Category Archives: Uncategorized

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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Reunited at last

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Margaret Thatcher dies

Good.

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William Morris on work

“Worthy work carries with it the hope of pleasure in rest, the hope of the pleasure in our using what it makes, and the hope of pleasure in our daily creative skill. All other work but this is worthless; it … Continue reading

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The SWP and the IS tradition

One of the recurring themes of the SWP leadership’s current furious efforts to repel the criticisms of an increasing number of its members is the need to ‘defend our tradition’, or ‘defend the IS tradition’. It’s worth taking a look … Continue reading

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Shock news from the trenches

There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning. Warren Buffet

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