UK Border Agency: let’s sign up to Schengen
Posted on Wednesday 9 November, 2011
Filed Under Conservative Party, Immigration, International |
6 Comments
ONE of the few political positions that sections of the far left and the free market right alike hold dear is opposition to immigration controls. So I am still not quite sure whether it was the Socialist Workers’ Party or the Adam Smith Institute that sneakily managed to take over the UK Border Agency while no-one was looking this summer.
Even though I also back a policy of open borders, I never once imagined that the Coalition would implement the idea quite so literally.
Much media coverage in recent days has focused on Theresa May’s hush-hush policy initiative of relaxing passport checks on arrivals from the EU, and whether or not UKBA boss Brodie Clark was over-zealous in their implementation.
Sadly, Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper have sought to extract political capital from all this by playing to the xenophobic gallery. The subtext of some of their remarks are not exactly pretty. Is the 100% increase in firearms seizures over the period really entirely down to bloody foreigners, Ed?
Italy deserves better than Berlusconi
Posted on Tuesday 8 November, 2011
Filed Under International |
11 Comments
IT IS fortunate indeed for New Labourite lawyer David Mills that he took a £400,000 bung from Silvio Berlusconi in 1999 rather than 2000. Were it not for Italy’s equivalent of the statute of limitations, he would now be a quarter be around a quarter of the way through a four year jail term in whatever qualifies as the local equivalent of Ford Open Prison.
One little noticed aspect of the judgement that let him off the hook was the ruling that he had to pay the office of the Italian prime minister €250,000 for ‘damaging its reputation’. Yes, you read that right.
I almost feel like congratulating Mr Mills on this signal achievement. Blackening the name of a man who has widely been accused of mafia collusion, false accounting, tax fraud, and bribery of police officers and judges, and who is currently in the dock on charges of hiring underage hookers, is obviously no easy job.
PASOK, PSOE: the suicide of social democracy
Posted on Monday 7 November, 2011
Filed Under International, New Labour, Politics |
19 Comments
AFTER three decades during which the centre left first adapted to neoliberalism, and then adopted it wholesale, it is sometimes difficult to establish what exactly social democracy stands for these days.
All of the major European parties that occupy this political space initially came into being to articulate working class demands, and were nominally committed to socialism. Even after Blair’s clause four rewrite, the Labour Party still officially defines itself as ‘a democratic socialist party’.
Few members these days expect social democratic formations to build the New Jerusalem; if we are going to employ that analogy, I suspect that Labour would be hard pushed to construct a jerry-built shed on the outskirts of greater Tel Aviv at the moment.
Greece’s uncertain future
Posted on Friday 4 November, 2011
Filed Under International |
17 Comments
AS SOMEONE who has been thinking and writing about politics for three decades, I like to think I have a handle on what goes on in countries with which I am familiar. But watching events unfold in Athens this week has left me as astonished as everybody else.
One minute Papandreou is holding a referendum on the bailout plan, and maybe planning to quit. Next thing you know, both those ideas have been scrapped and he is staying in office. A coalition government is one possibility, new elections are another. That was the score at the time of writing, anyway. By the time you get to read this, the situation could be something else entirely.
Television news junkies among us are night after night treated to footage of anti-capitalist youth protestors lobbing petrol bombs at heavily tooled up cops. But that is only a fraction of the picture.
N30: the power of the strike threat
Posted on Wednesday 2 November, 2011
Filed Under Industrial relations |
13 Comments
WHETHER or not the Coalition’s latest proposals on public sector pensions constitute ‘a very fair offer’ – as David Cameron insists – is a question best left to those with sounder knowledge of actuarial principles than I shall ever acquire.
Yet one thing is immediately clear. No improvements whatsoever would be on the table without the threat of a one day walkout across the public sector on November 30, and that in itself is significant.
I am racking my brains to remember the last time a government even made an effort to avert an impending stoppage by coming up with some meaningful concessions.
OccupyLSX: vicars in a twist
Posted on Tuesday 1 November, 2011
Filed Under Anti-capitalism, Religion |
3 Comments
THE OCCUPYLSX protest outside St Paul’s Cathedral seems to have boosted the rate of attrition among senior Anglican clergy to levels last seen in the mid-1550s.
