A Free Left Blog

Sometimes as a writer on social and political issues, I get this nagging feeling that it might be a good idea to suggest what should be done in government and wider public life rather than just moaning about it. This may seem like a somewhat obvious and absurd thing to say. Surely it is the job of someone writing about public life to put forward ideas about how to make it better? I agree with this to an extent. However there are real practical difficulties. Firstly, I think the primary task of a non-fiction writer is to describe and explain what is happening fairly and accurately. This takes a lot more time, effort – and space – than people might give credit for. We have limited time and space to play with as writers – and since we tend to be writing about something, that something necessarily takes up most of our time and attention. Secondly, and perhaps more interesting, is the necessary confrontation with the world of existing policy-making and law.   Policy-maki...

I must say I have found it a little strange seeing so many 'moderate' Labour MPs and activists getting angry about anti-Semitism in the party under Jeremy Corbyn's leadership. Where was this anger and upset during two leadership elections which re-elected Corbyn in 2015 and 2016? This sort of stuff is not new. It was well known and covered widely on blogs such as Harry's Place  and Rob Marchant's Centre-Left blog  in 2015. I also wrote about it  on this blog . The right-wing press covered it extensively. Even the Guardian published a piece by James Bloodworth setting out the charge sheet against Corbyn and his many known associations with anti-Semites. But in both elections, as I recall, none of the leadership candidates dared to raise it as a reason not to elect Corbyn as leader. Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Andy Burnham in 2015 and Owen Smith in 2016 instead fought dull, dry campaigns trying to tell the membership what they wanted to hear while talking in...

I was a Leave voter, and I won. However, since that heady early morning of 24 rd June when David Dimbleby announced that Britain was leaving the European Union, reality has dawned. The £ has fallen sharply; bankers and business groups have despaired and threatened to leave the country; there has been a massive jump in ‘hate crime’; the world and especially our former European partners are horrified at us for having chosen isolation and xenophobia over openness and tolerance. Now we are stuck here with all this uncertainty, not knowing what that ugly word ‘Brexit’ means, while our government is clearly clueless and doesn’t know what it’s doing. It’s a new dawn, a new day – and the new reality we’re living in certainly isn’t comfortable or pleasant. That’s the story anyway. Some of it is true. The new reality does come with discomforts and difficulties, and the fractious nature of our politics on the subject of Brexit is pretty unpleasant. But the idea constantly pres...

I have changed my mind on Europe. Or perhaps it’s better to say that I have now properly thought about it, looking not through a lens of vaguely liking ‘Europe’, foreign countries and people but for what the EU is and does as an institution. This forthcoming referendum on 23 rd June is not on ‘Europe’ as a place, but the EU as an institution, one which has great power over Britain and whose 27 other leaders have the power of veto over even quite modest domestic legislation here. We have just seen the latter point with David Cameron’s watered-down ‘renegotiation’ or ‘deal’ demonstrating in stark terms how our government no longer has the power to decide the country’s future in the interests of its citizens. It is subservient not just to veto from the leaders of France, Greece, Poland, Slovakia, Portugal and others, but also to the diktats of the unelected, virtually unaccountable European Commission and European Court of Justice. We may like some of those diktats, for ex...

The language of human ‘identity’ often misleads us into thinking about it as something out there which matches something in here – a literal ‘it’ which is identical in both, rather like in a mathematical equation. In this way you would have an English identity for example if you somehow matched up to a list of English identifiers which we can measure you against. There is an ‘it’ of Englishness out there in this sort of account, and whoever has access to it can decree how English you are by comparing their checklist to you and your likes, dislikes, activities etc. My point here is that someone else other than you can carry out this operation of identity without involving you at all. It is an authoritarian relation, attained by someone with authority matching their knowledge of what an identity is against you and coming up with a result on their terms of what these ‘its’ - of identity and you - are. The same goes when we measure up any sort of identity – to English...

A few questions: 1) What sort of country (and indeed world) do we want to leave to our children and grandchildren? 2) Do we care about quality of life and, if so, what does it mean? 3) Are we serious about valuing our environment and the natural world, or are we happy to keep on despoiling and degrading them? 4) Are we serious about tackling climate change, and if not, are we prepared to face the consequences of it? 5) What priority does economic activity take in relation to these things, and is this priority indefinite or time-limited? These questions seem pretty important and fundamental to me, but they are questions that hardly ever get asked in our mainstream political debate, let alone answered. We have a democratic political system, but it often seems more dedicated to avoiding big and difficult questions rather than confronting them. Ironically perhaps, the latter point is not far from the position of the aviation lobby and its media supporters...

At its most basic level, the left’s core problem when it gets into trouble (as now) is falling into expecting those who don’t take responsibility for themselves to be the responsibility of those who do take responsibility for themselves. This is rather than expecting people who don’t take responsibility for themselves to start taking responsibility for themselves. You can broaden this out to cover countries and societies: that on the left we expect that those who don’t govern themselves decently and effectively should be the responsibility of those who do take responsibility for themselves. (Our version of colonialism there, and with the irony that we then blame those who do take responsibility for themselves for being indecent and immoral when they don’t take it on for others).   The victim mentality is an offshoot of this more basic stance, with victim status putting you under the responsibility (again, ironically) of those who are apparently making you the victim. T...