Author Archives: Sean Thompson

Now it begins

The election of Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party yesterday was possibly the most important political event during my lifetime – certainly in terms of British politics. For the left, everything has changed; old analyses have proved wanting, old … Continue reading

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Kafka is writing again – this time it comes via email

The paranoia of Labour’s apparatchiks, both at HQ and in local Labour Parties, seems to be growing by the day in the face of what looks like an almost certain Corbyn victory. The party has announced  that it has purged, … Continue reading

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Setting out on a new voyage

Following the final deadline to sign up as a member or supporter of the Labour Party in order to vote in the leadership election, the Labour Party has announced that 610,753 people are eligible to vote. Labour had roughly 200,000 members … Continue reading

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Newspeak – a glossary for our times

Many years ago, the journalist Claude Cockburn suggested that widely used journalists’ cliches should be translated to enable us to understand what they really meant. For example, he pointed out that the phrase ‘the country as a whole’ (as in … Continue reading

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Gramsci, snooker and continental drift

 The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. As the Bard of Essex Ian Dury so cogently put it “There … Continue reading

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The Gas Men cometh

While there may be some considerable doubt about whether Goebbels was, as the ditty claims, deficient in the testicular department (he had six children, after all), there is no doubt at all that he was a master of the black … Continue reading

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The Captain finds a new berth

A few days ago I took part in the Founding Conference of a new party, Left Unity. The make-up of the conference was broadly what I was expecting; mainly men, largely over forty, mostly veterans of at least one of … Continue reading

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Why workers must work harder

I’ve written before about my huge admiration for Leon Rosselson, but I’m not apologising for mentioning him again. This is one of his poems from the eighties, entitled ‘Why workers must work harder, produce more and ask for less’. Quite. … Continue reading

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Political architecture, (or draw the blueprints before arguing about the furniture fabric)

My daughter is planning to build her own house in the next year or two – an exciting, if somewhat daunting prospect. However, when confronted by an empty piece of open ground and a blank sheet of paper, she’s found … Continue reading

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An open letter to the members of Green Left

Comrades, An event in Manchester last month served to demonstrate to me the limitations of the politics of the Green Party. It was on the TUC demonstration in support of the NHS; a huge, cheerful and largely working class march, … Continue reading

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