Latest post on Left Futures

We’re all Ralph Miliband now

Ralph Miliband T-ShirtThe treatment of Ralph Miliband by the Daily Mail has appalled the right-thinking all and sundry – even the likes of Michael Heseltine and Zac Goldsmith. Yet it is reassuringly pleasing to read reports that sales of Ralph’s books have soared since the Mail published that fateful essay last Saturday. And as a tribute to one of this country’s leading left thinkers, Philosophy Football has taken a quote from Ralph’s final book Socialism for a Sceptical Age, and turned it into a symbol of T-shirted dissent.

In a modern version of the ‘I am Spartacus!’ legend, we can wear Ralph’s words in opposition to the hatred of the Daily Mail. Ralph argued that “Socialism involves a process of striving to advance the goals that define it.” Obvious, you might think, but certainly not to today’s political establishment! So now we can all wear these words proudly.

As Mehdi Hasan rather brilliantly described this sorry episode as on Thursday night’s Question Time: “Let’s have the debate about who hates Britain more. It isn’t a dead Jewish refugee from Belgium who served in the Royal Navy, it’s the immigrant-bashing, woman-hating, Muslim-smearing, NHS-undermining, gay-baiting Daily Mail.”

Or, if you prefer, just ask yourselves the following: why take lessons in patriotism from a paper that headlined “Hurrah for the Blackshirts” and championed the appeasement of Hitler?

SPECIAL £5 OFF until close of Monday. JUST £17.99, usual price £22.99. Sizes S-XXL. Available from Philosophy Football.

518ZvOWDpxL._PLUS! To accompany the shirt, you can buy for just £9.99 (usual price £18.95),  Michael Newman’s superb biography Ralph Miliband and the Politics of the New Left. This, after all, was where the Daily Heil ripped their quotes from, stripping out every bit of context! Read it and learn why Ralph Miliband was such a towering intellectual influence on the British New Left, refreshing ideas that had nothing to do with either hating Britain, or admiring Stalinism! Again, rather pleasing that in the first couple of hours since the T-shirt plus biography was launched, response has been so heavy a rapid reprint of the book has had to be ordered!

Comments are closed.

© 2024 Left Futures | Powered by WordPress | theme originated from PrimePress by Ravi Varma