Author: robert.marchant

You could be forgiven for thinking that Andrew Marr’s interview last Sunday was to be an unremarkable one. The first 16 minutes are fairly anodyne: the leader’s normal waffle on economics and the standard, disingenuous, face-both-ways position on Brexit. Important, but all things we know already. From 16:25 we get onto Corbyn’s view that transgender… Continue reading BREAKING: Labour leader leaves national television interview with pants on fire

You have all probably seen the current madness over the Bayeux Tapestry. So some wags have created this brilliant online Bayeux generator, which you can use to create your own designs.So, with all the various news items about anti-Semitism and the left this week (mostly, sad to say, referencing the Labour Party), I’m afraid I couldn’t resist creating… Continue reading Ye Livingstone Formulatione On Antisemitisme

Momentum is on a roll. It has just secured three places on Labour’s NEC. It is now on course to easily force deselections in seats where it does not like the sitting MP. It has also, as its first act in that newly-constituted NEC, just ousted the long-serving head of the Disputes Committee, Ann Black,… Continue reading We need to talk about Momentum and anti-Semitism

For the record, I am not a vengeful person and honestly consider desire revenge to be the lowest of emotions. It is difficult, however, not to occasionally appreciate justice when you see it, especially when it is poetic.I also realise that to some this will be old news. However, in the course of writing this week’s… Continue reading Justice, o sweet justice

If you thought 2017 was a disturbing time for world geopolitics, hang on to your hats. Last January we wrote about the potential bear-traps of a Trump presidency. One year into it, they are all still there and mostly look worse. Current situations in Iran, North Korea, Syria, Ukraine and the Baltic states all look… Continue reading 2018: The year of still living dangerously

“If there is hope, it lies in the proles”, wrote George Orwell in 1984. If we ignore the negative connotations of the word and interpret the word “prole” to mean simply “workers”, he might have had a point with a direct resonance for Brexit Britain.It has been apparent for some time that the legitimate arguments… Continue reading If there is hope for Labour, it lies in the collision course being set with unions over workers’ rights

On Saturday, Labour’s Deputy Leader during the terrible 1980s, published a pieceentitled “Labour’s greatest crisis. Time to fight back”. It is not a bad summary of Labour’s current troubles. The trigger for the article was the Militant-style takeover of the Haringey party this week, providing uncomfortable echoes for those of a certain age of what… Continue reading It is indeed Labour’s greatest crisis. This man should know

It is surely worth commenting on today’s Brexit select committee, where the world discovered that *drum roll* the impact analyses which were demanded by Parliament were not so much drafted at short notice, but did not actually exist at the time when the request was made and still do not exist. Such government incompetence in surely… Continue reading The mind-boggling incompetence of the Brexit department

The election of Richard Leonard has, inevitably, provoked jubilation on the Party’s left and despair in the rest of the party. While despair is certainly the more appropriate reaction, there has been some misreading on both sides. First, let’s deal with the left. Yes, Scottish Labour really needed to reinvent itself, faced with a hegemonic… Continue reading Scottish Labour needed to reinvent itself to survive. But not like this

Perhaps, just perhaps, historians might look back at this week and say, that is the week that the tide started to turn against populist politics and at least some parts of the world managed to save themselves from it. Probably for some states, Turkey, Hungary, Russia and perhaps Poland, from where I write, it is… Continue reading Stopping Brexit is a race against time. Labour MPs are in pole position