Youth unemployment: Young Labour should make its voice heard
WHEN I was a member of the Labour Party Young Socialists, we prided ourselves on being as much of a pain in the arse to the adult party as was humanly possible. In those rare moments when we were not heatedly discussing finer points of the Transitional Programme and passing resolutions demanding the nationalisation of the [...]
PASOK, PSOE: the suicide of social democracy
AFTER three decades during which the centre left first adapted to neoliberalism, and then adopted it wholesale, it is sometimes difficult to establish what exactly social democracy stands for these days. All of the major European parties that occupy this political space initially came into being to articulate working class demands, and were nominally committed [...]
Tribune: the real is the rational
I WAS news editor at Tribune between 1992 and 1995, and it lived a hand to mouth existence even then. At a time when almost every other publication in Britain had switched to what journalists of the period called ‘the new technology’, I suddenly found myself thrown back into the era of manual typewriters. The [...]
Tony Blair: PR man for Kazakhstan
NURSULTAN Nazarbayev is clearly an extremely popular guy. Why, only last April, he secured 95% of the votes in Kazakhstan’s presidential elections. And just to underline how much his people love him, the name of the party which holds every single seat in the country’s parliament loosely translates as ‘Ray of Light of the Fatherland’, [...]
Ed Miliband speech: predators, producers and the proletariat
I CANNOT remember the last time I was wildly impressed by a leader’s set piece speech to a party conference. These days such perorations are designedly ephemeral affairs, calculated to grab the day’s headlines rather than define any lasting vision. The words delivered by Ed Miliband yesterday are no exception, and in case, have generated [...]
Refounding Labour: political homeopathy
INTERESTINGLY enough, Peter Hain is one of the few people with credibility in public life openly to champion homeopathy. So to his way of thinking, it presumably follows that by diluting the influence of unions in the Labour Party, Refounding Labour will ultimately make them that much stronger. The only snag is that the particular [...]
Is it OK to hate News International again?
BACK in the late 1980s, it was official Labour policy for MPs to refuse interviews with News International publications. Not that ambitious young politicians, such as home affairs spokesperson Tony Blair, took any notice of the ban whatsoever, you understand. But it’s the thought that counts, right? Now that the full ugly reality of the [...]
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 [...]
So what is Labour’s alternative to austerity?
OK, IT’S only an opinion poll, and just like the 73 bus, there will be another one along in a few minutes. But a ComRes survey for the Independent published today finds that Labour has lost its lead over the Tories, with the two main parties neck and neck on 37%. That compares with a [...]
