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As soon as this pub closes
Thanks very much to my old comrade Richard Kuper for reminding me of this extremely irreverent, but detailed and devastatingly accurate overview and history of the British left from the late ’80s. He...
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A little nag about food
I rather like my local farmers market. Yes, I know that farmers’ markets are full of insufferably smug Guardian readers pushing four wheel drive baby buggies and buying expensive vegetables and even...
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Orthodoxy and the Left
A few days ago I wrote about how the SWP’s leadership, who endlessly go on about the need to ‘defend the IS tradition’, have over the years coarsened and stultified the organisation’s politics and...
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Can’t pay? Don’t pay
Obviously, we all know that this is Government is absolutely vile. But of all the vile things that they have done, or are planning to do (or at least, that they currently admit they are planning) the...
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The Buddha’s parable of the burning house – Brecht
Guatama the Buddha taught The doctrine of greed’s wheel to which we are bound, and advised That we should shed all craving and thus Undesiring enter the nothingness that he called Nirvana. What is it...
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Squeezing blood from stones – Tory style
Under the current system, people on low or no incomes have up to 100% of their council tax paid by their local council through Council Tax benefit. However, in just five weeks time, at the beginning...
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Know Thy Enemy
I first came across Christopher Logue when, in 1963, a friend played me Red Bird, an EP (an extended play 7 inch record – a format now known only to pensioners and vinyl geeks) of Logue reading some of...
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The Times They (may be) a’Changin
Protesting about the bedroom tax in Hastings, East Sussex (Photo credit: Aspex Design: Photos by Dean Thorpe) Over the past couple of weeks, three things have served to lift the gloom of an apparently...
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Unfortunately this isn’t an April Fools joke
And so it begins. From today (1 April) the Government will begin do to things; it will give a tax cut averaging £100,000 to each of the 13,000 people in Britain earning over £1m a year and it will...
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‘The foothills of reform’
A quick look in the Telegraph today shows the direction of travel that the Tories want to go in. In an editorial entitled ‘We have only reached the foothills of reform’ the Telegraph says that...
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This is a battle that we can win
Last week, Hilary Benn MP, Labour’s Shadow Local Government Secretary, made an attack on the imposition of the Bedroom Tax in which he said ‘It’s hard to imagine that Conservative and Liberal Democrat...
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An open letter to the members of Green Left
Comrades, An event in Manchester last month served to demonstrate to me the limitations of the politics of the Green Party. It was on the TUC demonstration in support of the NHS; a huge, cheerful and...
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Political architecture, (or draw the blueprints before arguing about the...
My daughter is planning to build her own house in the next year or two – an exciting, if somewhat daunting prospect. However, when confronted by an empty piece of open ground and a blank sheet of...
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Why workers must work harder
I’ve written before about my huge admiration for Leon Rosselson, but I’m not apologising for mentioning him again. This is one of his poems from the eighties, entitled ‘Why workers must work harder,...
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The Captain finds a new berth
A few days ago I took part in the Founding Conference of a new party, Left Unity. The make-up of the conference was broadly what I was expecting; mainly men, largely over forty, mostly veterans of at...
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The Gas Men cometh
While there may be some considerable doubt about whether Goebbels was, as the ditty claims, deficient in the testicular department (he had six children, after all), there is no doubt at all that he was...
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Gramsci, snooker and continental drift
The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. As the Bard of Essex Ian Dury so cogently put...
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Newspeak – a glossary for our times
Many years ago, the journalist Claude Cockburn suggested that widely used journalists’ cliches should be translated to enable us to understand what they really meant. For example, he pointed out that...
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