When BARRY WINTER went to Belfast to meet the movers and shakers of the new politics, it was the working class unionists who made the strongest impression. Traditionally, the left has shown great sympathy for the nationalist/Catholic, working-class population of Northern Ireland, and with good reason. Their history of poverty, poor housing, unemployment and...
Republicans and the choreography of peace
The Good Friday Agreement has been described as “Sunningdale for slow learners”, reports PAUL DIXON. So how have the Republican leaders managed to sell it to their supporters? The peace process is back on track but still precariously balanced. The Good Friday Agreement is far from safe and probably won’t be for the next...
From third way to one way
DAVID CONNOLLY ponders the latest examples of new Labour style democracy. With the best will in the world it is difficult to take Philip Gould seriously. Anyone who has read his book The Unfinished Revolution will know that his political starting point is a deeply felt hostility to the Tories. He is genuinely desperate...
Theatres of conflict
JONATHAN TIMBERS rallies to remember the October revolution and spends a day at Millbank and Number 10 – all in one very bizarre week in November. When Harold Wilson said ‘a week is a long time in politics’, perhaps he should have added that sometimes an hour can seem even longer when you’re stuck...
The power and purposes of the United States
What some are now referring to as a US ‘empire’ is a complex and dynamic creation, says WILLIAM BROWN. Every great international conflict in the modern world – from the Napoleonic wars through the first and second world wars – has been followed by a recasting of the international order. Yet, although George Bush...
dot.com/sustainedgrowth?
WILLIAM BROWN sifts through the remains of an e-commerce party that never was, and warns that the ill-winds of an economic downturn could soon be blowing across the Atlantic. Maybe it was the end-of-the-century party mood, or a kind of millennium bug which affected economic forecasters, but the 1990s were awash with optimistic economic...
Gone but not forgotten
JEAN WOOD reports on the plight of Kosovan refugees sent back from Leeds to their own country and a very uncertain future. Just over a year ago, Serbian forces – intent on cleansing their region of Albanian people – drove thousands from their homes. Many of the luckier ones, who escaped the shootings, rapes...
Underground manoeuvres
ANN BLACK sees the forces of conservatism flourishing behind the closed doors of the National Policy Forum. Five years ago I attended my first conference. I haggled over benefits and human rights in compositing meetings, on equal footing with union grandees and delegates from constituencies across the country. Because of that participation, those contacts,...
Towering success
The east end of London used to be one the BNP’s electoral targets. MATTHEW BROWN reports on how the policies and priorities of one local borough has improved community relations. Juneha Chowdhury is nearing the end of her first year as a newly qualified teacher. It hasn’t been easy but, at 27, she’s finally...
Defective permanent revolutionary
MIKE WADSWORTH reviews the autobiography of SWP founder Tony Cliff. Tony Cliff’s autobiography was published shortly after his death last year. It is written in an almost conversational manner and shows that, as Paul Foot writes in the introduction, “Tony Cliff was not a humble man and his account (which he started only because...
“Mavis Grimett is out”: The rise of fascism in the north
BEN TURLEY looks at some of the social and political roots of the BNP’s success in northern and midlands towns, and offers some suggestions for how they should be tackled in the future. The local council election results on 1 May 2003 confirmed the BNP as a significant electoral force in some northern and...
An activist’s life
MIKE WADSWORTH reviews the recent biography of lifetime communist Edmund Frow, written by his wife. Ruth Frow points out that this biography of Eddie Frow is largely anecdotal and is not the detached recital of a life that would have been produced by a biographer less closely involved with the subject. In this regard...