ANDY HANSFORD enjoys an attack on the counterculture and its absorption into consumer capitalism In The Rebel Sell, two Canadian academics pick apart the way the counterculture has morphed into the height – and the pathfinder – of consumer capitalism at its most distasteful. And that’s it really. The canvas is broad, and the...
Peter Hain: time to go?
The new secretary of state for Northern Ireland is a bad thing for the peace process, says Paul Dixon. Is it conspiracy or blunder? Peter Hain is the most partisan secretary of state for Northern Ireland ever appointed. He has a documented record of activism in the movement for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland...
Into the cracks of the system
Matthew Brown reports on a weekend of political discussions at the ILP’s annual get together in Scarborough Back at the beginning of May, just two days after Labour limped back into power for a third term, the ILP held its annual get together for members and Friends to discuss the state of the world...
The last Porto Alegre
Mark Engler reports from the World Social Forum, now five years old It’s not Paris or Tokyo, Beijing or New York. Nor is it Sao Paulo or Rio de Janeiro. Enthusiastic residents of Porto Alegre, Brazil, will tell you that their modest city of 1.5 million people in the country’s deep south is ‘the...
Heed their voices
Labour MP Harry Barnes the left needs a new approach to Iraq following the elections Given that the Iraqi turnout was the same or even larger than at the last UK election, the left must do some urgent rethinking on Iraq or be morally sidelined while our natural comrades there fight for non-sectarian democracy...
Between the pop and the party
It may be a compelling read, says Will Brown, but ultimately The Last Party by John Harris is a disappointing analysis of the relationship between pop and politics It may be little older than Blair’s leadership of the Labour Party but in John Harris’ The Last Party Britpop has had its post mortem. Ten...
Telling it like it is?
With a ‘difficult’ election upon us, Matthew Brown reviews two contrasting tales of Britain under the Labour government It all seemed so much simpler back then. A little more than 20 years ago I clung to the back wall of a packed students’ union hall listening to Billy Bragg telling it like it is...
Letter: Reform of the House of Lords
It’s a sideshow, says Sean Creighton The type of reform Labour envisages for the House of Lords is a side-show from grappling with the real problem of the relationship between the Houses of Parliament, the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Assembly and a future working Stormont. I wonder whether the relationship could be considerably improved...
Beyond the market, below the radar
Barry Winter reports on a Catalyst conference that raised more questions than it answered Billed by Catalyst as a ‘major pre-election conference’ on renewing the public services, this event – ‘Beyond the Market: Public services in the twenty-first century’ – aimed to create ‘a positive agenda and a new progressive alliance’ on the left....
Lyotard and the post-modern
Does French Philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard have anything to teach democratic socialists? Martin Jenkins has his doubts Post-modernism’s impact on western intellectual life was at its height in the 1970s and 1980s, and was received by many on the political left as a threat.(1) As many prominent post-modernist thinkers were ex-Maoists, ex-communists and ex-Trotskyists, they...
Valley Fever
Ben Tullett reports on the battle to beat back the BNP in Halifax during the latest round of local elections Outside London, the June 2004 council elections were particularly significant. Following boundary changes, in large swathes of the country all seats were up for election, meaning that instead of having just one vote, many...
Democratic socialism
Democratic socialism exists and needs to exist, because contemporary capitalist societies are corrupt in fundamental ways: by the unjustifiable and unaccountable economic control by a small minority; by the consequent concentration of immense power in a few hands; by the disempowerment of the majority and the social exclusion of a significant sector of society;...