The general strike demand: time for a revival?
I HAVE no idea what social background Rosa Prince comes from, or where she went to university. But as she is political correspondent for the Daily Telegraph, I’d hazard a guess that the answers to those questions will most likely be ‘posh’ and ‘starts with an O’ respectively. Whatever the case, her grasp of the [...]
The rightwing myth of Labour’s ‘clientele’
FOR the kind of Conservative who remains convinced that the Tories only failed to win a landslide last month because they were insufficiently rightist to satisfy an electorate that positively craved neo-Thatcherism by the bucketload, there is still one obvious outstanding question about the general election. What needs to be accounted for is the fact that [...]
Want labour mobility? Build social housing
LABOUR’S vigorous denunciation of Tory plans to boot the unemployed out of their sink estate council flats faces one obvious and glaring credibility problem, and that is the fact that Blairism owns the copyright. Only two years ago, the then housing minister Caroline Flint floated more or less the same idea, demanding that one million [...]
Book review: ‘We Don’t do God’ by John Burton and Eileen McCabe
RELIGION is all very well until it starts to interfere with your everyday life, at which point it really is time to give it up. That, according to the Terry Eagleton wisecrack, summarises the typical modern English person’s attitude to matters of faith. For most liberal-minded folk, religion is akin to sexuality, or perhaps a [...]
What to do with statues of dead dictators
IT SEEMS slightly shamefaced to topple statues of dead dictators in the dead of night, almost in the hope that the world won’t notice. The last such memorial to Franco in Madrid was removed in just such a fashion before dawn one fine morning five years ago. Word of the operation must have got out [...]
Reflections on working until 70 (and that Helen Mirren topless pic)
WHEN a man reaches the point where gum disease is more of an immediate health risk than STD, he knows he is getting on a bit. I shamelessly recycle this 1990s PJ O’Rourke joke only to draw to readers’ attention to the fact that I celebrated my 50th birthday last month. Or, more precisely, didn’t [...]
Osborne budget: the withering away of the welfare state
THERE are only so many ways that even the most creative reporter can spin the ‘10p on a pack of fags, 2p off the basic rate of income tax, average earner two hundred quid a year better off’ headlines that budget day typically generates. So even though it is an entirely straightforward job, and the [...]
Afghanistan: 300 not out
MARINE Richard Hollington has today been named as the 300th member of the British armed forces to die in Afghanistan since the invasion of 2001. Meanwhile, the Ministry of Defence has confirmed another victim of the fighting, taking the tally to 301. We are not involved in a numbers game here, of course. For the families [...]
The Tories still hate industrial Britain
EVER wonder why there are entire conurbations in which Tories in elected office remain rarer than self-deprecating gangsta rappers? One reason is that Conservative policies are often experienced at their most damaging in working class towns and cities. We are in for another example of this tendency in Tuesday’s emergency budget. The public spending cuts [...]
Thatcherism, Blairism and Cameron: a contribution to the debate
FIRST Frank Field, now John Hutton. The seamlessness and alacrity with which New Labour politicians take jobs under the Cameron administration, and indeed the Cameron administration’s obvious eagerness to ask them to do so, poses the question of just how much change a change of government entails. And that puts me in mind of a [...]
