WikiLeaks: new light on Operation Cast Lead
ISRAEL gave Egypt and the Palestinian Authority advance notice of Operation Cast Lead, asking both of them to run the show in the Gaza Strip once Hamas was deposed, according to one of the diplomatic cables published in Sunday by WikiLeaks. We all know what happened next. Some 1,400 Palestinians, mostly civilians, were killed during [...]
The left: significant enough to witch-hunt again
ANYBODY out there remember the Dreadful Deirdre affair? That was the label the tabloid press managed to stick on the hapless Deirdre Wood, Labour candidate at the 1987 Greenwich by-election. Ms Wood held to identikit leftie positions of the period on issues such as feminism, gay rights and anti-racism. These days such views would be [...]
Katyn admission: de-Stalinisation from the right
IT IS 57 years since the death of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, and 19 years since the collapse of the social system that indelibly bore his name. Yet only now is a Russian president talking in terms of systematic de-Stalinisation. Dmitry Medvedev is reportedly about to declassify the entire Soviet archive, build a few monuments to [...]
Lord Flight: Keith Joseph without the erudition
WITH four nippers himself, Lord Flight presumably knows a thing or two about fertility. And the former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party is obviously worried that while Britain’s scallies get busy knocking up their babymothers every time you let one of the little buggers out of the Young Offenders’ Institution, nice people are progressively [...]
Ireland’s crisis: prospects for Sinn Féin
RIGHT, somebody run the distinction between Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael past me again. I did used to know this one, honest. Something to do with the civil war, no? I am being a little bit flippant when I joke about the similarities between Ireland’s two major parties, but only a little bit. British imperialism [...]
A Modest Proposal for preventing the bankers in Ireland, from being a burden on their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the publick
IT IS a melancholy object to those, who walk through Dublin, or travel in the country, when they see the streets, the roads and cabbin-doors crowded with hedge fund managers, followed by three, four, or six forex dealers, all in rags, and importuning every passing European Union bureaucrat and International Monetary Fund official for an [...]
Labour policy review: not like last time, please
MOST of the credit – or as some of us would see it, the blame – for the creation of New Labour typically accrues to Tony Blair. But the decisive turning point in Labour’s recent history was the 1987-89 policy review under Kinnock, the sine qua non for everything that was to come. What we [...]
Lord Young: the favourite phrase of those who’ve always had it better
THE last time an aphorism from Baron Young of Graffham made the headlines came a week before polling day in 1987, when he grabbed Norman Tebbit by the lapels and shouted ‘Norman, listen to me, we are about to lose this fucking election’. He need not have worried. The Conservatives proceeded to win that fucking election, and Lord [...]
Fish supper redux: Labour and the unions
SECOND only to the Granita pact in the list of most memorable New Labour meals is surely Stephen Byers’ fish supper of 1996. Labour’s frontbench spokesman on industrial relations was in Blackpool for the TUC conference, and speaking to journalists over a restaurant meal, expressed the opinion that the party should cut ties with the [...]
Fire service cuts: just who are the fascist bastards?
MOST people assume that the acronym FBU stands for Fire Brigades Union. But Richard Simpson, a man who still sits for Labour in the Scottish parliament, obvious had other ideas about the first two of the three initials. Seven years ago, he was forced to step down from his job as deputy justice minister at [...]
