New Labour and the erosion of labour movement morality
LABOUR backbenchers did not rebel against the Blair government in sufficient numbers to prevent war on Iraq, major curtailments of civil liberty, the privatisation of air traffic control, the abolition of student grants, or benefit cuts directed against single mothers and the disabled. Yet last night the Brown administration could not muster a parliamentary majority [...]
The case against tax cuts for the rich
JUST so stories – dressed up in academic terms under the guise of ‘economic theory’ – have frequently featured in the ideological justifications proffered for the neoliberal revolution of recent decades. Futures and options trading is most emphatically not a sophisticated version of doing the gees-gees, boosters of the free market insist. No, they are [...]
Atrophy: how the left blew its big chance
HAYEK, von Mises and Popper presumably never did get around to reading Gramsci. But in retrospect, the political movement these men – together with others – famously launched at Mont Pelerin some 62 years ago represents the most successful counterhegemonic bloc ever yet constructed. Even though the brand of classical liberalism they advocated seemed a [...]
Iceland: what is to be done
IT IS a little known fact that in the 1980s, Iceland boasted the largest section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International anywhere on the planet. At least measured by head of population, anyway. Granted, Icelandic Mandelism only had 24 adherents. But that worked out at something like one person in 10,000, equivalent to [...]
Luke Akehurst: get well soon
ROTTEN rightwing sectarian Trot-bashing bastard though he is, I am genuinely sorry to hear that my Hackney North CLP comrade, the well-known New Labour blogger Luke Akehurst, will be hospitalised for some time with a debilitating disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy. Crikey. I’m not sure what that is, even after googling it, but if [...]
Labour should get politically serious
I FREQUENTLY open my email inbox and find messages sent by Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Harriet Harman mingled with regular notifications of huge lottery wins and adverts for penis enlargement cream. Well, those are the names that crop up in the ‘from’ column, anyway. It’s not that I am a friend of the stars, [...]
Return of class war. Not.
I JUST don’t get it. How is it logically consistent to demand cuts in invalidity benefit and public sector pensions as a response to the financial crisis, yet explode in splenetic rage at the idea that the richest of the rich should pay tax at a rate slightly more in line with the bulk of [...]
Budget: the death of Prudence
THE important underlying issue in this budget is rather more substantial than the minor tax hike on boozes and fags, or even the welcome but largely symbolic 50p top rate of income tax. At stake is nothing less than the future material basis of social democracy itself. Ever since New Labour took office in 1997, [...]
The Daily Mail and ‘working class children betrayed by Labour’: the class politics of educational disadvantage
I AM as critical as anybody of New Labour education policy, which since 1997 has sometimes seemed almost entirely driven by a determination to turn state schools into one extended profit opportunity for the private sector. Used car salesmen with a few million quid to spare have enjoyed free rein to inculcate creationism in evangelical [...]
Shakilus Townsend case: cool to kill?
The trial of seven young people from Croydon and Thornton Heath. charged with the murder of Shakilus Townsend, a 16 year old boy from the same area, opened at the Old Bailey today. In view of the wideranging interest the case attracted at the time, I’m reposting what I wrote on the killing in July [...]
