All you can eat Buffett
Posted on Thursday 12 April, 2012
Filed Under Business, Economics, USA |
5 Comments
NOT many political fads to emanate from the US deserve to make an Atlantic crossing. But the principle of a so-called Buffett rule is something that the left this side of the pond should at least be talking about.
First enunciated in an op-ed piece in the New York Times last year, written by or perhaps ghosted for legendary investor Warren Buffett, the simple idea here is that millionaires should pay a minimum tax rate of 30%.
This week the call has embraced by Barack Obama, as part of his attempt to wrong foot his Republican rival in this year’s presidential race by depicting him as a creature of Wall Street rather than Main Street. Given Mitt Romney’s ‘I like firing people’ private equity background, this should not prove unduly difficult.
Some by-elections really do change politics
Posted on Monday 9 April, 2012
Filed Under Ireland, Politics, Respect |
49 Comments
IT IS not every day that Westminster witnesses a sensational by-election victory, driven by an unshakeably anti-imperialist appeal to a minority religious community in combination with an unfashionable socialist subtext. No wonder most of the pundits were nonplussed.
But when Fermanagh and South Tyrone chose Irish Republican Army hunger striker Bobby Sands as its MP back in 1981, and after his tragic death returned another IRA-backed candidate, Irish politics began to change.
Up until that point, Sinn Fein had not contested elections. But sensing that it was now possible to do so with success, it adopted the so-called ‘armalite and the ballot box’ strategy that marked its first step on the road towards the mainstream.
An organisation derided three decades ago as a ventriloquists dummy for a terrorist group is now the most popular party in Northern Ireland, at least in terms of its share of the vote at the last general election.
Our internet use is none of the state’s business
Posted on Wednesday 4 April, 2012
Filed Under Civil Liberties |
48 Comments
BRITAIN already has more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world, and a four million strong DNA database that contains details of thousands of UK residents who have committed no crime.
Should the state be granted its apparent desire to have access to every single phone call made, every last text message and email sent, and each website visited by anyone in Britain, it would be possessed of an arsenal of surveillance techniques that would have been the envy of the classic totalitarian regimes of the past.
The demands must be opposed, for the same reasons that similar demands made by the Labour government in 2008, during Jacqui Smith’s tenure at the Home Office.
Labour and the Falklands: what Foot got wrong
Posted on Monday 2 April, 2012
Filed Under International, Labour Party |
71 Comments
MARGARET Thatcher had no particular animus against the average Latin American military dictatorship. So long as the lideres maximales confined themselves to the workaday torture and execution of leftists and strict implementation of Chicago School economics, they could always count on her enthusiastic support.
So when Argentina’s ruling troika of Galtieri, Lami Dozo and Anaya ordered the occupation of the Falkland Islands 30 years ago today, it may be that Labour leader Michael Foot was expecting some sort of conciliatory stance on the part of the British government.
Certainly the rhetorical tone of his speech to an emergency recall session of parliament put many observers in mind of his days as a campaigning radical journalist of the late 1930s, when he distinguished himself by repeated attacks on the Tories who appeased Nazi Germany.
Bradford West: one off or turning point?
Posted on Friday 30 March, 2012
Filed Under Politics, Respect, The left |
222 Comments
I AM not a supporter of George Galloway. But it would be churlish for even an avowed political opponent not to congratulate him on his by-election success, the sheer scale of which massively exceeded anything that even his own fan base were expecting 24 hours beforehand.
What made the win even more astonishing is the way that it was secured from a standing start. Just three weeks ago the Respect Party existed on paper only, with no-one expecting ever to emerge again.
Already the supporters of the losing candidates are attempting to come up with reasons for the defeat. Some are saying that Bradford West’s Tories voted tactically for Galloway, for instance.
But it is already apparent that this time round, many of the excuses Labour put forward in Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005 do not apply. While Respect obviously played on Galloway’s elective affinity with Muslim struggles, this time it was Labour that attempted to mobilise bloc votes through the city’s mosques and Pakistani community networks.
