The years during which Mandelson and Blair had such influence over the
party also saw a steady decline both in the number of active Labour party
members and the quality of those rising through its ranks. A cursory assessment
of the calibre of Starmer’s Cabinet – many of them parachuted into safe seats
by factional chicanery – makes that abundantly clear.
John Booth
How Peter Mandelson degraded Labour
9/11 attracts new mainstream critics
In the face of the dark horrors fed to us daily from the Middle East and Ukraine one risks being deemed Pollyanna-ish to detect any comforting points of light. Who can draw much consolation when a UK Labour Government proscribes a direct-action pro-Palestine group as terrorists in the same week that its staunchly uncritical Parliamentarians celebrate the direct action of the Suffragettes? But...
Daring, Defiant and Daft
“His judgement was questioned repeatedly, he suffered numerous setbacks and he made important enemies among those in power. Yet somehow his indomitable spirit kept seeing him return.”
Vassal State: How America Runs Britain
“If she were alive today, Thatcher would be shocked by how much of the economy is US-owned and how servile the UK government has become, yet it was she who made it all possible through her strong advocacy of privatisations that were blind to the nationality of the buyers, and her general non-interventionist stance.”
Arnhem: Heroes and scapegoats
“To add insult to injury, there was a rumour going round that despite risking our lives we were now being criticised by the British, and that attempts were being made to turn Sosabowski and the Polish Brigade into the scapegoats for failure of the operation to achieve all its goals.”
Grenfell and 9/11: A Tale of Four Towers
Still standing: Grenfell Tower a week after the inferno killed 72 of its London residents in June 2017The images of Grenfell Tower we saw when the Inquiry chairman recently published his coruscating report into the tragic fate of its residents prompt serious questions as we remember what happened when three much bigger World Trade Center (WTC) buildings in New York City disintegrated in seconds...
Diaries and Diarists
“The wretched of the earth are no longer remote, shadowy figures occasionally glimpsed in some TV documentary or in the bottom half of a new bulletin. They are here, in Europe, battering at our gates.”
Words and deeds
Is this a man whose warnings about polarisation, populism and post-truth politics can be taken remotely seriously? A phrase from my youth came back to me on reading But What I Can Do?: “How can we hear what you’re saying when what you have done is deafening me?”
Levelling the pitch?
I have played on far more fields that aren’t level than ones that are. What matters is not the lie of the land, but the tea interval and the half-time whistle.
With friends like these?
That the offspring of Holocaust survivors and the Kindertransport should be drummed out of the Labour Party for ‘anti-semitism’ is unconscionable.
The Richer, The Poorer: How Britain Enriched the Few and Failed The Poor – A 200-Year History
“From the end of the 1970s, both poverty rates and the income and wealth gap rose sharply as a powerful financial and corporate elite recaptured the elevated slice of national income its predecessors had reluctantly conceded in the post-war years.”
‘An almost psychopathic disregard for human life’
How many times have we heard the vapid ‘thoughts and prayers’, ‘our hearts and thoughts go out’ and ‘lessons will be learned’ between the revelation of one scandalous tragedy and the emergence of the next?
Where does the money trail lead?
“If you wanted to be Tony’s Foreign Secretary Michael [Levy] was part of the package… He was an effective fund-raiser for the Labour Party, especially with the UK’s Jewish community. He had a home in Israel, as well as in London. Of Michael’s loyalty to Tony I was never in any doubt. But when Michael was given this position the Israelis must have thought they’d won the lottery.” – Jack Straw
In memory of Arnhem 1944
“I died to save my children. People of the world, see that they shall not die.” Gravestone of Cpl Arthur James Jones, killed on the first day of Operation Market Garden, Arnhem, aged 24.
The amazing Rose Reilly
As someone brought up to believe in exemplars rather than heroes it was a delight to spend an evening with Rose Reilly at Laura Martin’s fine production of Rose at the Perth Theatre. Looking fit enough still to be on the football pitch where in 1984 she was voted the world’s best female player, this genuine hero spoke after the one-woman show about the life that took her as a teenager from the...
Ten Years Hard Labour
To be smeared and abused with impunity by Israel-supporting figures in politics and the media is part and parcel of the corruption and decadence that increasingly disfigures what is left of our democracy.
Beryl and John: modest inspirers
To celebrate the lives of two inspirational figures in the same week has been a therapeutic diversion from the depressing spectacle of two Lilliputians vying to become British Prime Minister. One was my old schoolteacher and friend John Forster whose North Yorkshire funeral I attended last week. The other was world champion cyclist Beryl Burton who lived in the next block of flats to my Aunt...
Grenfell, Gresford, God – and Myrtle
In the week when would-be Tory successors to Boris Johnson speak of the urgent need for integrity and truth telling, the Dean of Durham used his Cathedral platform at Saturday’s Miners’ Festival Service to put those qualities in powerful historical perspective. The ground for the sermon to the packed congregation by the Very Reverend Andrew Tremlett had been well prepared by the vibrant playing...
Three cheers for the authentic
We are better people than Rupert Murdoch and his minions in the media and Westminster want us to believe.