24 December 2008 – 1:04 am
(Updated Christmas Eve, after spotting a flaw in my statistical analysis. I am deeply sad.)
Now that it’s well and truly over, two things really stick in my mind about the Manchester Congestion Charge vote. (Strictly speaking, the Manchester Transport Innovation Fund vote – but I don’t think it’s a fund that we voted to reject.)
One [...]
30 November 2008 – 12:42 am
Belatedly, a bit more Bingham. (Updated 30/11.) And a question: what, exactly, was Martin Kettle saying in this column?
What’s most remarkable about the column is that Kettle doesn’t actually contest the argument Bingham put forward. Instead, there’s a steady drip-feed of insinuations that Bingham’s speech shouldn’t be taken seriously, whatever it was he actually said [...]
20 November 2008 – 9:42 pm
Airmiles was quoted in the LRB the other week:
it was clear soon after 9/11 that the Bush administration … believed that the awesome demonstration of American military muscle would intimidate present and potential enemies everywhere. The administration had its own intellectual cheerleaders and experts on the Middle East: Bernard Lewis, for instance, whose pet conviction [...]
3 September 2008 – 2:55 pm
All RIGHT! Whoo! Are there any LEGAL THEORISTS in tonight???
OK then. (Hi Rob!)
Here are some thoughts on regulation and the law. This is a slightly abbreviated version of a paper I gave at a seminar earlier this year, which I’m planning to write up at greater length for publication.
I’d like to examine the conditions which [...]
WorldbyStorm:
Once Blair et al dreamed of a hegemonic project that would dominate the centre left for decades. At this rate they’ll be lucky to salvage anything from the wreckage.
Which reminded me of something I wrote for Casablanca (anyone else remember Casablanca?) in October 1994. To set the scene, John Major’s Conservative government had been re-elected [...]
Obsolete has an excellent, if inevitably depressing, analysis of the latest from Louise Casey. I was particularly struck by one line in particular: apparently Casey thinks it’s important
to get the public more engaged in tackling crime and to stop the erosion of community spirit.
Oh-oh – Broken Windows alert. Criminologists have spent years of their lives [...]
I seem to be disagreeing with WorldbyStorm quite a lot lately. Here’s WbS on the Lisbon Treaty:
I’d tend to the view that it is difficult to see how 26 countries won’t move forward. Why shouldn’t they? There’s no advantage to the status quo.
…
I was once, in a fairly received way, quite wedded to the federal [...]
There is “a fair amount of rewriting of history going on”, says Martin Kettle. (This post began life on CiF. I keep meaning to give up commenting there – it’s a singularly unrewarding occupation, apart from those rare occasions when the columnist you’re responding to actually reads the comments. Commenting on most CiF posts is [...]
Last week’s council elections, apart from being very bad news for Labour, told an interesting story about the state of the smaller parties in England. (I’ll leave commenting on the state of the smaller parties in Scotland to those better qualified.)
Smaller parties trying to get established have three problems which make it particularly hard to [...]
First, have a look at this table; it represents some highlights from the voting records of two MPs in the 2001-5 parliament. Neither of them’s particularly far to the Left or Right – they both voted for the Iraq war and for a lower age of consent for gays, for example. But there are some [...]
My academic background is in sociology, sort of – you could also call it politics, or contemporary history, or European studies. One thing it wasn’t is criminology. So I have a lot of sympathy with the academics cited here, lamenting the decline of sociology at the expense of criminology. (I met one of them – [...]
Ellis links to an excellent appreciation of Raymond Williams. I’ve got nothing to add to it, except that I’d forgotten just how well he wrote – it’s an odd tone of voice, with a kind of patiently strenuous quality, but it’s very powerful and rather beautiful, once you tune in to it. I can’t think [...]
I haven’t said a lot about Labour or the Left here lately, mainly because I’ve been saying it all at Dave’s place (another example of the essential superiority of Usenet over blogging). Here’s a slightly edited version of my comments on recent threads.
Dave argues that this government’s left-wing achievements have been localised and timid (Blair [...]
21 December 2006 – 12:06 am
Who’s with me?
We have to wake up. These forces of extremism based on a warped and wrong-headed misinterpretation of Islam aren’t fighting a conventional war but they are fighting one against us – and ‘us’ is not just the West, still less simply America and its allies. ‘Us’ is all those who believe in tolerance, [...]
29 November 2006 – 1:28 pm
I’m posting from work, because this is (unusually) a work-related question. And I do mean ‘question’: I will be expecting comments. Look sharp.
I’m formulating a research proposal, building on the work I’ve done on what went on in Italy between 1966 and 1980. Basically, you have two successive waves of protest: one which starts in [...]
24 November 2006 – 7:38 pm
Will:
Yesterday I was giving a talk on the egocentricity of the digital revolution … and afterwards stood around chatting to some media lecturers, all seemingly left wing intellectuals. They were dolefully discussing how their students showed no interest in criticising brainless, celebrity-obsessed and pornographic magazines, deeming it to be purely a matter of choice what [...]
19 November 2006 – 8:07 pm
Dave:
In a post yesterday, I pointed out that Tony Blair – currently in Pakistan to meet president Pervez Musharraf – at least did not feel the need to salute the military dictator’s ‘courage, strength and indefatigability’, as George Galloway famously did on meeting Saddam Hussein.
But I’ve just heard the World at One on Radio Four. [...]
8 November 2006 – 6:43 pm
Business, Community, Discipline: the Strange Triumph of New Labour
Written 12th May 1997; not published
I didn’t vote Labour on May 1st. At my first general election in 1979 I voted Liberal, an early tactical voter in Conservative Croydon South. I found out afterwards that the Labour candidate had lost his deposit: every vote did count [...]
27 September 2006 – 6:47 pm
100 years ago:
To be blunt, the problem is a large majority of Labour MPs in the Commons; it’s only going to be addressed by reducing that majority.But what would that get us, apart from making the Whips work for a living and preventing another disaster like the Prevention of Terrorism Act (which isn’t nothing)? [...]
Call me insufferably pretentious, but when I think of the Labour Party I can’t help thinking of the opening of Chtcheglov’s 1953 Formulary for a new urbanism. (Bear with me, there’s some good stuff further down.)
We are bored in the city, we really have to strain to still discover mysteries on the roadside hoardings, the [...]
