I am unsure what punishment sharia law provides for honey glazing married ladies. But I hope Lee Jasper checked this point out before accepting the Respect nomination for the Croydon North by-election this week, if only for his own safety. Meanwhile, the redoubtable Yvonne Ridley is running on the same ticket in Rotherham, and from […]
Obama could yet make New Labour’s mistake
Nov 19th, 2012 by David Osler.MOST liberal post-mortems of the US presidential contest have been pretty upbeat; many comfortingly assert that the Republicans can never win again. The GOP is said to be irretrievably out of sync with the new America of openly lesbian senators, women who know their bodies cannot shut down rape pregnancies, and ever-increasing numbers of Latinos […]
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The class politics of CLASS
Nov 8th, 2012 by David Osler.After decades in which the very word ‘class’ has been virtually unmentionable in polite Labour Party circles, the symbolism behind the acronym that arises from launching a body under the name of the Centre for Labour and Social Studies is entirely obvious. Even some of those sympathetic to its birth argue privately that the title […]
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Just how left wing is Sinn Féin?
Nov 5th, 2012 by David Osler.There is a political party in the United Kingdom – and I use the geographical expression advisedly – content to serve as junior partner in a rightwing-dominated coalition committed to austerity, reductions in public spending, privatisation, the PFI and tax cuts for business. And no, I am not talking about the Liberal Democrats. Unfortunately, such […]
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ANC, Sinn Fein: when radicals move right
Oct 29th, 2012 by David Osler.There was a time when the African National Congress and Sinn Féin were bruited as progressive or even revolutionary forces by the bulk of the left, and equally vehemently repudiated as repugnant men of violence by most of the right. Thirty years ago, our side used to stage sit-down protests outside South Africa House and […]
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Scotland: at least Labour could oppose independence independently
Oct 19th, 2012 by David Osler.In a part of Britain in which the population still gets overly excited about the ideological alignments of its football clubs, the British flag is not just a neutral patriotic symbol. Thirteen-year-old Lee Heron was earlier this year sent home from his high school in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, for wearing a Union Jack T-shirt his mum […]
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Owen Jones and the prospects for neo-Bennism
Oct 12th, 2012 by David Osler.The Daily Express was once the largest circulation newspaper in the world, Frederick Forsyth was once this country’s best-selling novelist, and Labour leftism was once a force that could not ignored. All of these statements, dear younger reader, are astounding but true. So I was highly amused to see that the website of the has-been […]
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Labour should prioritise unions over business
Sep 30th, 2012 by David Osler.There are 400 ‘business representatives’ at the Labour Party conference this week, to highlight an interesting choice of words found in a recent Financial Times report. I am kind of hoping that the phrase is an unnecessarily imprecise synonym for ‘exhibitors’. But if the rules have been changed while I wasn’t looking and the Confederation of […]
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Book review: ‘Nick Clegg: the biography’ by Chris Bowers
Sep 26th, 2012 by David Osler.UNDER Charles Kennedy, the Liberal Democrats stood against the Iraq war, did not want a replacement for Trident, opposed tuition fees, and favoured a 50p tax band for Britain’s highest earners. I was not a Labour Party member in 2005, and while socialist principle precluded me from even considering support for a party with no […]
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Ed Miliband: the impossibility of reinventing revisionism
Sep 16th, 2012 by David Osler.Listening to Labour leaders espouse whatever intellectual fad is currently doing the rounds on the other side of the Atlantic is nothing new for those of us who follow these things. The odds are that Ed Miliband’s advocacy of predistribution will be no longer lasting than Blair’s embrace of communitarianism or Brown’s support for progressive […]
