And neoconservatism is declining in theoretical standing chiefly because it has been seen to fail in practice. The invasion of Iraq has patently not gone the way the Project for a New American Century thought it was going to go.

Leading neocon Francis Fukuyama tries to come to terms with this in After the neocons: America at the crossroads, and unlike some parts of the British centre-left, starts from a realistic rather than rose-tinted assessment of the situation on the ground following the fall of Saddam:

'By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, training ground and operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at.'

The book is not quite a mea culpa. Fukuyama insists he was never foolish enough to back the war in the first place. But in classic Shirley Williams style, he insists that it is the party that has changed:

'I have concluded that neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something that I can no longer support.'

Instead, he tries to save neoconservatism from itself, proposing what he dubs 'realistic Wilsonianism' in its place. This boils down to a kinder, gentler neoconservatism, based on a foreign policy that concentrates onpromoting democracy by soft power rather than military hardware. It also takes pledges to work with, rather than against, international institutions.

Chapter two will be of particular interest to intellectual trend trainspotters, examining the roots of neoconservatism not just in the legacies of Leo Strauss and Max Shactman, but also in the work of Albert Wohlstetter and the groups around the magazines Public Interest and Weekly Standard. In particular, the Weekly Standard faction around William Kristol and Robert Kagan are fingered as the number one neocons advocates of war.

Fukuyama goes on to argue that political Islam is actually a displacement threat, appealing primarily to 'the same alienated individuals who in earlier generations would have gravitated to communism or fascism'. He also correctly observes:

'Western democracy will not be a short-term solution to the problem of terrorism. The September 11, Madrid, Amsterdam and London attackers lived in modern, democratic societies and were not alienated by the lack of democracy in the countries of their birth or ancestry.'

And against calls for a Muslim Luther, he points out again rightly that the Christian Luther did not preach liberalism and pluralism but intolerant religious fanaticism instead.

Where the Euston Manifesto seemingly appeal to the US to save the world for democracy, Fukuyama underlines the real limitations on its ability to do so.

'First, benevolent hegemony rests on a belief in American exceptionalism that most non-Americans simply find not credible. The idea that the United States behaves disinterestedly on the world stage is not widely believed because it is for the most the most part not true ...

'The second problem with benevolent hegemony is that it presupposes an extremely high level of competence on the part of the hegemonic power.'

That puts the matter rather politely. But 'nuff said, methinks. Finally, benevolent hegemony is impossible in domestic political terms. The US electorate just won't wear it. Together, the three points eloquently demolish a central tenet of neoconservatism in both its PNAC and Eustonite manifestations.

In short, Fukyama has moved on. It's sad to see Geras, Cohen and Johnson so hasty in trying to get on board an already sinking ship.

From Galloway's time as an operator behind the scenes in Dundee municipal Labour politics through his tenure as general secretary of War on Want and on to his current incarnation as the sole parliamentary representative of Respect, it's all here.

Morley plays with a straight bat, too. This is essentially a quick turnround journo cash-in book, and I don't mean that pejoratively. I do not disapprove of the genre on principle. It is most explicitly not the hatchet job it could have been; that would be another project altogether.

Little of the contents will come as a surprise to those who have observed Galloway's political fortunes since the late seventies. The allegations have all been had out before.

But it is interesting to read the impressions of an outsider concerning the culture of the British left.over the past period. Morley, obviously not being 'One of Us', sometimes seems bemused at our little world.

Why wouldn't Galloway have got his Dundee Standard newspaper printed by the Workers' Revolutionary Party presses? Yes the WRP were wingnuts in hoc to Tripoli, but a cheap printing deal is a cheap printing deal. That's how things operated on the left at the time. Ask Ken Livingstone.

In summary, if for some reason you haven't been paying attention to the tempests that inevitably surround his Gorgeousness, this is a quick crash course and is worth reading on that basis. The old hacks among us will know it all already.

