Iran: capitalist theocracy sui generis
THE current edition of Weekly Worker – seemingly the least popular but yet most widely-read publication on the British far left – includes a 2,000 word review of two recent books on Iran, penned by yours truly. The works in question are Ervand Abrahamian’s ‘A history of Modern Iran’ (Cambridge University Press, 2008, pp224, £14.99), [...]
Debus, Kasab, Kelly and Muna: the right to criticise union leaderships
IF YOUR boss sacks you for wearing a crucifix to work, you may have a case the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003. Clock on clad in a hammer and sickle lapel badge, and she can freely tell you to pick up your P45, you dirty little commie. Or so I had assumed, anyway. [...]
Žižek and Israel: what limits to criticism?
SLAVOJ Žižek seems to be taking over from the ageing Noam Chomsky as intellectual superhero of choice for the more academically-inclined sections of the far left. The fact that he got top billing on the extensive fly posting undertaken for the recent Marxism 2009 conference, organised by the Socialist Workers’ Party, is surely illustrative of [...]
Grayling speech: rewriting 1993 Blairism
AMBITIOUS shadow home secretaries can build an entire political career on the back of a single killer speech on law and order. Today’s offering from Chris Grayling could well go down as the best proof of that proposition since Tony Blair delivered his ‘tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime’ declaration all the [...]
What the left should grasp about the Megrahi case
I HAVEN’T seen any leftist comment on the topic yet that hasn’t welcomed the Scottish Executive’s decision to free Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. Many of them were explicitly premised on the idea that the man convicted of the Lockerbie bombing was innocent. Megrahi’s defenders – not least my journalistic hero Paul Foot – have [...]
Dependency culture versus bonus culture
APPARENTLY there are at least 164 definitions of the word ‘culture’, according to one 1950s tome on anthropology that was well-known in its day. But in current popular British usage, the term conjurs up a notion of an internally coherent set of beliefs that justify given social arrangements to participants within a particular social structure. [...]
What we accept when we accept individual freedom
THERE is a natural tension between social conservatism and social liberalism, and not one that can be broken down on the usual left-right or Labour-Conservative axis. Thus there are many socialists opposed to supercasinos, lap dancing clubs and 24 hour drinking, on the grounds that such activities are both detrimental to working class communities and [...]
NEETs: (They belong to the) blank generation
IT’S NOT as if coining a daft new acronym makes a problem disappear; rebranding the young unemployed as NEETs – short for ‘not in education, employment or training’ – almost comes across as a calculated insult. Piss off, kids. We’re not taking you anywhere as seriously as we take out of work adults. But this [...]
Comparative morality: Tracey Connolly and Sir Fred Goodwin
UNTIL someone comes up with a scale that facilitates such measurement, it remains logically meaningless to weigh up the morality of Tracey Connolly, and then judge it against the morality of Sir Fred Goodwin. The actions that these two people have perpetrated, and the impact these actions have had on others, vary enormously in scale, [...]
Andy Beckett: right about the left?
HERE’S a political conundrum for you; an economic climate that should be profoundly conducive to socialism instead seems set to herald a decade in which British politics is dominated by reanimated Thatcherism and the menacing growth of the fascist right. Writing in the Guardian’s G2 supplement this morning, Andy Beckett considers the outlook for what [...]
