Jade, ejected on an 82% public vote for her bullying and racism, is nevertheless more victim than villain. More interesting is Pater Bazalgette, chairman of the company responsible for Big Brother, and a sophisticated exponent of the programme’s interesting if unattractive role in society [More >>>]
The campaign to pressurise the English National Ballet into sacking one of its principal dancers because she belongs to the BNP is an assault on the principle of freedom of speech and opinion and reflects a noxious streak of self-righteous authoritarianism in the anti-racism industry [More >>>]
Few politicians commenting on Saddam’s hanging have dared to condemn the ‘execution’ itself, instead sheltering behind an easy denunciation of the manner in which it was performed or, even more cowardly, its unauthorised filming and publication, which in fact performed a valuable service. Only Gordon Brown among UK ministers has so far implicitly denounced the hanging itself [More >>>]
Ten justifications for describing the killing of Saddam Hussein as “an atrocity” [More >>>]
The government’s obstruction, on nakedly political grounds, of a criminal investigation of possible bribery in the context of the huge al-Yamamah arms contracts with Saudi Arabia is being explained with multiple mutual contradictions and may be in breach of UK international obligations. I offer an alternative but unfortunately improbable scenario [More >>>]
The evidence given by Carne Ross to the Butler Inquiry on the use of intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war was 'classified' and accordingly not published in the Inquiry's report. Ross was...
Alan Mumford’s cartoon history of the Labour Party (£19.99 from info@politicalcartoon.co.uk), by a cartoon and contemporary political history pundit and an old friend, is a must-buy, and makes a perfect Christmas present — no, nothing in it financially for me [More >>>]
President Ahmadinejad’s conference of Holocaust deniers is an objectionable event, but there’s no justification either for German and Austrian laws under which a Holocaust denier can be (and in the case of David Irving, has been) sent to prison for years for expressing their absurd if unpalatable views [More >>>]
We older Old Labour folk were more amused than saddened by this, in today’s Guardian Corrections column: “In a front-page sketch, Remember Nye Bevan’s warning …, December 5, we mistook, both in the heading and text, Mr Bevan (1897-1960) for his contemporary Ernest Bevin (1884-1951). It was Ernest Bevin, when foreign secretary, who pleaded with colleagues not to send him naked to the conference table.” [More >>>]
Some recent media items that are unintentionally revealing, chilling, or otherwise off-centre [More >>>]