Shut up and vote for Ken
Posted on Thursday 29 March, 2012
Filed Under Labour Left, Labour Party |
70 Comments
THERE is a ‘vote Ken Livingstone’ poster in my bedroom window. And I’ve even booked the week of the London elections off work, with the express intention of campaigning for him.
On the other hand, I’ve been putting off repainting my flat for some time now, and the more Labour’s candidate for City Hall opens his mouth, the more I feel like spending that time getting busy with the brushes and rollers instead.
Given that I position myself on the Labour left, and Livingstone is usually upheld as a figurehead of precisely that strand of politics, this may surprise some readers.
Yet several of his recent remarks should give socialists reason to consider the extent of their endorsement.
Bradford West: Respect redux?
Posted on Wednesday 28 March, 2012
Filed Under Politics, Respect, The left |
45 Comments
ANYTHING other than a win for Imran Hussain in tomorrow’s Bradford West by-election would be astonishing. After all, the seat has consistently returned Labour MPs since 1974, and with the party currently well ahead in the national opinion polls, there is no real reason to expect any other outcome.
Much of the interest – for outside observers, anyway – will come from watching the performance of former MP George Galloway, who has effectively relaunched his Respect party especially for the occasion.
Certainly his supporters are upbeat. A sympathetic commenter at Britain’s most widely-read leftwing blog insists: ‘News coming out of Bradford is that George’s campaign has really caught fire and has managed to recapture the buzz of his campaign for election in Tower Hamlets back in 2005.’
Even the Guardian is suggesting that ‘Labour should be a little worried’ about the intervention of a man apparently viewed as ‘a superstar’ by many young Asians.
News International upholds probity? So be it
Posted on Monday 26 March, 2012
Filed Under Conservative Party, Politics |
13 Comments
THE righteous, so the rabbinical maxim has it, have their work done for them. After yesterday’s Sunday Times so perfectly skewered the venality of the Conservative Party, all the average lefty need do is sit back with a big wide smirk on his or her face.
Some commentators are suggesting that this operation was carefully planned, by way of a reprisal from the Rupert Murdoch camp for the Leveson Inquiry. The theory is entirely plausible, and if that is indeed the case, the irony that probity is here being upheld by News International should be apparent to all.
Because if there is one businessman who must certainly does not need to stump up a quarter of a million quid for a meal with senior politicians, it is Mr Murdoch. No doubt he is contemptuous of the small fry forced to reach for their chequebook.
You know what some people call us
Posted on Friday 23 March, 2012
Filed Under Coalition, Conservative Party, The right |
14 Comments
‘YOU know what some people call us,’ Theresa May famously asked the Conservative Party conference four years ago. Many readers will be tempted to supply their own punchline to that point.
But the correct answer, according to Ms May, was ‘the nasty party’. The Tories, she insisted were unrepentant, narrowly based, just plain unattractive. Her words, not mine.
David Cameron was supposed to be the antidote to all of that. The assertion that his mission was ‘detoxify the Tory brand’ rapidly became something of a cliché.
Mohammed Merah: French politicians exploit Muslim alienation
Posted on Thursday 22 March, 2012
Filed Under International, Religion |
123 Comments
THANKS to Eurostar, Paris is now a city that affluent Londoners can head to for a night out. In a space of little more than 24 hours earlier this week, I squeezed in Shemekia Copeland’s stunning live blues show at New Morning jazz club, a blow-out meal at an historic brasserie and a spot of sightseeing, and am now safely back at my desk.
Yet I was aware from start to finish that the nation’s attention was not on its capital. The seven recent murders in and around Toulouse and the subsequent siege that has ended with the death of Mohammed Merah predictably focused everyone’s attention on continuing racial tensions on the other side of the Channel.
The debate over this sequence of events has polarised along predictable lines. Some far left publications instantly attributed the killings to fascists and seemingly dismissed the possibility that it could be the work of an Islamist.
Meanwhile, one of Britain’s most widely-read political blogs slated a well-known activist for her insistence that Merah’s acts were generated by grievances and injustices. All of these stances are entirely predictable.
