When the most constructive thing you can find to say about a country facing the real possibility of a military coup is to brand Seumas Milne the moral equivalent of Gary Glitter, you need to consider whether you ought to be commenting on international politics in the first place.
Yet such was the basic premise of Nick Cohen’s column in The Observer this Sunday, which opens with the contention that supporters of the Venezuelan government are “no different” to sex tourists. Continue reading
Such is the magnitude of the event that the definitive account of the financial collapse of September 2008 and its consequences has surely yet to be written.
I do not mean by stating that to deride numerous worthwhile attempts at a first draft of history. Journalistic efforts such as Paul Mason’s Meltdown, Elliott and Atkinson’s The Gods That Failed and Gillian Tett’s Fool’s Gold all do a reasonable job in explaining approximately what went wrong.
There are even works by economists, such as Crisis Economics by Roubini and Mihm and Keynes: the Return of the Master by Robert Skidelsky that are accessible for those without a background in the dismal science. Continue reading
It’s something of a love that dare not speak its name. But Powellism has remained a major subtext on the British right for something like half a century, with the rise of UKIP marking only the latest incarnation of this ongoing infatuation.
It may seem a bit of a stretch to compare a reactionary intellectual such as Powell, with an organised base that extended only to a few hundred in the Powellight Association, to the leader of a 26,000-strong party, who so effectively adopts an ordinary-bloke-down-the-boozer persona. Continue reading
Margaret Thatcher stands in the same relationship to the last five leaders of the Conservative Party as James T Kirk does to subsequent captains of USS Enterprise; they represent ideal types against which the fan base can haughtily dismiss other holders of the same job title as irredeemably insipid.
So powerfully does she dominate the mindset of the grassroots right, Tory and UKIP supporters alike, that they will dismiss the claim she was actually anything but a conservative in the ideological sense as simply preposterous. Most of the left, too, see Thatcher as the very yardstick by which to measure the creed. Continue reading
If A Trot paper of the type I used to sell in the 1980s had accused Margaret Thatcher of ‘bourgeois triumphalism’, it would have been laughed off the pitch for resort to boilerplate cliché of the worst kind.
But the formulation was famously first levelled by traditionalist Tory Peregrine Worsthorne in the pages of the Sunday Telegraph, then even more than now a Conservative house organ, and must have hit home all the harder for it.
‘Why does he talk about boo-jhwa?’ she famously retorted: Continue reading
