In Tony Cliff’s original four-volume series on Lenin published in the 1970s, the second volume was entitled All Power to the Soviets and the third Revolution Besieged.1 Besieged may not mean destroyed, but the civil war, which began in May… Continue Reading
Climate science came massively under attack in 2010. Leaked emails from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia were spun by the right wing media to claim that climate scientists had hidden and manipulated data. The… Continue Reading
“The moment I understand history as possibility, I must also understand education in different way”.1 The huge student protests over tuition fees and the Educational Maintenance Allowance beginning in November 2010 were an inspirational challenge to the coalition government’s far-reaching… Continue Reading
A review of David Harvey, The Enigma of Capital (Profile, 2010), £14.99 David Harvey ranks today among the world’s most renowned Marxist theoreticians. His fame is thoroughly deserved. Few red professors have his gift for presenting sophisticated ideas with such… Continue Reading
Many young women full of devotion and good-will have been engaged in superficial charities. They have tried to feed the hungry without knowing the causes of poverty. They have tried to minister to the sick without understanding the cause of… Continue Reading
A review of John Prescott with Hunter Davies, Prezza: Pulling No Punches (Headline, 2008), £18.99; Peter Mandelson, The Third Man: Life At The Heart Of New Labour (Harper Press, 2010), £25; Tony Blair, A Journey (Hutchinson, 2010), £25 With David… Continue Reading
It is more than a little ironic that the recent race for the leadership of the Labour Party came down to a contest between the Miliband brothers.1 For their dad, Ralph, was the author of a devastating socialist critique of… Continue Reading
Many people, even those of us with little or no illusions in the police, felt a deep sense of shock and outrage when on 22 July 2010 the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) announced that there would be no prosecution of… Continue Reading
Two years after his election Barack Obama presides over an increasingly divided nation, in both economic and political terms. His failure to deliver on the promise of real change has seen him punished in the midterm elections for Congress and… Continue Reading
We enter 2011 in a situation marked by both continuity and—in Britain, at least—dramatic discontinuity. The element of continuity is represented, of course, by the global economic and financial crisis. Change comes in the form of the sudden emergence of… Continue Reading