Monthly Archives: February 2016

‘Are we nearly there yet?’ – For 168 years that has been the plaintive call from the little revolutionaries in the back of the socialist car as it meanders across the bewilderingly varied landscape of capitalism on its way to … Continue reading →

No complaints; I really don’t feel sore about this, just slightly perplexed. But I’m wondering why (virtually) no-one has yet reviewed my British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t? It came out in October. I can’t fault the publisher, who made … Continue reading →

(From the archive. This is a review I wrote of The Strange Case of Thomas Quick. The Swedish Serial Killer and the Psychoanalyst who created him by Dan Josefsson, for the Guardian a couple of months ago. It follows on from an earlier piece Kajsa … Continue reading →

The Guardian today points the finger at Jack Straw as having been one of the least ‘open’ ministers – with regard to Freedom of Information – of his day: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/08/jack-straw-ministries-among-worst-freedom-of-information In 1999 I wrote this piece about ‘official secrecy’ for the … Continue reading →

The point about justice is that it should apply to people you don’t like as well as to those you do. Otherwise it’s not justice. I don’t think that, if I met him, I would like Julian Assange very much. … Continue reading →

On the one hand, doping and betting scandals. And football still in the hands of quasi-criminal capitalists, paying their mercenary players obscenely high wages, and pricing loyal spectators out of their grounds. (See my earlier piece on this: https://bernardjporter.wordpress.com/2015/01/09/mercenaries-in-football/.) Who … Continue reading →

Keep a scandal simmering for long enough, and people will get bored with it. That must be most people’s reaction to the latest news about the Assange case: a UN ruling that he has been ‘unlawfully detained’. He’s a funny-looking … Continue reading →

Bernie Sanders’s impressive showing in the Iowa primaries is greatly encouraging for all us 1960s nostalgics. Or it would be, if the USA were a democracy. As it is, just imagine what it will be like if he becomes the … Continue reading →

Just a reminder that I have some knowledge in this area, though I wouldn’t like to claim that The Refugee Question in Mid Victorian Politics – the title of my 1979 book, re-issued a couple of years ago by CUP … Continue reading →