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Dispatches from the corridors of British power
Britain's Opposition leader, Ed Miliband has emerged from two national crises with flying colours. He may have been a little late coming to the first - the Murdoch hacking scandal - but better late than never. As it was, he managed to sound both authoritative and urgent when turning his fire on the ...
The fires have been dampened, the tottering ruins of wrecked buildings have been demolished. Gradually people have begun going about their business. Touchingly many of those who took the brunt of last week’s rioting have begun to benefit from publicly spirited individuals shocked at what they saw ...
It is the thirtieth anniversary of the Toxteth riots in what was better known then as the Liverpool 8 district. I remember the shocking scenes, as a corner of that city burned and policemen defended themselves with truncheons and dustbin lids. Thirty years ago, these riots and those that followed ...
Amidst all of the market babble and financial gobbledegook that poured from both ‘analysts’ and ‘practitioners’ following last week’s global market meltdown, came a shaft of light. It took the form of a question and the question was posed by Robert Reich; “Pardon me”, he said “but who gave ...
Had Piers Morgan stuck with the celebrity thing, I suspect that the hacking storm would have touched him, but not engulfed him. Celebrity twitter is what Morgan knows, and it was hardly his fault that those who controlled the Daily Mirror back in the 1990s thought that a young man so steeped in ...
One there was ‘Watergate’; now every minor, irritating little faux scandal as the mocniker ‘gate’ attached to it. The latest being ‘Tipgate’, an August silly season story that has found the Prime Minister, David Cameron failing to pay a tip in an Italian restaurant. Here is the story, breathlessly ...
No journalist worth his or her salt should rejoice in the downfall of another. There are plenty of commentators in particular that I could name who infuriate me, who have in fact infuriated for me for years, or who I have had real spats with. I would be disappointed if some of them didn’t feel the ...
For centuries, the best of radical journalists, campaigners and trades unionists have railed against the British Establishment. They have largely had good cause to do so. The apex of the British class system has belonged to many of the same families for centuries. Such has been their power and ...
July 13th. Unlucky for some. Unlucky for Rupert Murdoch and the News Corporation mafia in particular. Last week there was catharsis as Britain’s shabby political establishment suddenly realised that the Murdoch empire no longer had them by the short and curlies. Today the political ...
Sales of the doomed News of the World increased by 30% we are reliably informed on the day the newspaper closed, and on the day Rupert Murdoch flew in dressed in an open neck shirt and a panama hat. The ‘Dirty Digger’ as Murdoch used to be known affected not to have a care in the World. He said ...
It was so ordained that James, rather than Rupert Murdoch, announced the closure of the News of the World, the 168 year old tabloid, after the presses roll this Sunday. He did so from New York, the city to which Rupert spirited him earlier this year, possibly already aware that leaving him in ...
Today is the day that the sound of chickens coming noisily home to roost was heard all over the United Kingdom. It began with a BBC radio interview of the father of a child who had been killed in the terrorist bomb outrage in London in July 2005. In a dignified manner he revealed that he would ...
A Guardian newspaper investigation in Britain has revealed that one of Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers, the mass selling tabloid, ‘News of the World’, hired a private investigator to hack into the cell phone of a teenager who had gone missing and was subsequently found murdered. This sort of activity ...
IT was one of Labour’s most successful – in terms of winning elections – leaders, Harold Wilson, who realised that the only way to lance the division in his party over Europe was to hold a referendum. That was back in 1975. Since then, Labour has gone from having a policy of quitting what was ...
Neo liberalism is in crisis. Discuss. If only I were back at some red brick university and being asked this question by one of my lecturers! Neo liberalism is in deep crisis, as the prospect of economic depression on the back of the Euro zone break down becomes more apparent. So while it ...