That's the question Mark Garnett addresses in 'From Anger to Apathy: the British Experience Since 1975'. This book will be of special interest to fortysomethings, as the period under consideration is broadly coterminous with their adult lives.

As a bonus, the author seems to have been on the right side of the picket lines throughout the Thatcher years, and makes repeated reference to the music of the Clash and the Specials.

Prepare to be reminded of much you had probably forgotten, such as the Mormon missionary 'sex in chains' case of 1977, and the days when Gordon Brown wrote corruscating critiques of Thatcherism.

Garnett's central thesis can be summed up in two words: blame Kinnock. Rather than work from the basis that Thatcherism at no point enjoyed anything like majority support, Labour simply capitulated to the notion that greed was now the dominant social value.

Such was the impact of the 1987 defeat and the subsequent policy review that Neil Kinnock, Labour leader of the day, spent most of the 1992 general election on the back foot, being forced to explain why he was now advocating policies he had once openly loathed. Such opportunism was a propaganda gift to the Tory tabloids.

Now we are living with the results, also known as the youth of today. I'm regularly chided for underestimating young people; they are far more radical then I give them credit for, especially when it comes to anti-capitalism, campaigns against third world poverty and the anti-war movement ... or so I'm told.

But individual exceptions aside, I don't see much evidence for it among younger workmates or fellow students. Love for you if you were born in the eighties, the eighties? Sorry. Not really. I blame the parents, myself. The parents and the Tories, anyway.

Writing the history of recent decades must be a far harder task for a historian than analysing the Glorious Revolution or the causes of world war one, if only because most of the participants are still alive and will have experienced the period in different ways.

If journalism is the first draft of history, volumes such as Garnett's are essentially the second. The definitive analysis will probably not be produced for many years. But don't let that put you off; this was one of the most enjoyable current affairs books I read in 2007.

It is thanks largely to 'Globalization and its Discontents' that the one-time chief economist at the World Bank came to the attention of the wider public. Thanks to unexpected provenance, this book - first published in 2002 - found a ready audience in what much of the left, with traditional hyberbole, at that time called the anti-capitalist movement. I'm reading it now, incidentally, because it is the set text for a course on emerging market economics I am taking next term.

For reasons this volume makes quite clear, the term 'global justice movement', these days in wider use, is a rather more accurate designation of the target market. While many activists from a range of backgrounds - including trade unionists, environmentalists, small farmers, Christians and anti-poverty campaigners - have over the last decade or so been moved to street protest against the negative impact of globalisation, only relatively small numbers of far leftists did so on the basis of rejecting capitalism as such.

As Stiglitz repeatedly points out, there have been wide-ranging and important upsides to globalisation as a process; at the very least, it has facilitated the creation of a global civil society that promotes democracy, civil rights and social justice worldwide. It is indubitably a more progressive brand of capitalism than economic nationalism.

What has rightly generated the anger is the absolute prioritisation of the interests of finance capital over any other consideration. From Latin America's 'lost decade' of the 1980s to the debilitating transition to capitalism in Russia and the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, the interests of the majority of the world's population have been systematically disregarded.

All of this underlines just how poor the track record of free market orthodoxy since the Reagan-Thatcher revolution really has been, especially in the field of development economics. No matter how immaculate a theory is, it really is essential to give an occasional glance at the result.

This is a technocratic critique, unsurprisingly given its authorship by a technocrat. Much of the book is taken up with an account of ongoing turf war between the World Bank - where Stiglitz worked - and its Washington rivals, the International Monetary Fund and the US Treasury. It's always nice to get suspicions confirmed by an insider account, even if the broad outlines are already widely known.

Stiglitz's case is essentially that the Bretton Woods institutions have lost their original Keynesian mission and have been subjected to regulatory capture by Wall Street. The remedy, he proposes, is to democratise the governance of the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank, in a move towards a broadly Keynesian globalisation. Some of his insights into such technical areas as capital market liberalisation offer useful detail.

