(originally written June 2012) Shostakovich 10 A wonderful performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the CBSO under the mesmerising Andris Nelsons. Shostakovich is a site of ideological battle, his music fiercely contested and debated, with every sort of hidden meaning detected which might make it acceptable to anti-communist listeners. At the root of this is …
Category: politics
The Future From 1989
(I wrote this for the October 1989 issue of Nalgo Action ) Birmingham City Council - Model Managers? With Labour leading in the opinion polls it's worth having a good look at how a Kinnock government would treat public services. The ‘new model’ Labour Party's view that its job is to ‘manage’ capitalism is already …
Leopards and Spots
Source Nalgo Action Issue 3 23/10/89 ‘Caring' council closes children's centres Workers, parents and vocal children lobby Islington Council by Jo Thwaites a parent and Nik Barstow With chants of “Margaret Thatcher, Margaret Hodge, what's the difference? Not a lot!” Islington Council's 'caring' leader was given a rough ride by 180 angry parents who lobbied …
Great Lockdown of 2020
The Great Lockdown of 2020 Being forced to stay at home for weeks on end allows the energetic and self-directed to invent new ways of filling their time with productive and satisfying activity. This would be an interesting topic for Marxist thinkers to develops in terms of alienated labour. However, for someone as basically idle …
Who Writes Our History?
Sarah Helm's If This is A Woman: Inside Ravensbruck: Hitler's Concentration Camp for Women is the most important and best history book I have read in a long while. It is a gruelling read full of horror and evil, redeemed in part by extraordinary acts of courage, compassion, heroism, solidarity and generosity. But it would be foolish …
Mental Health and Left-Wing Politics
This short essay is an attempt to answer the question ‘what can be done to make it easier for people with mental distress to get involved in left-wing politics?’. As such it needs to be stated at the start that the essay is a complete failure; it raises a lot of questions and issues but …
Bits and Pieces – June 2012
Shostakovich 10 A wonderful performance of Shostakovich’s 10th Symphony by the CBSO under the mesmerising Andris Nelsons. Shostakovich is a site of ideological battle, his music fiercely contested and debated, with every sort of hidden meaning detected which might make it acceptable to anti-communist listeners. At the root of this is a problem that conventional …
A Collation of Links
This entry is somewhat remarkable in that consists solely of links to other people’s blog entries with almost no discussion or intervention. I do most heartily commend all of the pieces, but admit that it also functions as an easy historical record for me of a period in which I have not blogged. I suppose …
A Sick Society
The attack on sickness benefits has been going on for a number of years but has been vastly accelerated by the LibCons. This attack is both a personal and political matter for me. It has been brilliantly covered in a number of articles by HarpyMarx which I link to below. I wanted however to both …
Fire and Circuses
Although I do not want to spend all my time looking backwards and I have already offered some thoughts on the past 18 months, I must not overlook some of the best things I have read on the net. It is, after all, from the net, in the form of email, blogs and links to …
Moving Toyshop 