Given that the Church of England is factionally riven to the point that exposes the far left as wilful amateurs in the backstabbing stakes, we probably do not know the full reasons for the departures of the Rt Rev Graeme Knowles, the Rev Dr Giles Fraser and the seemingly untitled Fraser Dyer.
Like most others not affilated to Britain’s last remaining nationalised industry, I had never heard of either Knowles or Dyer until this morning. Giles Fraser is a friend of a friend, and I am told that he both personable and left-leaning. If that is so, it is a shame that he has decided to quit what is presumably a plum job within his chosen profession.
Even I feel sorry for Dr Rowan Williams on this one. As if splitting the difference between strident Nigerian homophobes and equally irreconcilable US gay rights advocates wasn’t a fulltime job already, having a couple of hundred crusties, Trots and peaceniks setting up shop outside his premier London retail outlet was probably the last thing the Archbishop of Canterbury needed.
Financial markets do not exist
Posted on Sunday 30 October, 2011
Filed Under Economics |
15 Comments
ONE of the most striking aspects of the blanket media coverage of the eurozone crisis is the way in which financial markets are routinely spoken of as entities with a life of their own.
They are conceived of as capable of adhering to ethical codes, from which they have of late drifted away. Ostensibly they can experience such human emotions as tension, and even desperation, fear, panic and the jitters.
In addition, they can demand obedience, on pain of the exaction of serious consequences. George Soros tells us that financial markets are driving the world towards another Great Depression. No wonder that governments have little choice but to do their bidding.
So it is a worthwhile corrective to point out that, in the ordinary sense of the word, financial markets do not exist. No one has ever seen one, or taken a photograph of one, for instance.
British monarchy: scrap it altogether
Posted on Friday 28 October, 2011
Filed Under Politics |
42 Comments
‘OF THE various forms of government which have prevailed in the world,’ Edward Gibbon presciently remarked more than 200 years ago, ‘an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.’
In this respect at least, not a lot has changed over the past two centuries. Heaven only knows what the great historian would have made of the current lot, whose foibles all too frequently offer ample scope for satirists.
However, the real case against the House of Windsor is not based on the failings of the individuals that comprise it, but its continued role in political life. As long as the queen or king remains head of state, not just in the UK but in 15 other countries as well, then parliamentary democracy remains unduly restricted.
Tribune: the real is the rational
Posted on Thursday 27 October, 2011
Filed Under New Labour |
11 Comments
I WAS news editor at Tribune between 1992 and 1995, and it lived a hand to mouth existence even then. At a time when almost every other publication in Britain had switched to what journalists of the period called ‘the new technology’, I suddenly found myself thrown back into the era of manual typewriters. The one I was given, according to a standing office joke, used to belong to George Orwell himself.
As the magazine’s token Trotskyist, I was always somewhat at odds with the overall editorial line. But nevertheless various editors somehow found a place for my contributions, and I will always be proud to be associated with a title that – for much of its existence, anyway – instantiated the best aspects of the democratic socialist tradition in this country.
So I am sad to hear that barring miracles, this week’s edition will be the last. Apart from anything else, the closure will mean redundancy for some of my former workmates. But much as it pains me to say it, the decision is probably the right one.
Tony Blair: PR man for Kazakhstan
Posted on Monday 24 October, 2011
Filed Under International, New Labour |
31 Comments
NURSULTAN Nazarbayev is clearly an extremely popular guy. Why, only last April, he secured 95% of the votes in Kazakhstan’s presidential elections. And just to underline how much his people love him, the name of the party which holds every single seat in the country’s parliament loosely translates as ‘Ray of Light of the Fatherland’, in honour of the big N himself.
Personally I am at a loss to fathom why Nazarbayev should feel the need to retain an expensive western public relations outfit. But inexplicably enough, he has done just that. The Financial Times reports that a firm by the name of Tony Blair Associates has landed a contract worth $13m a year to help tidy up Kazakhstan’s image in the West. If you don’t have an FT subscription, read the rewrite in the Daily Telegraph here.
