A very British M-15
MARKETING consultants nowadays offer a more incisive guide to contemporary radicalism then leftist theoreticians of the more traditional variety, and the prediction seems to be that we will soon see a lot more of the youth protests now sweeping Spain and other European countries. Gerald Celente, seemingly something of a celebrity in the US trend forecasting [...]
Blue Labour: more Old Labour than it thinks
I HAVE not been able to track down the origin of the slogan ‘family, faith and flag’. But it does have the ominous ring of a motto that could have been advanced by an obscure Croatian proto-fascist splinter group in the 1930s. Given Blue Labour’s patently puerile desire to secure column inches by the adoption of a [...]
The need for a reality-based left
CRITICS often accuse revolutionary socialists of being ‘out of touch with reality’. Usually, what they mean is something like well to the left of Brendan Barber’. But let me offer a sobering thought to anybody who locates themselves in the Marxist political tradition: the claim isn’t always wrong, is it? Some of the more celebrated idiocies [...]
The 2010 generation
THE Black Bull pub on Whitechapel High Street was always a pretty down at heel boozer, standing out as noticeably grubby even in the days when most pubs in that area fairly merited that description. Unsurprisingly, it was turned into an Indian restaurant several years ago, and that’s no great loss to East End drinkers. But [...]
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. [...]
How to enforce democratic centralism, Japanese style
SOME far left groups operate an ‘easy come, easy go’ membership policy, with resignations virtually unnoticed. Others take matters much more seriously, with those who depart expected to churn out sophisticated 10,000-word Marxist analyses of their political differences by way of justification. But things were obviously that bit more disciplined in Japanese armed struggle Maoist [...]
The right to sell socialist newspapers
SOMETIMES you can hardly move outside central London tube stations in the rush hour, thanks to the ubiquitous presence of people dishing out freesheet newspapers. So it is worrying to read on the Revolutionary Communist Group website that one of its supporters in Glasgow is facing unspecified criminal charges for selling that organisation’s publication Fight [...]
Toppling the government? Sorry Vince, that’s the SWP’s job
VINCE Cable was branded a ‘Marxist’ after taking a tokenistic pop at the City in his last Lib Dem conference speech, and it seems this entirely unwarranted praise has gone to his head. Now he thinks he can bring the government down. No Winter Palaces will require storming in this instance, though. It will be [...]
Thrashing royal Rollers: some public relations tips
IT IS entirely possible that the people who smashed up the royal Rolls Royce last night do not have McCann Erickson, Burson-Marsteller or Weber Shandwick on a retainer, and are largely making up their public relations strategy as they go along. And Daily Telegraph commentator Damian Thompson is clearly a man who can spot rank [...]
The left: significant enough to witch-hunt again
ANYBODY out there remember the Dreadful Deirdre affair? That was the label the tabloid press managed to stick on the hapless Deirdre Wood, Labour candidate at the 1987 Greenwich by-election. Ms Wood held to identikit leftie positions of the period on issues such as feminism, gay rights and anti-racism. These days such views would be [...]
