Rediscovering Paul Berman

Six years ago I wrote a review for the Observer about Paul Berman's Terror and Liberalism, a quite brilliant polemic about the way the legitimate liberal desire to overturn the conventional or the bourgeois can so often turn to murderous terror.

I recognised at the time that it was an extraordinary book, but I couldn't quite except his final conclusions, which seemed to elide different forms of barbarism so that Palestinian suicide bombers became equated with the genocide of the Nazi death camps. I still think it is important to make distinctions between the geographical, cultural and historical specifics...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (0)

The PBR Suggests that Labour Thinks It's All Over but Peter Mandelson Knows It Is

Labour's Pre-Budget Report has been interpreted as a cynical electioneering exercise, a last-ditch attempt to to open up clear blue water between Labour and the Conservatives. Perhaps paradoxically, I thought it was a sign that the Government knows the game is up. Of course the Labour Party has to fight the election - it can't simply not turn up. But it strikes me that using the UK economy quite so blatantly for party political advantage when it was already so fragile, was a strategic error. I am sure Alistair Darling believed he was doing the right thing. He is a...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (8)

Let's Talk About Class

My posh Tory friends get really irritated when I talk about class. Almost as annoyed as my posh Labour friends. The idea that class was somehow excised from the political discourse by New Labour is absurd. We live in a country where the two dominant political parties are essentially representative of their class. And why not?

It is completely understandable that a political coalition would coagulate around the interests  of business and big money. It would be a pretty rubbishy ruling class that didn't protect its position.

We should also be proud of living in a country which has developed a major political...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (44)

Progress On Our Pernicious Libel Laws

Central to his argument is the point that the government risks being outflanked by the Tories on this issue: 

The Conservatives could well come down behind the reforms that were outlined recently in the Sunday Times, based on the recommendations published by Index on Censorship and English PEN in our report, Free Speech is Not for Sale (see www.libelreform.org). Unless Labour...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (2)

Cumbrian Floods: How Long Till We Forget?

So what happens when the news cameras leave and the people who have been flooded out are left to clear up the mess and rebuild their lives? The point is that the news agenda moves on and the people of Cockermouth will just have to get on with it. 

But where is the record of what happened? Who is collecting all those stories of the extraordinary events of November 2009? Thanks to the internet, some of the oral history of the great flood has been automatically recorded. The BBC website captured some of the stories. But they will just...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (6)

Iraq Inquiry Digest

The Chilcot Inquiry is already proving a hundred times more interesting than anyone expected. My only worry is that people already view 2003 as ancient history. There is a tendency to think we already know what we only suspected. I was an agnostic on the intervention. I hoped in would work, but worried that it would be a disaster. I still think it is too early to tell whether it was. 

What is certainly the case is that most British journalists failed to hold the government to account at the time. Even at the height of excitement about the Hutton Inquiry,...

Continue reading...

Email to a friend  |   Permalink   |   Comments (1)