A Free Left Blog

The novelist Doris Lessing has been called a ‘feminist icon’ but had some withering words for modern-day feminists before she died last year. At the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2001, she said: “ What I really can't stand about the feminist revolution is that it produced some of the smuggest, most unselfcritical people the world has ever seen. They are horrible ." She added: " It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man and no one protests . " Men seem to be so cowed that they can't fight back, and it is time they did ." I have had my fair share of shouty abuse from feminist mobs online and can certainly sympathise with what Lessing says, even though I would pull away from calling all of these people ‘awful’; indeed they are often perfectly pleasant when separated from this side of their politics. It is ofte...

I only decided to post this list having compiled it as a comment in response to a post on LabourList from The Fabian Society's Deputy General Secretary Marcus Roberts . I think anyone who is interested in the wider political world would take something good from all of these books, while hopefully not getting bogged down too much. 1)  Dee Brown - 'Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee'.  I recommend this largely because of Jon Cruddas' recent speech mentioning the book 'Radical Hope' by Jonathan Lear. That is a fine book with good insights, but this one has much greater depth of history and background on the existential and material dispossession of the American Indians , with moments of joy and hope across the cultural divides. It helps to break down what is good and right in amazing, diverse, confusing situations. 2)  J.B. Priestley - 'English Journey'.  A travelogue across England published in 1934 during the Great Depression. It's a ...

Despite the title ‘cynic’s guide’ I am not really a cynic – indeed I rather like being led astray by great rhetoric and romantic dreams in my politics. There is a place for emotion, passion, and being inspired – an important place too.   Alas, the elections for Labour’s governing body the NEC (National Executive Committee) is not that place. It is a place where cynicism is more at play, almost necessarily, and the candidate statements offer plenty of insight into how Labour reproduces itself. So a bit of cynicism in looking at them is more than merited. Whether the setting of eleven that was recorded recently on my cynic-o-meter is merited I am not so sure, but there it is. I am no Labour insider so what you are going to get is not an insider’s view, but rather how these elections and these candidates appear to me in my rather wary, grumpy, half-ignorant and sometimes rather angry state of being when it comes to internal Labour processes. Probably like most memb...

At first sight, Labour’s proposed National Infrastructure Commission seems like another example of politicians lacking in confidence, giving away their democratic powers to unelected ‘experts’ in unaccountable quangoes; taking the democracy out of politics; depoliticisation as authoritarianism . There is perhaps a little bit of truth in that, at least in presentational terms– through the cult of the ‘independent’, ‘impartial’, ‘expert’, taking an apparently neutral approach to political decision-making. But the handover of power proposed by Sir John Armitt in his Draft Infrastructure Bill for Labour – backed by Ed Miliband – isn’t so much out of the Whitehall jungle as straight into the arms of its big beast: the Treasury. The Commission would be answerable to the Treasury, appointed (mostly) by the Treasury, told what to focus on by the Treasury, and its plans presented by the Treasury in a form decided by the Treasury. Its headline role would be to carry out a big ...