J30: one day strikes are not enough
I DON’T know what the late Ralph Miliband read to his offspring by way of bedtime stories. But if Ed’s reluctance to back today’s public sector stoppage is anything to go by, Rosa Luxemburg’s ‘The Mass Strike’ did not feature strongly in his upbringing. For my generation of the far left, which came to political [...]
What Woodward and Bernstein told me about Johann Hari
I HAD a front page splash in Metro, the nationally distributed freesheet, last year. Not that I got a byline for it, or still less a cheque. They simply nicked my work – including the money shot quotes – and passed it off as their own, without attribution of the source. Congratulations, guys. Only five [...]
What happens if the US defaults?
HAVING a former Merrill Lynch boss caution against irresponsibility is somewhat akin to hearing Beyonce’s choreographer laying into excessively raunchy dance routines. But Richard Bernstein, once chief investment strategist at the collapsed investment bank, is sincerely convinced that the US should not go into technical default. Yet that is just what could happen in early [...]
Why the IMF loves Ahmadinejad
THE Farsi edition of ‘The Shock Doctrine’ has just picked up a literary award in Iran, reportedly on the basis of the quality of translation. Obviously I cannot judge how elegantly Naomi Klein’s prose was rendered into that language, but I can’t help noticing that the content of the volume is timely in that country right now. [...]
Argentina defaulted: it’s still there
TEN years ago Argentina defaulted on $95bn-worth of public debt, in a move that still holds the record for the largest sovereign default of all time. By last year, it was back on the international capital markets. True, the major rating agencies assess the creditworthiness of almost all Argentine debt – sovereign, sub-sovereign and most [...]
Afghanistan: another step closer to the endgame
CONTINUING the unwinnable struggle in Afghanistan is hardly a viable option, from either a military or political standpoint. So the revelation of president Hamid Karzai, confirmed over the weekend by US defence secretary Robert Gates, that contacts have been established with the Taliban hardly come as a major surprise. Indeed, even last year there were [...]
Greece: what next?
BEING the German equivalent of the Sun, there is no particular reason to believe that Bild has got any special hotline to Langley, Virginia. But for what it’s worth, the claim that the Central Intelligence Agency sees a military coup in Greece as possible has recently surfaced among that publication’s endless stream of topless girlie [...]
The Tory who wants to ban strikes
BORIS Johnson may argue for a minimum turnout threshold on industrial action ballots, Vince Cable might make threatening noises at GMB conference. But throughout my adult lifetime, I cannot remember any public figure openly advocating that strikes should be illegal. Step forward Dr Andrew Lilico, an economist who – modestly or otherwise – styles himself [...]
Miliband speech: conflating the incomparable
MAYBE Ed Miliband’s inner social democrat thinks that it is clever politics to combine a spot of banker bashing with a ritual middle market tabloid-style denunciation of dole scroungers. After all, you would probably have to go back well before 1994 to find a speech from a Labour leader as openly critical of the City [...]
Brown hated Blair: who knew?
NOT even the most unthinkingly loyalist constituency level footsoldier can have been unaware that hatred between Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and their respective supporters constituted the defining feature of top level Labour politics for 16 seemingly endless years. From the day that word of the Granita pact first made it into a gossip column, the [...]