For anybody on the Marxist left, none of this is anywhere near savage enough; although Stiglitz recognises many of the problems with market economies - the unchecked pollution, the failure in most countries to provide universal free healthcare or education, the increasing inequalities - he does not regard capitalism as, say, inherently exploitative or by nature imperialistic.

But then, perhaps he doesn't answer these indictments because he doesn't have to answer these indictments; socialism is not popular enough to command mass support, and can thus simply be factored out.

In one of the most interesting passages of the book, Stiglitz makes quite clear what is keeping the world's ruling elite awake at nights, and it is not the spectre of the revolutionary left or even the organised working class.

A section headed 'The most grievous mistakes: risking social and political turmoil' reveals a profound fear of an undifferentiated 'poor'; stop subsidising their food and fuel and they trash things, as Indonesia's Suharto found to his cost. Interesting choice of emphasis, no? Policies that might allow that sort of thing to get out of control constitute the IMF's worst possible blunder.

Other sections on the fate of the 'transition economies' had me reflecting on the standard Trotskyist argument - I used to push it myself - that 'proletarian property relations' are inherently superior to free markets.

Well, yes and no. Clearly, Russia in the 1990s suffered economic devastation unparalleled by any major economy in peactime; on the other hand, the Polish working class is clearly better off both economically and in terms of its civil rights than it was under Stalinism, and any balance sheet of China's shift away from central planning has to be broadly positive.

Given its subject matter, 'Globalization and its Discontents' is not a lightweight read. But this is intelligent and well-written Keynesianism in popular guise - a genre developed by Galbraith - with much that leftists need to take on board, if only because the arguments have been taken up by the mainstream of the very social movements many are now orienting towards.

I opened the first page of this volume on a bus in Dalston; immediately I was approached by a young black woman – perhaps the right age to be a student – who told me she had just purchased it and asked me what I thought about it. Too soon to say, I told her.

By the time the bus got to Liverpool Street, a City Boy was sitting next to me. I couldn’t help noticing his continued furtive glances at the cover. Perhaps it is finding a new circulation in investment bank land as well.

The obvious reason for the renewed interest is the credit crunch, of course. Parallels between the events of today and those of 79 years ago are commonplace. See here and here and here and here.

Essentially, opinion is divided between the ‘you ain’t seen nothing yet’ school – bourgeois commentators can sometimes be just as prone to catastrophic economic forecasting as the most deranged Trots – and those who point out that we are at least one year into turbulent times, and have yet to see anything more threatening to capitalism than a minor downturn.

A healthy slug of Galbraith would help both sides define their case more sharply. For my part, I cannot help but be struck by the parallels between Wall Street 1928 and Wall Street 2007.

In both time zones, plenty of ‘financial innovation’ was there for all to see. Then, as now, leverage, derivatives, endemic shorting and carry trades loomed large, even if they went by other names in the 1920s.

Even many of the actors are essentially the same concerns. Goldman Sachs was a major player and remains so now. So was Citibank, although it then traded as National City Bank.

Today’s Standard & Poors rating agency – which has gotten a shocking press in the financial pages for the allegedly slovenly way it has rated many derivatives issues – was then two separate companies, Standard and Poors. Both are namechecked.

And the 1920s equivalents of Al Greenspan and Ben Bernanke were as guilty of masterful inaction as their successors now, and their attempts at ‘moral suasion’ just as ineffective.

Moreover, the Great Crash developed in the same protracted manner as the credit crunch; there were worries of overheating months before the market plunged, and plenty of bear market rallies and dead cat bounces afterwards, too.

It’s worth noting that the markets even staged a substantial recovery in the months after October 1929, with continued decline only setting in from March 1930.

By June 1932, many blue chips had lost 90% of their value, and the main indices took a quarter of a century to recover. In short, if the aftermath of 2008 is on anything like the same scale, then a re-run will blight the entire remaining economic lives of many readers.

Galbraith was a Keynesian, of course, and sets out his explanations in those terms. Marxist economists, reading between the lines, would probably describe his analysis as pointing to a crisis of realisation resulting from disproportionality between output of capital goods and output of consumer goods.

