[PDF file]: […] the rich, rather than a mass participation event. In the early 1950s, three million people were Conservative Party members, while more than a million belonged to the Labour Party. Now, the two main parties can count barely 600,000 members on their books combined. (p. 139) Once again, he seems to have a somewhat rosy […]
[PDF file]: […] Starmer Project: A Journey to the Right Oliver Eagleton London: Verso, 2022, £12.99, p/b John Booth First impressions can mislead, but the more I discovered here about Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer the more I became convinced that my hunches based on personal glimpses of him were correct. I saw him initially when as […]
[PDF file]: […] equivalent of Janis Joplin but never enjoyed comparable success. 5 Peter Hain had, originally, been a very active (and visible) campaigner for the Liberal Party but joined Labour in 1977. 6 Jenner organized a set of festivals in Hyde Park in the late ‘60s and initially managed The Pink Floyd. He also thought Strummer […]
[…] our own; we do not see what we are not already predisposed to see.’ 36 The wrong kind of member The EHRC report on anti-semitism in the Labour Party found . . . not very much;37 what they did find hinged on debatable definitions of anti-semitism; and most of it was the responsibility of […]
[…] voice pointing out that his apparent aim of rebuilding the US manufacturing economy behind tariff walls is not a million miles from the central idea in the Labour Left’s Alternative Economic Strategy of the 1980s.1 In the USA domestic manufacturing is around 10% of the economy. In the UK around 9%. Both countries went […]
[PDF file]: […] in Israel. (Lord Reid, as well as being a leading advocate of the Iraq invasion and toughness in the ‘war on terror’, is a longstanding member of Labour Friends of Israel.) Then turn to The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein and read this about Israel’s economic trajectory in the past five years: ‘Much of […]
[PDF file]: […] per cent of the British people believe that Blair should be tried as a war criminal. I am one of that number’. Obviously the memoirs of any Labour MP with such admirable views are worth a look and Bob Marshall-Andrews’ extremely witty, indeed laugh-out-loud volume, Off Message, does not disappoint. He recalls the heady […]
[PDF file]: […] £22.00 John Booth Here we have two approaches to politics and public life which are also partly the story of two Neils. Neil Findlay is a former Labour member of the Scottish Parliament and a long-time grass-roots activist. Neil Kinnock was the Labour leader who helped Alastair Campbell insert himself into the upper reaches […]
[…] force. These underworld members were loyal to the right-wing cause and, importantly, should senior figures see an outright coup d’état necessary in the event of a militant Labour win at election, they were well outside of government control. Which is what Peter Sanderson described in Lobster 81. In that piece, I quoted a section […]
[…] force. These underworld members were loyal to the right-wing cause and, importantly, should senior figures see an outright coup d’état necessary in the even of a militant Labour win at election, they were well outside of government control. Which is what Peter Sanderson described in Lobster 81. In that piece I quoted a section […]
