Jos massacres: the case for secularism
IF YOU are even momentarily persuaded by the crazily mendacious thesis that ‘secular fundamentalists are the new totalitarians’, reflect for a moment or two on why 500 people were slaughtered in Nigeria over the weekend. The victims were Christians, those who hacked them to pieces with machetes were Muslims, and it’s a safe bet that [...]
Jewish student groups: the 1985 banning campaign
A MOMENT from my past has just caught up with me. Last week I received an email from Dave Rich of the Community Security Trust, the Jewish-led charity that monitors anti-semitism in Britain. Rich informed me that the CST is currently researching the campaign conducted 25 years ago - with the involvement of at least some Socialist Worker Student [...]
Michael Foot 1913-2010
I’M PROUD to possess two books given to me as presents by Michael Foot. One of them – a witty polemical assault on a couple of wartime Tories – was penned by himself. The other is an early edition of Leon Trotsky’s ‘Where is Britain going?’ As many of the obituaries since his death at [...]
Jon Venables: a second chance, and even a third
THE moral difference between an adult that murders a child and a child that murders another child should be obvious at a moment’s reflection. Yet somehow the crime that Jon Venables and his young friend Robert Thompson perpetrated against James Bulger 17 years ago – horrific though it was – has always attracted a degree [...]
BBC 6 Music and Asian Network: why a hideously white middle-aged man cares
TWO radio stations I have never listened to in my life are about to get the chop. Being the sort of bloke former BBC boss Greg Dyke famously described as ‘hideously white’, and pushing 50 to boot, the suits at Broadcasting House probably assume that I couldn’t less. Yet somehow the death sentences pronounced on [...]
Chile: the class politics of looting
CHILE’S second city is under lockdown today, with the country’s post-Pinochet military offering an object lesson in what Marxists mean when they describe the state as the ultimate guarantor of property relations. Concepción was close to the epicentre of Saturday’s 8.8 magnitude earthquake, in which at least 723 people died. Food and water is running [...]
Despite all the amputations: Labour’s general election prospects
ONE-LEGGED Lithuanian lesbians, David Cameron joked in 2007, should not be in receipt of Arts Council grants. On what grounds they might be deemed intrinsically more or less deserving than heterosexual Estonian bipeds, he didn’t say. But clearly the Old Etonian element among leading Tories has got something of a downer on amputees. Hence Boris [...]