Yet the technical stuff is kept to a minimum and should not deter the general reader. Indeed, I should add here that the writing style is a real treat. I’ve been reading political polemics for decades now, and this is among the best I have come across. There are aphorisms to treasure aplenty.

Naturally, it would be stupid to pick up this book and read straight off into the present day. It may be that the US ruling class has learned the lessons of the past and will do whatever it takes to prevent a rerun of the 1930s. But if events do take a similar turn, the insight and descriptive matter contained here will prove invaluable source material for everyone on the left, social democrat or Marxist alike.

Despite at least six or seven projects designed to build a new united socialist party over the last 13 years, the British left is now smaller, more socially isolated, more middle class in composition, more devoid of influence in the unions and the Labour Party, and generally more ideologically dazed and confused then at any previous point in my adult lifetime.

Meanwhile, the far right has combined its forces into a single principle organisation which claims to be several thousand strong. There is no reason to think it is lying, either; unlike some socialist groups, there is no evidence that it routinely inflates membership figures.

It has a cohesive project, centred on the need to secure legitimacy through electoral success, without compromising an avowed fascist purpose. This has secured it hundreds of thousands of votes, dozens of councillors and now a member of the Greater London Assembly.

The British National Party now has a real base in a number of communities, predominantly among the very social class the left regards as the main agent of social change.

Nigel Copsey’s timely book tells us how they have done it. Read it and weep. Then think about what might happen if we do not get our act together.

It should be said from the outset that this work is aimed at academics rather than activists, but don’t let that put you off. It is fairly accessible. I sometimes dread having to read academic books - especially those published by Palgrave Macmillan - because of their tedious prose. While Copsey isn’t a literary stylist manqué, he at least writes well enough to keep you awake.

I had previously read Richard Thurlow’s Fascism in Britain, which covers 1918-1985; Copsey’s book is the ideal follow up, offering a quick crash course on the Thurlow material, before taking up the story from the early 1980s launch of the BNP. That makes it the most up-to-date book on the market. This second edition came out earlier this year and takes in events up to last year.

I do have some problems with Copsey’s conceptual framework, which sees fascism as the revolutionary ideology of the right. I don’t think that this is true; the historical experience shows that fascism classically comes to power through constitutional means, when the ruling class needs street level forces capable of crushing working class militancy.

This is an important point; it extents to questions such as whether or not certain brands of reactionary Islamism can properly be dubbed Islamofascist, for instance.

Copsey also puts too much stress on the role of the media, especially the local press. That is a mistake, too. In my experience, local newspaper hacks pretty much report what is going on, as they see it.

If it is the case that Asian-on-white violence is an issue in some former mill towns, that debate has to be had out and the problem addressed. Suppressing discussion by diktat will only play into the far right’s hands.

Likewise, Copsey sometimes seems horrified to record that even condemnation by local clergy, the distribution of 20,000 antifascist broadsheets or ghost-written pleas by Tony Blair do not always put people off the BNP. Surely he must see how anything the establishment does can sometime plays into the hands of an outfit marketing itself as the premier anti-establishment vote.

The author’s basic thesis is indicated by the subtitle, ‘the British National Party and the quest for legitimacy’. The far right’s prospects, he believes, hinge on legitimacy at either local or national level. The worry has to be that the BNP is increasingly finding it.

He accepts – or at least he seems to; the formulations aren’t always as precise as they might be – that some European far right parties have genuinely evolved from fascist or neofascist roots towards non-fascist nationalist populism.

But his contention is that, for all Nick Griffin’s claims to be taking party down this very road, the BNP leader’s personal political formation is very much in the ‘political soldier’ tradition of the old National Front, as mediated through third positionism and Strasserism. Copsey is quite clear that the BNP are a threat to democracy.

Yet whatever criticisms I offer in this short review, Contemporary British Fascism is more than worth picking up for anyone with an interest in the subject. If it helps sections of the left to smell the coffee, so much the better.