A brief history of Labour and News International
I NEVER did quite share the visceral contempt in which almost all lefties seem to hold The Sun, although I certainly understand where it’s coming from. The vicious personalised red-baiting in the Thatcher years, the bitterness generated by the Wapping dispute, and the way the bastards stitched up Kinnock all take some forgetting. But I [...]
New Labour: Party like its 1982
THE year is 1982 and the soundtrack is Town called malice, Come on Eileen and Should I stay or should I go. The boys look good in rockabilly-inspired flat top haircuts, lumberjack shirts and 501s, while ra-ra skirts and leggings are all the rage for girls. Israel invades Lebanon, Britain and Argentina go to war [...]
Labour has lost a generation
LISTENING to a group of young people shouting ‘Labour, Labour, Labour; out, out, out’ while marching past Brighton’s conference centre yesterday took me back to when I was the same sort of age. We had a similar chant, you see. But back in the 1980s, the slogan was aimed at Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Instantly recognisable [...]
War on terror: some lessons from Northern Ireland
*Irony alert* THE Irish Republican Army were decent white European Christians just like us, and their commitment to our common heritage of Enlightenment values was always abundantly plain. That’s why they limited themselves to blowing up boozers in Birmingham and hotels in Brighton, rather than flying 757s into New York skyscrapers. Hey, they even gave [...]
Labour: losing friends in the north
FOR generations, the default assumption of southerners meeting northerners has been that they are likely to be Labour supporters. There always have been pockets of Toryism at positions further up the M1 than Londoners usually care to go, from the rolling farmlands of the East Riding to the Cheshire stockbroker belt, of course. But they [...]
Trident: Brown’s no peacenik
UNILATERAL nuclear disarmament formed part of the manifesto on which Gordon Brown was first elected to the House of Commons. I do not know whether he was ever an individual member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but back in the early 1980s, such an affiliation was certainly no hindrance to ambitious young backbenchers. Just [...]
Irving Kristol: American Idol of the right
FOR a man who purveyed little more than warmed over supply side economics and a stress on the need for religiously-rooted morality, Irving Kristol – who has died aged 89 – was idolised on the transatlantic political right to an extent entirely out of proportion with any distinctive intellectual contribution to their cause. Given that [...]
How dare you assume I’m a progressive?
‘WE ARE all socialists now,’ Liberal chancellor Sir William Harcourt famously maintained on the introduction of death duty in 1894. The soundbite was resurrected earlier this year when Newsweek took a pop at Obama’s ostensible leftism. For the last century, politicians have routinely reworked the phrase. Thus Tricky Dicky insisted ‘we are all Keynesians now’ [...]
Royal Mail: en defensa de los prácticos españoles
ROYAL Mail services are shockingly substandard and employees from the boardroom to the sorting office floor need not so much a rocket but a long range intercontinental ballistic missile inserted up the appropriate part of the anatomy. There, said it. Look, I’m a leftie. I start from the default position of preferring public services to [...]
Nick Clegg: the strange resurrection of Liberal England?
GO BACK to your constituencies and prepare for government. Or something like that. The leader of the Liberal Democrats believes that Britain is about to enter a ‘new era of Liberal politics’, with the use of a capital L here presumably deliberate. Nick Clegg’s contention is that we are about to witness the strange resurrection [...]
