Matthew Carr's Blog, page 45
July 21, 2015
Labour: Giving the public what it thinks it wants
One of the recurring justifications for the Labour Party’s drift to the right over the last – how long as it been? – twenty or thirty years has been the notion that it is only responding to the ‘concerns’ of … Continue reading →
July 20, 2015
Labour’s Summer of Madness
It’s amusing, in a gallows humour kind of way, to watch the horrified response of the parliamentary Labour Party to Jeremy Corbyn’s startling surge in the Labour leadership polls. Having shooed him into the race in order to broaden … Continue reading →
July 16, 2015
R.I.P Europe
I’ve just come back from a week’s hiking in the Pyrenees. When I left for the mountains I knew that the European Union was in poor health. By the time I came down four days later it was dead. The … Continue reading →
July 6, 2015
Greece Says No
Yesterday’s astonishing referendum vote in Greece has left elite jaws dropping across the continent. In the face of universal opposition from the powers-that-be across the continent and dire warnings that essentially amounted to ‘ do what we say or else’ … Continue reading →
July 4, 2015
Greece versus the loansharks: just say no
The other day I overheard two locals where I live talking politics. Their views were not very enlightened, insightful or informed. On the contrary, the fragments of their conversation that I picked up sounded like a collage of Daily Mail … Continue reading →
June 30, 2015
Full Spectrum Idiocy
Governments rarely have anything honest to say in response to terrorist atrocities, and they rarely have anything intelligent, insightful or useful to say about them either. Invariably they lapse into the standard bargain-basement cant that has acquired such tedious traction … Continue reading →
June 27, 2015
International Terror Day
In his memoir The Devil in France, the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger looked back on the historical circumstances that had resulted in his internment in a French prison in Tunisia during World War I, and driven him into exile in … Continue reading →
June 24, 2015
The Brightest and the Best
One thing you can always count on with this government: when it comes to immigration it will always do something more squalid and nasty than you previously thought possible. And this week Lord Snooty and His Pals have demonstrated once … Continue reading →
June 21, 2015
A march against austerity does you good
There is a certain breed of cynic on the left who will tell you there’s no point in demonstrations, that marches, protests etc are managed spectacles through which an authoritarian political system projects an illusion of democratic participation and offers … Continue reading →
June 18, 2015
Al Qaeda: Our New Enemy in the War on Terror
There was a time, shortly after the 9/11 attacks, when the world suddenly seemed simple and easy to understand, when the falling towers blew away any remaining clouds of ambiguity, nuance or complexity. In those grim but bracing days, … Continue reading →
