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Respect: two, three, many Bradford Wests?
I AM unsure what punishment sharia law provides for honey glazing married ladies. But I hope Lee Jasper checked this point out before accepting the Respect nomination for the Croydon North by-election...
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Australia’s UKIP: a brief history of One Nation
NOT the least unfortunate precedent for Ed Miliband’s current attempt to rebrand Labour is the sorry saga of a 1990s wingnut populist outfit Down Under that also went by the moniker of One Nation. Its...
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Two Milibands on the monarchy
THE late Ralph Miliband made his name as a Marxist theoretician through detailed elaboration of the proposition that the Labour Party can do absolutely nothing for the working class. His two boys, or...
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Book review: ‘Bash the Rich’ by Ian Bone
WHEN I clocked this paperback in the remainders section of the Economists’ Bookshop, I did briefly consider nicking it. That, after all, is surely what the author would have done in my shoes. But such...
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From Section 28 to gay marriage: the Tories and homosexuality
ON ONE level, David Cameron’s decision to legislate for equal marriage is a measure of just how far the Conservative Party has come since the 1980s. Only a quarter of a century ago, it was still...
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Statement of SWP Democratic Opposition
Four members of the Socialist Workers’ Party have been expelled in the run up the that organisation’s conference next month, for reasons detailed here. Some of their co-thinkers have responded by...
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Cult comes a cropper: an article by Duncan Hallas
BACK in 1985, the Workers’ Revolutionary Party fragmented eight or nine ways following revelations that its main leader, Gerry Healy, had seriously sexually abused women comrades. Among those on the...
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Book review: ‘Maonomics’ by Loretta Napoleoni
BACK in the 1930s, a certain breed of starry-eyed European leftist was eager to make the case that the USSR somehow represented ‘a new civilisation’. Proof of the superiority of Stalin’s economic...
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I predict a riot … or not
BRITONS don’t riot, my friend Nick Cohen famously told the readers of his Observer column a couple of years back. Yet even as the first copies of the paper were hitting the newsstands outside Kings’...
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SWP crisis: open thread
THE ‘Comrade Delta’ rape allegations and the subsequent fallout have dominated internet discussions on the far left this week, and how now surfaced in the mainstream media, with this report in the...
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Doctors without qualifications: how Milton Friedman inspired coalition NHS...
WHEN you trust someone to wield a scalpel on the most sensitive parts of your anatomy – and such, dear reader, was my painful lot some 18 months ago - you cross your fingers and hope they are a...
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Do we really need to resuscitate the Convention of the Left? Reply to Owen...
DOES the name ‘Convention of the Left’ mean anything to you? Don’t worry, you are not alone; 99% of the population will never have heard of it, and even those for whom the name rings a bell may need...
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Book review: ‘Standing for Something’ by Mark Seddon
ON THE evidence of this autobiography, Mark Seddon is very much still the truly lovely bloke he was when we worked together on the Labour newspaper Tribune back in the mid-1990s. The smutty schoolboy...
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Gramsci: the bits Gove left out
I ONCE drew attention to a passage from a book by Malcolm X, in which the legendary African-American activist demanded black community control of black educational institutions, and jokingly suggested...
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Eastleigh by-election: open thread
EASTLEIGH has never been held by Labour since its inception as a parliamentary constituency in 1955, and the last general election saw its share of the poll slump from over 20% to under 10%. While it...
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Exonerating Amritsar: a reply to Andrew Roberts
THE brutal actions of Germany’s SS in a Czech mining village one day in 1942 have rightly entered the history books as an exemplar of collective punishment, enacted largely to invoke mass terror among...
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Book review: ‘Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ by Richard Seymour
THE target is a famous journalist who ranked among the foremost English language polemicists of his era; the assailant is something of a lesser luminary, sadly afflicted with a prose style that comes...
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Don’t exaggerate the UKIP threat
BRITISH parliamentary contests are described as first past the post for a reason, and the reason is that coming second does not get you a seat at Westminster. Yet somehow UKIP is basking in a...
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A brief history of Victorian welfare reform
BACK in the 1830s, the Tories and the forerunners of the Liberal Democrats were of one mind concerning the need for sweeping reform of Britain’s horrendously expensive welfare provision. Not only did...
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Bedroom tax: Labour should follow SNP lead
BRITAIN is about to witness the first co-ordinated attempt by multiple local authorities to obstruct a Westminster edict in almost three decades. Good news, but don’t dust off those ‘defiance not...
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