One of the many weird things about the Labour leadership election has been, as a member for nearly 30 years, getting lectured about Labour values by people who – to my certain knowledge – have never been members of the Labour Party, are not members of the Labour Party, have spent a great deal of time […]
Mark Ferguson seemed like a decent, thoughtful bloke who did good work as editor of LabourList, so I was disappointed when he announced he was going to work for Liz Kendall’s campaign. I was even more disappointed today when he went out of his way to (i) misrepresent the work of Keynes and (ii) appear […]
In his piece in The Guardian today, positioning himself as a contender for leadership of the Labour Party, Chuka Umunna wrote: Our vision as a party must start with the aspirations of voters: to get on and up in the world, to see their children and grandchildren do better than they did, to get that […]
There’s no shortage of people dissecting the election result but here are my initial thoughts. Labour did not lose because it wasn’t left wing enough for Scotland – even if Labour had taken every SNP seat in Scotland, it wouldn’t have won this election. In any case the policies Labour offered at this election were […]
So, another set of elections, another ungood night for Labour. Admittedly it was a much worse one for the parties in government. Indeed it was so bad, that if the swing against the Conservatives and Lib Dems was repeated at a general election, Labour could achieve a substantial parliamentary majority without adding a single vote […]
I am chuffed to be able to point you in the direction of the latest issue of Albedo One (no. 45 – available in ebook form from Smashwords and Amazon) which features my story, “King Rook”. The story is one set in Northern Ireland in the mid-eighties and while none of the important stuff in the […]
I, like lots of other people, got a bit excited when the organisers of Loncon3 sent out the draft schedule for this year’s Worldcon – but I’ve had some ongoing website problems, so it’s taken a while to get this online. But, at last, for anyone who might be interested, these are (provisionally, I think) the […]
So this year’s elections are over, and lots of people are using the results as an excuse to try and shift their favoured political parties around, so I thought: “Why should I miss out?” I don’t think the European election results are either disastrous or brilliant for Labour. You can’t look at the raw figures […]
So, the Hugo nominations are out, and there are a number of things I like and many things I have absolutely no interest in. In the end I weakened and nominated some stuff, just so I could feel properly entitled to moan at the final shortlist. I think four of the items I nominated made […]