Category Archives: Uncategorized

Clegg’s interview in today’s Guardian reveals a lot about the Tories. Osborne comes out of it worst. Apparently he didn’t care in the slightest about the effects of his cuts on the lives of ordinary people, as long he could pander to … Continue reading →

For anyone who missed the recent BBC dramatization of Joseph Conrad’s novel, I’d urge you to catch up on it. It’s on DVD. I’ve just finished watching a recording of it that I made when I was away. This is an … Continue reading →

I’m a ‘professor emeritus’. Gosh, that sounds good, doesn’t it? The word ‘merit’ embedded there, in the fancy Latin, must denote something special, more than a mere ‘professor’? (Those are two a penny nowadays.) Actually, no. All it means is … Continue reading →

My original hope for the EU, though it wasn’t an altogether confident one, was that it might act as a barrier to the relentless global spread of free market capitalism, which is, after all, the dominant trend in the world … Continue reading →

Has Ed Balls ever specified what it is about Jeremy Corbyn’s programme for government which makes it ‘a leftist utopian fantasy devoid of connection to the reality of people’s lives’? I’ve followed the debate pretty closely (even from Sweden) and … Continue reading →

While in Sweden my website let me down. It wouldn’t let me post or edit. But my son-in-law Richard has fixed it – it involved switching from Safari to a thing called Google Chrome – and so, if this post … Continue reading →

There was a huge crowd to hear Jeremy Corbyn in Queen’s Gardens yesterday; the biggest gathering any of us had ever seen in Hull. All sorts of people: young, old, men, women, ‘workers’, professionals, white, black, a few Trotskyites (of … Continue reading →

When I was eight years old I was sent – alone – to a residential school for children with serious chest complaints, mainly TB and asthma, in Ventnor, Isle of Wight. It was the most miserable three months of my young … Continue reading →

MI5 has a record of targeting left-wing MPs and parties in Britain, sometimes via retired agents and third parties. The best known examples are the ‘Zinoviev Letter’ affair of 1924, and the ‘Wilson plot’ (that is, the anti-Wilson plot) of … Continue reading →

I doubt if I’ll be blogging much over the next month – everything is too depressing politically, especially vis-à-vis the Labour Party here and the Republicans over the pond, and I can think of no new historical parallels to draw. … Continue reading →