Anti-immigration sentiment won’t (necessarily) boost the far right
CONFUSED rightwing populism is more or less the default position for public opinion in this country. I’ve always believed that lefties are making a mistake when they blame the Daily Mail and the Sun for that state of affairs; the reality is that these newspapers sell shedloads precisely because they articulate the prejudices they in [...]
Solidarity with Colonel Gaddafi
LOOKING for incisive Marxist analysis of the Libya crisis? Try this editorial from News Line, daily paper of the Workers Revolutionary Party: We urge the Libyan masses and youth to take their stand alongside Colonel Gadaffi to defend the gains of the Libyan revolution, and to develop it. Definitely quote of the week. [hat tip: [...]
Saudi Arabia: £269bn might not be enough
EVEN though King Abdullah Ibn Abdulaziz al Saud spent part of his childhood at a British private school, my guess would be that he is not particularly well versed in the aphorisms of the One Nation Tory tradition. Nevertheless, the Financial Times’ lead story this morning puts me in mind of Quintin Hogg’s famous 1943 [...]
Revolution: the demonstration effect
ARAB autocracies are not the only autocracies. While the Jasmine revolution has so far been played out largely on the streets of north Africa, authoritarian and dictatorial governments everywhere obviously have good reason to feel nervous. Consider reports emerging from two of the few remaining outposts of Stalinism in Asia. In China, there have been [...]
Coalition prepares to break strikes
THIS from the Daily Mail this morning. Self-explanatory, really: A secret ‘war plan’ to prevent a general strike has been drawn up by ministers – with thousands of union-busting workers lined up to cross militant picket lines. A unit has been set up in the Cabinet Office to prevent Britain grinding to a standstill in [...]
Libya crackdown: the trajectory of Brother Gaddafi
MAKING comparisons between Muammar Gaddafi and Hugo Chávez is inevitably invidious to the latter. Whether you approve of the Venezuelan president or not, he is where he is on the back of a clear electoral mandate. Yet in their standing as maverick oil-rich third world radicals lionised by sections of the British left, there are [...]
Thilo Sarrazin: what limit to ‘no platform’?
FEW current figures in public life are so widely execrated that Jewish groups and opponents of Islamophobia alike would seek to deny him the chance to address a public meeting at a London campus. But former Bundesbank executive Thilo Sarrazin manages to make the cut. The central contention of Sarrazin’s best-selling book, ‘Deutschland schafft sich ab’ – [...]
Big Society: what’s in a name?
BIG Society is a completely vacuous construction that doesn’t mean anything in particular, according to some commentators, anyway. Well, either that, or a mark of Cameron’s capitulation to the quasi-Marxist ideology of ‘leftist subversive’ Saul Alinsky. Or maybe it is a fancy pants name in which to dress up free market fundamentalist public spending cuts. [...]
Fashism.com: the mass psychology of clothing conformity
COMING up with the name fashism.com for a website that crowdsources ‘how to dress’ advice is a fairly obvious if slightly tasteless play on words, and most of the target demographic will have just the foggiest idea of what the pun entails. After all, only a small minority of teen and twentysomething sharp dressers have [...]
Labour councils and the cuts: grotesque chaos is back
MAYBE Manchester council didn’t hire taxis to scuttle round the city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers, a crime for which former Labour leader Neil Kinnock famously berated Liverpool’s local authority in his 1985 conference speech. Then again, I don’t suppose the 2,000 Mancunians who are losing their jobs are any happier about [...]
