The target is a famous journalist who ranked among the foremost English language polemicists of his era; the assailant is something of a lesser luminary, sadly afflicted with a prose style that comes across like a deliberate parody of an obscure 1970s French structural-functionalist political sociology text. On the literary level, I guess, Richard Seymour’s […]
Book review: ‘Unhitched: the Trial of Christopher Hitchens’ by Richard Seymour
Feb 27th, 2013 by David Osler.
The massacre that “saved thousands of lives” – a response
Feb 25th, 2013 by David Osler.The brutal actions of Germany’s SS in a Czech mining village one day in 1942 have rightly entered the history books as an exemplar of collective punishment, enacted largely to invoke mass terror among the population of an occupied country. In deliberate planned revenge for the earlier assassination of a senior German official, ten truck […]
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Gramsci: the bits Gove left out
Feb 7th, 2013 by David Osler.I once drew attention to a passage from a book by Malcolm X, in which the legendary African-American activist demanded black community control of black educational institutions, and jokingly suggested that Michael Gove could use the reference when next speaking in support of free schools. Now the Tory education secretary has gone one step further, and […]
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Doctors without qualifications: how Milton Friedman inspired coalition NHS reforms
Jan 18th, 2013 by David Osler.When you trust someone to wield a scalpel on the most sensitive parts of your anatomy – and such, dear reader, was my painful lot some 18 months ago – you cross your fingers and hope they are a properly trained surgeon. But according to the free market right, regressive attitudes like that hold back […]
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I predict a riot…or not
Jan 14th, 2013 by David Osler.BRITONS don’t riot, my friend Nick Cohen famously told the readers of his Observer column a couple of years back. Yet even as the first copies of the paper were hitting the newsstands outside Kings’ Cross, buses were being overturned in Tottenham. Within days, the disturbances had gone nationwide.
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Book review: ‘Maonomics’ by Loretta Napoleoni
Jan 7th, 2013 by David Osler.BACK in the 1930s, a certain breed of starry-eyed European leftist was eager to make the case that the USSR somehow represented ‘a new civilisation’. Proof of the superiority of Stalin’s economic policies, they insisted, was to be found in continued expansion, even at a time when western capitalism was deeply mired in depression. The […]
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From Section 28 to gay marriage: the Tories and homosexuality
Dec 17th, 2012 by David Osler.On one level, David Cameron’s decision to legislate for equal marriage is a measure of just how far the Conservative Party has come since the 1980s. Only a quarter of a century ago, it was still acceptable for a Tory local government leader to respond to the arrival of AIDS with a call for ‘90% […]
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Book review: ‘Bash the Rich’ by Ian Bone
Dec 10th, 2012 by David Osler.WHEN I clocked this paperback in the remainders section of the Economists’ Bookshop, I did briefly consider nicking it. That, after all, is surely what the author would have done in my shoes. But such is my deeply unanarchist internalisation of bourgeois property norms that I shelled out the £2.99 asking price anyway, and was […]
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Two Milibands, One Nation, One Monarchy
Dec 4th, 2012 by David Osler.The late Ralph Miliband made his name as a Marxist theoretician through detailed elaboration of the proposition that the Labour Party can do absolutely nothing for the working class. His two boys, or so the lefty joke has it, have very loyally done their best to prove the old man right. Now it looks as […]
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Australia’s UKIP and the many incarnations of ‘One Nation’
Dec 1st, 2012 by David Osler.Not the least unfortunate precedent for Ed Miliband’s current attempt to rebrand Labour is the sorry saga of a 1990s wingnut populist outfit that also went by the moniker of One Nation. Its leader, a bigot called Pauline Hanson, occupied what was once a safe Labor seat during her thankfully brief spell in the Australian […]
