[PDF file]: […] high enough), ‘what do politicians at home know of the cruel, hard facts of life when civil disorder has broken out?’ He deliberately courted controversy thereafter, as Conservative MP for Aberdeenshire West, joining the pretty extremist Monday Club and Anglo-Rhodesian Society. He also became an ‘icon’ for the Conservative Right, who of course didn’t […]
[…] to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, uniting, liberating, crusading temper – the arc […]
[…] Lobster. *new* By their omissions . . . Michael Gove, the outgoing Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, passes for an intellectual in today’s Conservative Party. In May he delivered a speech on anti-semitism.1 He made some interesting points. This paragraph, for example: There are no BDS campaigns directed against Bashar […]
[PDF file]: […] weapons exports and military expenditure it still certainly is), then the Founding Fathers certainly intended a counter-revolution. When the dead US president, now beatified, spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference two hundred and ten years later he said: ‘They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help. I’ve spoken […]
[…] to the lessons of Major’s locust years. His government needs a philosophy, a set of principles, an ideology. Indeed Starmer’s need is greater than Major’s was. A Conservative administration benefits from a sense of purpose; a Labour government cannot survive without one. Progressive politics needs a galvanising, or 3 4 5 2 uniting, liberating, […]
[…] destroying Jeremy Corbyn. *new* The MLK files I asked Google why the Trump administration had released the official files on 5 6 The sole exception is former Conservative minister Alan Duncan, whose 2021 memoir begins with complaints about that lobby. See the review by John Booth at or . 7 3 the assassination of […]
[PDF file]: […] a number of years now. His ‘dead cat’ strategy7 has regularly proven counter-productive. Yet his firm Crosby Trextor was paid £18.6m for their part in the 2017 Conservative election campaign. Yes . . . £18.6m for that campaign – the one that reduced the government’s majority to a thread. Top of the tree for […]
[PDF file]: […] social media abuse – there is much talk but little action. As I write, no better illustration of this can be seen than the submission by the Conservative Party to the Committee on Standards in Public Life’s review of electoral arrangements.4 Reports of this submission suggest a weakening rather than a strengthening of oversight. […]
[PDF file]: […] of post-war British society. A range of political and economic philosophies and traditions went into the version embraced by the Attlee government and indeed successive Labour and Conservative administrations all the way to 1979. Nurtured by over a century of humanistic and religious teaching, and a respect for the rights of the individual citizen […]
[PDF file]: […] dependent on the Americans. From this point of view, the so-called ‘Special Relationship’ was a vital concern of British capitalism and its political servants both Labour and Conservative. This recognition long pre-dated New Labour. The post-war Attlee government had recognised it fifty years earlier, although without any of New Labour’s enthusiasm. In the 1980s […]
