Redmond O’Neill: an assessment by Bob Pitt
REDMOND O’Neill – a man I knew relatively well during my membership of the International Marxist Group in the 1980s, but with whom I have had no dealings whatsoever since – died earlier this month at the young age of 55. In recent years, he was in the public eye as one of the coterie [...]
Glasgow North East: multiple pile-up in No Mean City
NOW that the Gorbals has been demolished, No Mean City clearly needs a successor, and Glasgow North East fits the bill just nicely. This place is poor; in your face, 40% below the poverty line, smack addicts congregating in the shopping centre, poor. Things have pretty much always been that way, of course. One hundred [...]
Joe Glenton: ordinary soldiers must be heard
IT TOOK a bollocking administered in person by Billy Bragg to teach me the lesson, but these days I know better than to make the automatic assumption that anyone serving in the armed forces is necessarily a braindead reactionary. At a small business meeting in London attended by some prominent lefties about a decade or [...]
Karadzic and Blair: morally equivalent
THE trial started yesterday, but somehow Radovan Karadzic doesn’t fancy standing in the dock before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, and is boycotting the proceedings. Little wonder. The former Bosnian Serb leader faces 11 charges of genocide, war crimes and crimes against humanity allegedly committed during the 1992-95 war [...]
easyCouncil: Tory cheap flight from Hell
OFFICIALLY, the proposals are known as ‘Future Shape’. But the unofficial designation ‘easyCouncil’ better spells out just what Tory plans to re-run 1980s-style local government cuts under a pseudo-funky nickname will mean for users of local authority services. Barnet leader Mike Freer – a Conservative parliamentary hopeful, natch – openly admits that the Ryanair business [...]
Famine in Africa: what is to be done?
RARELY can the standard neo-Malthusian rightwing orthodoxy on development have been expressed quite as bluntly – or quite as nastily, come to that – as it is in The Times this morning. ‘Do starving Africans a favour,’ runs the headline over a piece by the paper’s former Africa bureau chief Sam Kiley. ‘Don’t feed them.’ [...]
White riot: welcome to mainstream fascism
IT’S TEN days before the next election and Nick Griffin is on walkabout when a white leftist with a history of mental health problems plunges a breadknife through his heart before the skinhead heavies can stop him. The British National Party leader is pronounced DOA at the hospital. Or maybe it’s ten days before the [...]
NUJ elections: evil Trots exposed
I’VE BEEN covering industrial relations as a hack for over 20 years now. Once it was my main specialism. These days the task takes maybe 25-30% of my typical working week, but I still keep an eye on a number of trade unions. I write about Nautilus International and RMT, who organise seafarers, fairly regularly. [...]
Royal Mail strikebreakers: minimum wage convicted crims
YOU just can’t get the staff these days. Even the Daily Mail is aghast at the quality of the scabs Adam Crozier and Co are taking on to break this week’s Royal Mail strike. Looks like some of those lovely mail order Chrissie pressies are about to go walkies: Royal Mail is hiring thousands of [...]
Afghanistan after Karzai’s rigged election
HELPFUL hints for Afghani vote riggers; next time you stuff a ballot box, guys, make sure you include a few token votes for other candidates. When Karzai picks up every single vote in village after village, people tend to get a tad suspicious. I mean, not even Georgina Gould’s New Labour supporters in Erith & [...]
