We must look beyond the two issues that dominate discussions of Iraq, and unite in support of Iraq’s trade unions, says former MP HARRY BARNES In Britain, our minds are often focussed on two big issues concerning Iraq. First, should we have been involved in its invasion? Secondly, should our troops now be withdrawn?...
Orwell’s boy
BARRY WINTER remembers Staff Cottman, life-long socialist and veteran of the Spanish Civil War, who died last year. Last September, after a year’s illness, Stafford Cottman died. Staff was a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a life-long socialist and trade unionist. What impressed me most about him was his comradely warmth, abundant energy...
Critical times in a back to front world
BARRY WINTER went to the Critical Politics conference in November, and found a Left still confused about how to respond to new times. Organised by the Signs of the Times collective, the intellectual heirs of Marxism Today, this conference was really back to front. It concluded where it might, more usefully, have begun, with...
Telling the troubled truth?
The idea of a truth process in Northern Ireland is gaining credibility. But it’s not without its problems, as GARY KENT reports. The Irish republican leader Gerry Adams is the latest politician to raise the possibility of a truth commission in Northern Ireland, after a generation of conflict still known euphemistically as “the Troubles”....
Impassable impasse?
As the Northern Ireland peace process lurches into another crisis, PAUL DIXON asks, what next? When the IRA announced its ceasefire in September 1994 it was always difficult to see what kind of agreement could be reached between loyalists and republicans. The propaganda war and real (physical) war between unionists and nationalists over the years...
A Hill of beans?
BARRY WINTER reviews Anti-Capitalism: The social economy alternative, by Chris Hill, and considers the role of the social economy in creating change, as well as sustaining socialism. This is an intriguing book. Written and, indeed, published by a former, long-standing member of Militant and, at the time of writing, a member of one of...
Pushed into enemy hands
One of the sad aspects of Labour’s farcical London mayoral selection contest, argues BERNARD HUGHES, is how the leadership is turning even some of its closest friends into foes. When Glenda Jackson announced on 19 January that she would ballot her constituency party on how she should cast her second vote in the London...
Beneath American skies
GARY KENT reports on the diversity of opinions he found on a recent State Department-sponsored trip to USA. The United States is not a uniform entity. Anyone who says, “America thinks this, that or the other” is just plain wrong. There is possibly more diversity of opinion in America than in Europe. Bush made...
London Labours
DAVID CONNOLLY wonders what happened to Tony Blair’s once passionate support for one member one vote. In his book, The Unfinished Revolution, the new Labour strategist Philip Gould comments on the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the time of John Smith’s death in 1994. Of Blair he says that “it was...
It’s the end of the world as we know it
The British National Party won its fifth local council seat in a matter of months in Halifax in January, attracting a brief flurry of national media comment and political hand wringing. BEN TURLEY looks at what happened. “Halifax is a wonderful place and its people are not racist,” Alice Mahon MP said the day...
The Travellers’ tales
Gypsies have become the object of increasingly racist, anti-immigration demonology over the last few years. As MATTHEW BROWN reports, they have been the one of the most victimised groups in society for centuries. It could be any day in modern London. A tube pulls into King’s Cross underground station. The doors slide open and...
Zimbabwe in crisis
WILLIAM BROWN unpicks the rhetoric and looks beyond the headlines to examine the origins and assess the likely outcomes of the recent unrest in Zimbabwe. Not since independence was granted in 1980 has Zimbabwe accounted for so many minutes of TV news and so many column inches in the broadsheets in Britain. However, the...