MP expenses: against state secrecy
IT SEEMS surprising that John Wick – the former SAS man and Tory supporter who grassed up Westminster to the wider world – took many weeks to find a buyer for a disk containing a run down of all parliamentary expense claims going back several years. After all, this is material that Telegraph hacks have [...]
EU: democratisation, not denunciation
EVEN for the hardcore anoraks among us, euroelections mark the most shambolic twice a decade non-event of the entire political calendar. True, low turnouts and the use of proportional representation mean that smaller parties get a rare chance to make a mark, a factor much appreciated by activists in sundry posturing fringe outfits. But for [...]
David Cameron: power to the people, right on?
FEW revolutionary slogans are ever successfully transformed into singalong top twenty singles. But that’s the trick John Lennon pulled off with his 1971 hit ‘Power to the People’. Let’s face it, ‘Communism is Soviet Power Plus Electrification’ just doesn’t scan in quite the same way. The title of Lennon’s ditty subsequently become the catchphrase of [...]
Ideological politics: stilled pendulum
TURNING points in British political life have to the point of cliché been conceptualised as ‘swings of the pendulum’. The idea has been that the Labour Party represents the left and the Conservative Party the right – much as that proposition pains the ideologically-minded – and once every generation or so, popular outlook switches sides [...]
Euroelections: the case for the SPGB
AMONG the three – count ‘em, three – far left choices for Londoners in the European elections is the Socialist Party of Great Britain. Do not, whatever you do, mix this lot up with the Socialist Party in England and Wales; the SPGB gets very irate if its distinctiveness is so traduced. Founded in 1904, [...]
John Smith 1938-1994
I DON’T normally bother to join in so-called internet memes. Nevertheless, I have been tagged twice of late, so I’ll make a rare exception. First off, nearly two weeks ago Rupa Huq canvassed my opinions about the late Labour leader John Smith on the 15th anniversary of his death on 12 May 1994. Here’s my [...]
McCarthyism for beginners
DOES media coverage of MPs who claim for moat cleaning on their expenses even remotely compare with the sustained hounding of leftists in 1950s USA? Tory MP Nadine Dorries seems to think so.. In an interview on the Today Programme this morning, she maintained that her Westminster colleagues have become the victims of ‘a McCarthy-style [...]
Not the 1930s redux
SO CAPITALISM looks like surviving, then, and pretty much unscathed too, come to that. On strictly statistical yardsticks, the current economic downturn may indeed be the worst since the 1930s. Yet it somehow doesn’t feel like we are living through an action replay of the twentieth century’s most troubled decade, not even in slow motion. [...]
Guillermo Lora 1922-2009
GUILLERMO Lora – leader of Bolivia’s Partido Obrero Revolucionaria, one of the few Trotskyist organisations in history ever to gain a mass following – died on Sunday, aged 87, as a result of a liver cancer. I haven’t seen his demise announced anywhere online in English yet, but the most extensive Spanish obit have I [...]
Catholicism, child abuse and gay adoption
CATHOLICISM is strongly opposed to gay adoption, and Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor – until recently Archbishop of Westminster – proved especially keen on making sure that New Labour did not forget that fact. During the debate over the Sexual Orientation Regulations two years ago, he wrote to every cabinet minister, stressing that Catholic agencies ‘would not [...]
