Tom Harris is being silenced. At least according to his latest blog post, entitled ‘Silence those who dare to disagree with us!’. He has taken exception to an advert in the Guardian, posted by constitutional reform activists Power 2010, which attacks 6 MPs for opposing electoral reform. And Tom is deeply aggrieved to be on [...]
Stephen Byers is, I think we can agree, a tool. Cab for hire? Most pimps are into self-aggrandisement. They want to sound more significant than they are not less. Personally if I were a politician on the make, I’d call myself a facilitator, the power behind the throne, the hidden lever, The Cigarette Smoking Man. [...]
Saturday’s anti-EDL demonstration in Bolton has attracted a great deal of comment around the blogosphere and in the media. Much of it nasty, outright lies and smears, some of it genuine debate about the kind of tactics we need in the future. I’m not going to comment much on the discussion of tactics right now [...]
As I got off at Hatton Cross station, I saw a few flags. Billowing in the wind, I thought the bright red Unite emblems were a bit uniform, and bland, but that this might be where I’d find some socialist pals I’d arranged to meet up with in order to offer support and solidarity. As [...]
Here’s a prediction: The Sunday Times’ big ‘MPs for hire’ scandal is going to be a damp squib. No one’s going to care. Sure, it’ll be all over the news for a few days, and Labour might take a temporary hit in the polls, but in the long term the effect will be zilch. The [...]
In Agatha Christie’s classic crime novel the ABC Murders, the detective Hercule Poirot comes up with the following formulation: “When do you notice a pin least? When it is in a pin cushion. When do you notice a murder least? When it is one of a series of related murders.” I would like to extend [...]
Climate change, responsible for the melting of the Andean glaciers, threatens the lives of millions in Latin America’s poorest country. Sitting atop a barren mountain in Bolivia is a chunk of ice. It might be hard to imagine, on first inspection, that there is anything special about it. Ice is ice, after all; cold, hard [...]
There’s an old Jewish joke about a couple of Jewish guys in 1930s Germany. One is reading the Jewish press and the other one is reading the Nazi papers. The man reading the Jewish Press turns to his friend and asks “why on earth are you reading the fascist papers?”. His friend tells him “Whenever [...]
Last week I suggested that when middle class journalists get contemptuous about “the English”, they are rarely engaged in true self-deprecation. They are not, I argued, referring to themselves, but are using superficially anti-patriotic sentiment as cover to express often quite vile opinions about the masses. And so it was that one of my fellow [...]
A review of Hannah Patterson’s Much at the Cock Tavern Theatre Here’s what happens after Helen, tells her ex-boyfriend Tom, who’s still in love with her, that’s she about to get married to someone else: in fact she’s going to get married to Tom’s dad, Roy. Helen: Are you mad? Tom: Mad? Helen: With me? [...]
