This post was published on LabourList on 16th August 2012, under the title ‘Labour must free the Press’. The first instalment of Lord Leveson’s inquiry report into the Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press is due in the autumn. It’s vital that Labour are ready to argue for a truly free press. We should […]
Category: Politics
“Budget Hero” – Public Media’s Most Despicable Financial Propaganda is the title of a great anti-austerity piece by William K. Black on the New Economic Perspectives site. It appears that some very strange and economically ignorant people have designed an on-line game to demonstrate their destructive view of how the economy works. Bill Black is […]
The riots that engulfed London and other cities in England began one year ago today. Just to hark back to my piece ‘Riots: Looking Deeper’ on this topic last year, written one week after they started. I think it’s fair to say that it was a reasonable analysis. In particular the Independent Panel set up […]
This is a response to ‘The Spirit Level’ and the response to it, with discussion of the implications to be drawn for tackling inequality. You can also download it as a pdf (67kb). This article is on 5 pages, and you can go to the next page you want by clicking on the relevant number […]
A version of this post appeared on LabourList on 1st August 2012. The charge sheet against Messrs Cameron and Osborne as the architects of the coalition’s economic strategy is growing, and it may not be long before they, like their buddies Andy Coulson and Rebekah Brooks, find themselves in the dock.Not perhaps the dock of […]
Whichever side of the argument you might be on, it’s worth looking at a very cogent and entertaining video talk by the late Professor G.A Cohen on some of the problems of ‘actually existing capitalism’. I found it while following up a reading of his Tanner Lecture, ‘Incentives, Inequality, and Community’, given at Stanford University in 1990-91, which contains a powerful argument against […]
‘We need to be clear how equality, and what kind of equality (including of what), services our notion of the good society.’ To give David Miliband some credit, he is asking the right question. It’s not clear from his New Statesman sally whether he has the right answer. As characterised by the older brother, ‘Reassurance […]
I’ve read with interest the recent Labour List posts of Owen Jones and Emma Burnell. I think on the politics Emma is right, but on the economics Owen is right to call for a fresh plan of action. Politics these days is a performance, and it’s increasingly a self-interested one where concern for the greater […]
This article was published on LabourList on Thursday 12th January 2012. That there is ‘no money left’ is presented to us as an economic fact of life. The Conservatives have embraced it and the Liberal Democrats accepted it. Led by the authors of ‘In the black Labour’ we are at risk of falling in with […]
David Malone, a documentary film maker, perhaps better known these days as blogger on the financial crisis and its causes – operating under the name GolemXIV – gave a talk in Edinburgh on the 6th of December. He’s quite a charismatic guy and gave an effective talk in a church with no aids other than […]