Discussion on Brexit, Right to Buy and political culture.
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I am blown away.
Rarely does taking part in a piece of theatre speak so directly to the core of my being, but Counting Sheep is one of the most exciting, moving and provoking pieces of theatre I have ever seen.
Set in Ukraine around the 2014 revolution we are introduced to the action by Mark – a Canadian of Ukrainian heritage who is visiting the country as a travelling musician. He gets swept up in the revolution and through him so too does the audience.
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Theresa May put her worst day behind her pretty quickly. Being thumped by a margin of 230 votes would cause most of us to have no confidence in ourselves, never mind asking anyone else to. But by immediately winning a confidence vote the next day May has had a chance—briefly—to change the narrative.
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Theresa May achieved something this week that had long been felt impossible. Both Remainers and Leavers passionately wanted the same thing – for her deal to fail.
And fail it did, spectacularly so. There will have been sore throats from all the chanting and sore heads from the celebrating that both sides were doing. The problem for everyone is that they woke up with that sense you get after a truly epic night out that you don’t quite know what happened, what exactly you did or what to do about it.
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Amber Rudd has described Buffy Summers as her feminist hero. Quite right too. While it’s hard to agree with Rudd that she’s an “early feminist” (Mary Wollstonecraft might have something to say about that) she’s definitely a fantastic role model for anyone who wants to look up not just to a hero but to a champion.
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Once again the Labour Party is spending a summer at war with itself. The disgust at antisemitism that has been rightly vocalised by Jeremy Corbyn, Tom Watson and many others has not stopped the issue becoming a political football in Labour’s vastly overheated National Executive Committee elections.
Many Corbyn supporters, the vast majority of whom share the disgust at antisemitism, still feel bruised after the attempted ousting of Corbyn in 2016 and vindicated by the party’s better-than-expected showing at the general election. They know that the Venn diagram of those who are outraged and upset by antisemitism has a lot of overlap with those who will never accept Corbyn as a leader. Some have therefore understandably – if wrongly, in my view – seen this issue purely through those old lenses.
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“Why don’t you just leave?” This is a question frequently faced by Labour members who are sceptical of the leadership and direction of the party.
A decade ago it was asked of those now in charge, who felt similarly out of step with New Labour. They stayed; things changed. Many see a lesson there.
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As part of my ongoing role as Co-Chair of Open Labour, I co-edited a pamphlet of the future of the relationship between the EU and the UK. This looked specifically at how the left should approach the future of cooperation with our nearest trading bloc.
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claiming it had treated him “like a criminal”.
No part of the saga is satisfactory for anyone involved. The Labour Party and O’Mara have both shown themselves to be lacking in understanding of what his offence means. Both in relation to those he insulted then, and why it matters to those of us in the party who remain determined to wipe the scourge of misogyny from the party and wider society.
O’Mara does have some legitimate complaints and has clearly had a dreadful time. I wouldn’t wish his emotional distress on anyone. The lack of support he received is a stain on the party and its processes.
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There is a sense I get from some Corbynsceptics in the Labour Party that if they just sit quietly and ride out the storm, then eventually things will return to their version of normal.
This is why there is so much infighting on process issues. They know that mandatory reselection, whereby MPs have to refight for their seat before every election would put at risk some of their MPs and would change the largely Corbyn-critical membership of the Parliamentary Party.
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Tens of thousands of people hanging on your every word and singing your name to the heavens. Who wouldn’t want to experience that? More pertinently, who—having experienced it once—wouldn’t want to recreate it?
It is very easy to see how, after the high of Corbyn’s post-election appearance at Glastonbury, the temptation to go big on Labour Live was as difficult to resist as it has proved impossible to deliver. According to reports, ticket sales are rather low and my younger, cooler friends tell me the line up isn’t up to much. Even I can see that there’s no Stormzy there—an oversight apparently caused by him already being booked to do something else. Which begs the question why that wasn’t checked before the date was set.
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In the bleak mid-80s, life was tough for young people in general, and in particular for those of a more sensitive disposition. Sensitivity wasn't cool. Cool was brash, buccaneering, blokey.
So when The Smiths came along, they spoke to a generation of (mostly white) dispossessed young people of a sensitive and mostly left wing bent. Their anthems to loneliness, quirkiness and being different struck a chord in many in a such a profound way that it is still ringing in their ears decades later. Their music was wonderfully refreshing (and Johnny Marr remains an untroubling hero) but it was the lyrics of Stephen Patrick Morrissey that made a lot of lonely vulnerable people going through a difficult time feel less alone.
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I’m not a pacifist. I believe that there are times and places where intervention is right and necessary. I have little but contempt for those like Stop the War who seem to believe that a war doesn’t happen until the West is involved. Wars are happening all over the globe. Sometimes the way to stop them is precisely for the West to get involved. Sometimes that is not the case.
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The battle to replace Iain McNicol as the Labour party general secretary is getting heated. There have been some pretty furious exchanges between supporters of Momentum chair Jon Lansman and Unite's Jennie Formby.
Those on the inside of each organisation will tell you that this is about deep, important divisions over how democracy within the party should be played out. Lansman's supporters say this is about party democracy versus union-backed central control, while those backing Formby say it’s about defending Labour’s historic link with the unions.
How we run local communities, what services are provided and by whom, are deeply political questions. The philosophical traditions of the two main parties in Britain differ greatly on state involvement at every level: national, local and international.
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