Waterstones.
For a start, there is ‘Getting the buggers to turn up’, which just about says it all. Other [...]
Prince Harry ‘Paki’ video: making the republican case
MONARCHY is all about tradition, as Prince Harry – who likes to dress up in Nazi uniforms and diss Asian army pals as ‘Pakis’ – seems all too well aware.
After all, his great granduncle was an open fascist sympathiser suspected of passing secrets to Hitler’s Germany, while his granddad routinely berates Chinese people for their [...]
McDonald’s apprenticeships: selling young people short
THE ONE-TIME workshop of the world has transformed into a country content to leave provision of key job skills for young people in the hands of franchisee burger-flippers; McDonald’s will shortly become Britain’s largest provider of apprenticeships. You can almost hear the mocking laughter emanating from Bundesverband der Deutschen Industrie HQ this side of the [...]
Adolf Merckle case: the class politics of suicide
ON MONDAY evening, the fifth-richest man in Germany wrote a note for his family, and then took a walk down to the railway track in his home village of Blaubeuren. His body was recovered some time later.
I am at the human level naturally sorry for those close to Adolf Merckle, whose photograph dominates the front [...]
Tax cuts for savers: a dumb idea from David Cameron
THOSE of us that came to political maturity in more ideological times can be forgiven for wondering whatever happened to the notion that Labour and the Conservatives stood for fundamentally different ideas of how society should be organised.
While the turning point can be variously dated, it is patently the case that they no longer do. [...]
The preconditions for a settlement in Palestine
PERHAPS the most dispiriting aspect of the invasion of the Gaza Strip is the utter pointlessness of the exercise; while military victory is all but certain, at every other level, Israel can only be the loser.
Decades of refusal to allow Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not left it even marginally more secure, and its [...]
The white working class and the racism of desperation
POLITICIANS are banging on about the white working class again. Hazel Blears – daughter of a maintenance fitter from Salford – at least knows the milieu in the firsthand way Harriet Harman never will.
Even so, she has managed completely to misinterpret the results of a survey that shows many ordinary white working people on council [...]
