More banter from the political past today as John Prescott criticised Tony Blair’s “get a transplant” jibe.
Meanwhile, Margaret Beckett has somehow branded herself a ‘moron’ because she was one of Jeremy Corbyn’s sponsors, nominating-but-not supporting him so the Labour Party could have a debate.
Well, a debate is being had. A wider range of policies are being debated and the other candidates have found they are unable to triangulate their way to a victory on points. The contest is going to be far more interesting than any that has gone before and—here’s a radical thought—it could be that this moment of public disunity and ill-tempered argument could end up strengthening the eventual winner. Survival Of The Fittest, Whatever Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Stronger, &cetera.
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Category: Diary (Page 59 of 300)
Things that happen to me, or things I do
Tony Blair gave a speech today, warning the post-defeat Labour Party of a lurch to the left. Meanwhile, the most left wing of the four Labour Party leadership candidates, Jeremy Corbyn, is apparently leading the polls.
I find the pragmatism of the centrists in the Labour Party to be enticing. If you want to win power and achieve social justice, they say, there is no point in positioning yourself too far away from the electorate. To place Jeremy Corbyn at the top of the Labour Party is to distance the party from the rest of Britain. And that means further election defeats. Instead, the answer is to be more centrist, more Blairite, because at least that is where the rest of the country sits. Continue reading
I am rather shocked by the realisation that the discussion I chaired with authors Cory Doctorow and China Mieville was exactly five years ago today.
I recall that a couple of short excerpts from the event were included in a podcast at the time, but the entire discussion was never posted anywhere for people who could not attend. Happily, yrstrly took a recording of the discussion on my phone and I post it here (and on Soundcloud) for posterity.
Continue readingLast week I spoke at the launch of Draw The Line Here, the book of cartoons published by English PEN in response to the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
I touched on a few things that I have already noted here: the punctured optimism after the 7/7 bombings, for example. I also explicity noted the fact that, on the day after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, all but two British newspapers carried the same terrible image of the murdered policeman Ahmed Merabet, yet only those same two newspapers (The Guardian and The Independent) felt able to reproduce the relatively benign image of Mohammed on the cover of Charlie Hebdo the following week.
Amazingly, I also encountered a heckler during the speech! He protested that the incredibly crass cartoons that sometimes found their way into the pages of Charlie Hebdo were not worth defending. I unequivocally disagreed.
A recording of my speech is embedded below (and also on SoundCloud). Continue reading
Snubbed. Overlooked. Passed over. Ignored. Crash and burn. Disrespected. Insulted. Shunned. Neglected. Ostracised. Scorned. Rebuffed. Upstaged. Blackballed. Thrown shade. I did not win the Shirley Jackson Award for best novella.
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