A Free Left Blog

"They came on in the same old way, and we defeated them in the same old way". ~ The Duke of Wellington, after defeating the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. The French must be saying something similar about the English now after their women’s football/soccer team comprehensively outplayed their English counterparts in a 3-0 victory at the Women’s Euro 2013 tournament, sending England out with a solitary point from three games. The failings of the women’s team against France and in their other two games against Spain (2-3) and Russia (1-1) were depressingly familiar from watching England men’s teams at international tournaments. The players struggled to pass the ball accurately, their basic ball control and anticipation was severely lacking and they often just lumped it up the field in the vague direction of a big Number 9, thereby invariably losing possession. They were tactically rigid and predictable, and wilted in confidence as the French quickl...

The former Labour MP Chris Mullin's Diaries are a delight: genuinely enlightening, funny, thought-provoking, indiscreet (at times, but not exclusively) and also moving. One aspect of the Diaries that has been largely overlooked by their many admirers is Mullin's politics, which I find particularly attractive and a world away from the Old Labour caricature that many New Labour types seem to assume. He considers the future not from a purely economistic point of view as most politicians end up doing, but from the perspective of what life will be like for his children and grandchildren, and other children and grandchildren around the world. This means giving more than a cursory consideration to what the economic system is doing to our environment, and to ourselves with it. This is his diary entry for 1 January 2000, at the dawn of a new Millennium: "A new century.   My grandchildren, who I hope to survive long enough to meet, will live into the twenty-second cent...