David Cameron’s incompetent campaign against Jean-Claude Juncker has exposed his lack of bargaining power within Europe, says Eddie Ford Just as the Corn Laws haunted the Conservative Party throughout the 19th century, Europe acts as a running sore for the modern-day Tories. Desperate to steal the clothes of the UK Independence Party and appease the Eurosceptics ...
According to the secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, ‘one of the under-appreciated tragedies of our time has been the sundering of our society from its past’1. Unfortunately, he was not referring to the tendency for subjects like politics and economics to be taught in a manner completely torn from all historical context, but ...
On Sunday October 2 over 35,000 workers, students, pensioners and anti-cuts campaigners marched outside the Conservative Party conference. This is a sizeable increase from the 7,000 demonstrators at last year’s conference, underlining the growing, yet still sluggish, moves to resist the austerity measures. The conference itself was ringed by steel walls, barricades and hundreds of ...
As I write, commentary on the ongoing Conservative Party conference is focused not on David Cameron’s ‘can-do optimism’, not on the news that effectively the wheels have fallen off George Osborne’s economic strategy, with the estimate for UK economic growth over April-June cut to 0.1%, and not even on the impending euro zone catastrophe. No, ...
Michael Copestake discusses AC Grayling's New College of the Humanities Did he know what he was in for? This is the first question that springs to mind at the sight of the do-gooding liberal philosophy professor, AC Grayling, formerly of Birkbeck College, judging by the uproar and opprobrium that his plans for a ...
Harley Filben reviews Sean Birchall's 'Beating the fascists: The untold story of Anti-Fascist Action' Freedom Press, London 2010, pp413, £15 (first published in the Weekly Worker) This book appears at an interesting time, given its subject matter. The historical narrative it lays out - the rise of militant anti-fascism from the ...
With Tory confusion on the economy, the general election looks to be very close, writes James Turley Alastair Darling’s budget was in effect the opening shot in Labour’s election campaign and, given the global economic crisis, he made a fair fist of it. As everyone knows, he had to promise financial responsibility, while offering a few ...
The Tories are showing themselves up as the party of corruption, says James Turley Michael Ashcroft, the Tory peer and deputy chairman, is one of a handful in the House of Lords who has non-domiciled tax status - that is, for tax purposes he is not registered as resident in Britain. Instead, his notional home is ...
Mike Macnair explains why the CPGB recommended a Labour vote on June 4 The political dynamics of the scandal over MPs’ expenses claims are becoming clearer. The dominant dynamic of hatred for the corruption of the parties and MPs is towards a ‘democratic’ but rightwing populism which aims to produce an apolitical politics, a politics without ...
Carey Davies reports on the Conservative ‘remedies’ for a ‘broken society’ The Tories’ response to the departure of Tony Blair and the efforts of the Brown government to re-christen the New Labour project - not to mention ...