NUJ strike planned at Morning Star
UPDATE: Sunday’s threatened stoppage is now off, after Morning Star management agreed to return to the negotiating table. Watch out for further developments. IMAGINE how your workplace union branch would function if the management controlled a block vote of almost half the membership through the mechanism of democratic centralism. That’s the situation facing National Union [...]
McDonnell out of Labour leadership race: what now?
JOHN MCDONNELL has this morning withdrawn from the Labour leadership contest, and it seems unlikely that Diane Abbott will have the necessary 33 names in the bag by the time nominations close at 1230. So what should the left do now? Is it possible for socialists to extract any political mileage from the proceedings as [...]
Cuts are not class-neutral
LET me tell you a family anecdote, but one that makes a political point. By the early 1980s, my late mother was bedridden with multiple sclerosis, an illness that left her incontinent. That meant that she wore the adult equivalent of nappies. As both my brother and I lived a long way away and my [...]
Immigration: no longer a New Labour taboo
OPPOSITION to immigration has just become become post-Gillian Duffy New Labour orthodoxy. By my reckoning, the four candidates who will actually make it onto the leadership ballot paper vary only in the degree of mealy-mouthedness with which they are prepared to ascribe electoral defeat to letting in too many bloody foreigners. There’s frontrunner David Miliband, [...]
Book review: ‘Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative’ by Francis Elliot & James Hanning
THAT David Cameron is a ‘posh boy’ is the most clichéd of all insights regularly proffered about our new prime minister; just how posh we are talking here is fully brought home in this well-written, scrupulously researched, and balanced-but-ultimately-favourable account of his life. ‘Cameron: the Rise of the New Conservative’ gives a glimpse into a [...]
The parallels between Palestine and Kurdistan
THERE is a certain irony in hearing the head of the Turkish government condemn acts of state terrorism and rail against breaches of international law. This is not to argue that Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s characterisation of the storming of Mavi Marmaris is at all inaccurate; the brutality of what happened on Monday is too readily [...]
The legality of Israel’s attack on Mavi Marmaris
ISRAEL attack on humanitarian aid vessel Mavi Marmaris was ‘perfectly legal, perfectly humane and very responsible’, the country’s ambassador to the US has insisted. Michael Oren even adds: ‘Israel acted in accord with international law. Any state has the right to protect itself, certainly from a terrorist threat such as Hamas, including on the open [...]
Woodley, Unite and Labour: more than a bit of verbal?
MANY trade union general secretaries can deliver a punchy left-ish sounding speech when the occasion demands, without any particular implications for their political practice. Tony Woodley is a case in point. I am not suggesting he is in any way a poseur; he’s a genuine working class bloke, labour movement born and bred, who made [...]
