NHS: not Marxist enough
CONSERVATIVE Euro-MP Daniel Hannan reckons that the National Health Service is a ‘Marxist system’. And notice how he says that like it’s a bad thing. This outburst offers further proof of the infallible rule of thumb that when the Tories really, really do not like something, they reflexively reach for a USSR analogy. Yep kids, [...]
Women’s boxing: 2012 Olympic sport?
LENIN Arroyo – ‘the volcano’ to his fans – is a professional boxer based in Miami, a part of the world where such a first name will not endear him to many. He’s the reigning WBC Latino light welterweight champ, and he’s on 18-5-1 with three knockouts in 25 bouts. Less successful is Gilbert Lenin [...]
FSA code: Turner and Sants must go
IT’S TWO years to the week since the start of the credit crunch, and we now know that a culture which positively encouraged bankers to take crazy risks in search of even crazier bonuses was among the main causes of the worst economic downturn since the war. Today – the very day on which it [...]
Tracey Connolly: don’t demonise single mums
TRACEY. She really did have to be called bleedin’ Tracey, didn’t she? Just to hammer home the stereotype. Damn, couldn’t she at least have lived in a tower block as well? The identity of Baby P’s mother has been readily available to anyone capable of using Google for at least ten months now. Even so, [...]
Melanie Phillips, plagiarist
Daily Mail, 14 July 2009: Richard Littlejohn describes ‘Hattie Harman’ as ‘the Isambard Kingdom Brunel of social engineering’. Total bollocks, of course, but a good little one-liner nevertheless. Daily Mail, 10 August 2009: Melanie Phillips speaks of ‘that Isambard Kingdom Brunel of social engineering, Ed Balls’. She doesn’t even acknowledge the source. Mel, love. All [...]
Islamist or Nazi, society has to tolerate the far right
DAVID Cameron packed what he himself described as ‘a really trashy novel’ for his 10-day holiday in France. By contrast, my choice to read on Brighton beach last week was rather more serious. Ed Husain’s ‘The Islamist’ is controversial autobiographical account of the author’s involvement with the Islamist far right in Britain, and ends with [...]
Advice for a young leftist
I WAS extremely flattered to get an email in this blog’s inbox last week from a young man of 19, asking my advice on getting involved with leftwing politics for the first time. He tells me that while he finds the SWP impressive in many respects, he is aware of its well-deserved reputation for sectarianism [...]
The Morning Star, the LaRouchite and the holocaust denier
I NOTICE that Nick Kollerstrom’s book ‘Terror on the Tube’ enjoys a highly positive review on the Morning Star website. Here, we are told, is a work that ‘tears the official explanation for the July 7 Tube and bus bombings to shreds’. The research effort is highly commended, resulting as it does in ‘a detailed [...]
Woolas announcement: the point of points-based citizenship
EXACTLY how many people were on the now-notorious al Muhajiroun-organised demo in Luton earlier this year, in which a small group of Islamists chanted anti-war slogans at British troops marching through the town? Just a couple of dozen, if memory serves. Yet the nationwide impact of the protest was out of all proportion to the [...]
Industrial militancy in Britain: back to the future?
BRITAIN ‘could return to crippling 1970s strikes’, according to a headline in Britain’s biggest-selling rightwing broadsheet yesterday. And note how the Daily Telegraph says that like it’s a bad thing. My first response is not to get my hopes up too high. Newspaper commentators have been predicting an imminent rerun of the Winter of Discontent [...]
