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.
Margaret Thatcher
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.”
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?”
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.
‘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?
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.
Who killed my daughter?
It is the painful saga of a traumatized parent being denied access to the truth of his daughter’s death – of a humane community doctor forced to confront the ugly realities of realpolitik on both sides of the Atlantic.
Imran Khan and a matter of principle
Imran Khan, the ousted prime minister of Pakistan, is not someone whose tenure in office I know much about. Equally, my knowledge of the country extends little beyond awareness that its history has been of much turmoil and foreign intervention, and that many of its politicians have not died quietly in their beds. But I have worked with Imran and the impression I gained of the former captain of...