THIS SHOULD BE LABOUR’S NEW YEAR RESOLUTION
”The Right has constructed its majority by closing borders, “taking back control”, waging culture war… Keir Starmer’s Labour has mostly rehashed and reheated the rhetoric about patriotism and borders that plays to Conservative strengths… Instead of blaming and waiting, Labour needs to mount an independent offensive to build its own majority, by providing solutions to the problems caused by slashed benefits and extractive overlords. It needs to make its case on its own terms, not just as the nicer alternative to Johnson’s evil sherriff.” – Nesrine Malik, The Guardian
A CAFE IN HASTINGS HAS A SIGN IN ITS WINDOW – “THIS CAFE IS A HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT FOR THE HOME SECRETARY”
At the café they prepare trays of piping hot chips, together with hot drinks. These are then rushed down to the beach for the newly arrived asylum seekers. Hastings of course is the setting for ‘The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists’ by Robert Tressell, 1914.
“THE NEW WORLD ORDER REVEALED AT ITS MOST SELFISH AND MORALLY DEFECTIVE”
“Countries are locked into a narrow nationalism, trapped in a geopolitics that puts military and economic sanctions before food for the hungry… Our liberal world order is proving itself neither liberal nor orderly… To turn our backs now on ordinary Afghans in their hour of greatest need would be the final insult;
a badge of shame that the free world would carry forever.” – Gordon Brown, The Guardian, 14 January, 2022
THE TORIES’ VICIOUS TEETH AND CLAWS ARE BEING UNVEILED
We are now hearing demands for tax cuts, deregulation, “private good, public bad”, “radical supply-side reform” and the classic nonsense – that the public sector is becoming bloated and thus “shrinking the state” is necessary. In fact the public sector remains smaller as a percentage of total employment than under Labour,
17.5 % now, compared with 22.2% in 2009. Also, for example, the main rate of corporation tax has been reduced from 52% in 1979 to a mere 19% today.
“For the model to reboot Britain from Covid – 19, the Confederation of British Industry invokes, not Thatcher but the 1945 Labour Government.”
The Guardian
“IF YOU’RE NOT VACCINATED AND YOU’RE ELIGIBLE, YOU’RE NOT JUST IRRESPONSIBLE – YOU’RE AN IDIOT. ” – SIR ANTONY BLAIR
As usual with Blair, he displays a lack of understanding and sensitivity of the deepest questions of age, class, ethnicity, faith and language. As well as what poverty, insecurity and institutionalised prejudice do to people’s relationship with the state. These questions were discussed in depth by John Harris in The Guardian on 3 January 2022.