Bob Ainsworth: can an ex-Trot be a credible defence secretary?
AS A former staff journalist on Socialist Worker, Peter Hitchens really should think twice before repeatedly banging on about the one-time Trotskyist affiliations of a fair few New Labour cabinet ministers. Does the expression ‘spent conviction within the meaning of the rehabilitation of offenders act’ really have no meaning to him? Yes, yes. We all [...]
The Chloeification of Conservatism
DAVID Cameron will win the next election, but the result will not be a Conservative government. That’s the proposition Simon Heffer advances in the Daily Telegraph this morning. And note how he says that like it’s a bad thing. What he is actually trying to argue is that a Cameron administration would not be a [...]
Democracy in Iran: a holocaust denier writes
SOMETHING struck my as rather odd about the letter the Independent chose to feature as the lead item on its online letters page today, and by that I don’t mean the argument that the writer was seeking to advance. The idea that Iran qualifies as a democracy is frankly in the froot loop category, but [...]
A brief history of workplace occupations
I AM just about old enough to remember the last time the British working class had the self-confidence to occupy workplaces threatened with closure. The Upper Clyde Shipbuilders work-in of 1971 was a major news story at the time, and may have done as much as anything to reverse Ted Heath’s tentative stab at Selsdon [...]
Competition: devise an anti-middle class stealth tax
ANYBODY else rejoice to read the front page splash in the Mail on Sunday this morning? The headline – ‘Secret Labour tax on having a patio: Millions of homes assessed for charge which hammers middle classes’ – says it all. At last! Those patio-owning bastards get what’s coming to them in the name of class [...]
Contra Kolakowski: a defence of Marx
LESZEK Kolakowski – the noted Polish-born political philosopher, who has died aged 81 – probably deserves the designation of the embittered former leftist’s embittered former leftist of choice. His principal work, ‘Main Currents of Marxism’, was widely touted in my undergraduate years as the definitive refutation of Marxism as a doctrine. The book runs to [...]
Green Party: twenty-first century Stalinists?
SCRATCH Jean Lambert, get Lavrentiy Beria; Green politicians are all totalitarians in the making, just itching to refound a carbon-neutral Gulag Archipelago. This, anyway, is the position of Times hack Antonia Senior, who has obviously given the matter a great deal of thought. Her stark warning must be heeded at once by anyone sufficiently naïve [...]
Gary McKinnon should be tried in Britain
IT’S GOOD to hear the prime minister – discussing the case of soon-to-be-extradited computer hacker Gary McKinnon – proclaim that ‘anybody who looks at this must be sympathetic to someone who suffers from Asperger syndrome’. The irony won’t be lost on anybody who has followed a discreet drip-drip campaign of repetitive sotto voce insinuation persistently [...]
Whatever happened to old fashioned boozers?
I HAPPENED to be in Camden the other night, and couldn’t help noticing what had become of a small pub previously called The Halfway House, best known as the closest boozer to the tube station. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, this was where I would habitually meet up with the mates to get a [...]
On Alan Milburn and social mobility
YOU CAN have capitalism, or you can have equality. But the very nature of the former militates against thethe latter, and it is precisely this that renders New Labour efforts to introduce egalitarianism by legislative fiat ultimately self-defeating. The political right just doesn’t understand this, of course. So the likes of Melanie Phillips can get [...]
