How to play guilt by association
MOST people would recognise at least a difference of degree between a peaceful student sit-in at an upmarket grocery store and a posse of skinheads on a Paki bashing expedition. Among those who seemingly cannot Simon Heffer, who effectively asserts in the Daily Telegraph this morning that UK Uncut and Combat 88 are ‘every bit [...]
Adam Ramsay: in defence of posh lefties
‘DAILY Mail dropped round my parents house – doing a “shock revelation” that I’m a bit posh,’ read the Tweet from Fortnum & Mason sit-in arrestee Adam Ramsay yesterday. ‘For those who’ve not met me, I’m a bit posh.’ I’ve not met him. And as the resultant hatchet job makes plain, Ramsay is indeed posh. [...]
Red Ed goes to Durham
ED MILIBAND is set to become the first Labour leader in more than two decades to address the Durham miners’ gala. Short of openly coming out in favour of the Transitional Programme and the decisions of first four congresses of the Communist International, little could be better calculated to piss off the residual Blair fanboys [...]
Saturday night inside the kettle
OK, I wasn’t there for all of it, and I am in no position to offer a definitive judgement on what happened in Trafalgar Square on Saturday night. But thanks to my possession of a press pass, the cops let me inside the kettle and I got a pretty good voyeur’s view of the proceedings. [...]
TUC march: I don’t predict a riot
NOT only are my days as a street fighting man well behind me, but daddy is taking girls aged 10 and 8 on the TUC anti-cuts march tomorrow. The last thing I want is for the headbangers to kick anything off. Yet today’s papers are full of dire predictions that a ‘violent minority’ are hell-bent on ‘hijacking [...]
Budget 2011: will the Osborne plan work?
I CANNOT recollect ever hearing a chancellor of the exchequer climax his budget day peroration with the affirmation the package he has just presented is expressly designed to slow down the economy and increase the length of the dole queue. All budgets are “budgets for growth”, at least in the eyes of the man who [...]
Libya: revolution betrayed?
MUAMMAR Gaddafi was – as Eamonn McCann argues in Socialist Worker this week – ‘for long stretches … an attractive figure for many on the left’. I am sorry to say that he is not far wrong about that. Such a formula is deliberately evasive, of course; just which parts of the left found the [...]
Will Britain ever see strong trade unions again?
AS A young hack, my ambition was always to become an industrial reporter on a national newspaper and to join the Labour and Industrial Correspondents’ Group. Now I read that this once exclusive club has wound itself up, on the grounds that job description no longer really exists. Fittingly, the wake begun with a debate [...]
Support the No Fly Zone – with no illusions
EVERY time they replay that clip of Blair kissing Gaddafi, it will hopefully serve to remind television viewers that the West’s intentions in Libya are entirely self-serving. There can be no reasonable doubt that the US, Britain and France are only extending support to the rebels because they have calculated that it is in their [...]
Alternative Vote? Yawn, but yes
I WILL to be in Chicago on May 5. And guess what? I will not be rushing home early from whatever Southside blues bar I wash up in that night to google up the exit poll verdict on the Alternative Vote referendum back in Britain. A certain lack of excitement here notwithstanding, I have been [...]
