I am exceptionally lucky. All the main political parties care deeply about me. They show their love weekly with solicitous letters, cards and visits. I fully anticipate flowers soon enough. I bet most of you don’t get that. So why the special treatment? I’m not a special person, I haven’t had a recent bereavement that [...]
‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the [...]
“Kingmakers”?! You’ll be dropped quicker than porno mag when the wife walks in unless you are actually a political force in your own right…
Last week’s Jewish Chronicle ran a story on the Board of Deputees of British Jews’ new campaign to instigate a so-called “buycott” in which, British Jews are encouraged to buy Israeli-produced goods. This is a response to the boycott of Israeli goods that has been hanging around anti-Zionist and pro-Palestinian campaigns since the early-2000s, but [...]
…hate to say I told you so: Climate change sceptics and fossil fuel companies that have lobbied against action on greenhouse gas emissions have squandered the world’s chance to avoid dangerous global warming, a key adviser to the government has said. Professor Bob Watson, chief scientist at the department for environment and rural affairs, said [...]
This is going to be a slightly derivative post, (specifically, it’s inspired by this fine article from Johann Hari in the Indy a few months back). Essentially, I’m calling for a bit more rigour when we talk about political and ethical ideas. There are certain words which we use to endorse or dismiss ideas when [...]
Guest post by Carl Packman In my opinion, that famous neo-Hegelian thinker Francis Fukuyama – the man responsible for the predication in the late eighties/early nineties that at the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end-of-history had loomed upon us, and it had shown free-market capitalism to be the victor over socialism – has gone [...]
It’s really unsurprising that the figures of Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris and Dennett should rise to such prominence now. The secular society and its values of free expression and scientific advance have for several years now been under attack from many different places and with tenacity we may have thought we’d left behind. The first thing [...]
“Back in the 1980s the Labour party lurched to the left and made the party unelectable. Ultimately it was the hardline Labour left who were responsible for 18 grim years of Tory rule.” Ever since Blair’s landslide victory in 1997 this has been the orthodoxy, both within the Labour party and amongst political commentators in [...]
David Cameron and Nick Clegg have already written off this year’s Queen’s Speech as pointless political posturing, filled with legislation that will never see the light of day before the next general election. The implication being, neither men expect Gordon Brown to be residing at the same address this time next year. Of course, as [...]
