How deep the irony that invocation of Aneurin Bevan is all too often little more than a gesture of contentless radicalism, much in the manner of a faded Che Guevara poster ironically adorning the walls of an undergraduate hipster’s bedsit. To this day, Neil Kinnock’s curious penchant for upholding a one-time militant miners’ strike leader […]
The banana republic mentality of the Labour NEC
Jul 18th, 2016 by David Osland.When was the last time a mass social democratic party anywhere in the world was formally forbidden to meet? The best answer I can come up with is 1973, in the wake of the military takeover in Chile. Yet such is the surreal situation in which the Labour Party now finds itself. This, not as […]
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The principles of Eaglespeak
Jul 13th, 2016 by David Osland.“Eaglespeak was the official language of the Parliamentary Labour Party and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 2016 there was not as yet anyone who used Eaglespeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or in writing. The leading articles in the Times […]
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The 18th Brumaire of Hilary Benn
Jul 12th, 2016 by David Osland.If only he hadn’t died a few years back, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the late Soviet general Gennady Yanayev had been acting as strategy consultant to Hilary Benn and his mates since last weekend. In case you’ve forgotten the name, or perhaps weren’t even born 25 years ago, this is famously the guy […]
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Jo Cox murder: the omnipresent danger of fascism
Jun 20th, 2016 by David Osland.He says his name is death to traitors, freedom for Britain. But Tommy Mair might as well have called himself a ticking time bomb, and the obvious question is why he exploded now. The alleged murderer of Labour MP Jo Cox has a track record of mental health problems. But despite the flood of instant […]
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Why Blair is the guy whose face is on the placard
Jun 9th, 2016 by David Osland.Richard Nixon famously told a press conference that he was ‘not a crook’. And in the sense that the late US president was never found guilty of anything whatsoever, the statement is factually incontestable. Likewise, Tony Blair is not a war criminal, even though contention to the contrary is a longstanding commonplace among anti-war campaigners, […]
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Porn, fags and Big Macs: Labour and the ethics of business donations
Apr 22nd, 2016 by David Osland.Back in 2002, New Labour accepted a £100,000 donation from Daily Express proprietor Richard Desmond, a man who made his original fortune from printing pornographic publications under such lurid titles as The Very Best of Mega Boobs and – hey, let’s not be squeamish, because Blair certainly wasn’t – Spunk Loving Sluts. Questioned on the issue, […]
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The ridiculous red-baiting of Sadiq Khan
Apr 14th, 2016 by David Osland.The news that London Labour activists are working their butts off to secure a victory for Labour’s candidate in the London mayoral elections, on the grounds that Labour electoral success is good news for the leader of the Labour Party, is hardly the stuff of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalism. Yet such is the substance of a […]
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Intense relaxation: John McTernan and the freedom to not pay tax
Apr 7th, 2016 by David Osland.Peter Mandelson famously declared himself “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich, as long as they pay their taxes”. His successors now appear intensely relaxed about the wealthy not paying their taxes at all. Senior Blairite John McTernan has responded to last weekend’s Panama Papers revelations by reassuring Telegraph readers that “tax avoidance is an expression of […]
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Nasty signalling over Port Talbot
Apr 1st, 2016 by David Osland.There is currently no small vogue among polemicists of right-wing bent to accuse lefties of something they call ‘virtue signalling‘. So please allow me to introduce a parallel neologism. Many of the ugly responses from free market ideologues to the crisis now destroying the British steel industry are clear-cut examples of nasty signalling, designed to […]
