Egypt: results and prospects
NOT even people who live in Egypt – and I’ve spoken to several ex-pats this morning, now that mobile phone communications have been restored – seem certain about what will happen there next. So let’s avoid the leftist parlour game of attempting to shoehorn all social upheavals into the model of the classic class struggles [...]
Egypt: what is the class nature of the Muslim Brotherhood?
EGYPT matters, in a way that Tunisia does not. It is the most populous Arab country and packs the cultural clout across the Middle East that goes with that. In international relations terms, it is a key regional ally of the US. If the Mubarak regime – currently facing the most significant protests in three [...]
Posh and Posher: grammar schools are not the answer
TORY MP Jacob Rees-Mogg is the Old Etonian son of a former editor of The Times. But don’t go running away with the idea that he is in any sense a member of a privileged class, he tells a television programme that will be broadcast on BBC 2 this evening. ‘I’m a man of the [...]
Private Finance Initiative: an idiot’s guide
IMAGINE a mortgage that you pay off over many decades, and then hand the house back to the building society at the end of it. That, more or less, is how the Private Finance Initiative works. PFI always was a rip-off for the taxpayer. But just how egregious a scam the whole crooked set up [...]
What the Palestine Papers say about Netanyahu
I AM not sure whether Benjamin Netanyahu coined the phrase ‘a partner for peace’ himself, but certainly he used the term about the administration he formed when taking up office as Israel’s prime minister in 2009. It has since then been widely bandied about by participants in Middle East politics, with both camps employing it [...]
Ed Balls: Labour has nobody better
IT IS widely reported that Alan Johnson is a nice bloke and that Ed Balls is not. Indeed, some assessments of the latter individual’s character and personality are considerably less charitable even than that. But as an economically literate Labour leftist who has never met either man personally, my concern is simply that the shadow [...]
In defence of Education Maintenance Allowance
SIXTH FORMERS are spending their Education Maintenance Allowance on ‘booze, cigarettes, CDs, music festivals and clothes’, commenter jenny50 indignantly maintains in a one-sided debate on a Telegraph discussion board this morning. And she should know, having ‘worked in a large comprehensive for many years’. Well Jenny, if you are reading this, brace yourself for a shock. I [...]
The rise and fall of Lord Taylor of Warwick
LEFT to its own devices, Cheltenham Conservative Association would never have selected John Taylor as its candidate in the 1992 general election. Indeed, one activist was subsequently expelled for referring to the highly respected black barrister as a ‘bloody nigger’. Perhaps others did not canvass quite as avidly as they might have done. Whatever the [...]
Tunisia: what next?
FOR those of us who feel jubilation at the fall of any dictator, the sight of Zine el Abidine Ben Ali scurrying away from the country he misruled for 23 years constitutes the obvious political highlight of the opening weeks of 2011. But if the scenes we witnessed in North Africa last week do deserve [...]
Blog of the week: New Left Project
UP AND running for some time - but new to me, and attracting quite a bit of attention right now - is New Left Project. This is impressive group blog in the Red Pepper-ish milieu that features quite a few familiar leftie writers, such as Ed Rooksby, Joseph Healy of Green Left, Elly Badcock, Guy Aitchison, Richard Seymour, Sunny Hundal, [...]
