Category Archives: Politics

DON’T ASK ME – I DON’T KNOW

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Theresa May ponders Brexit in Brussels

Paul Anderson, Fleximize, 19 July 2017

With parliament shutting up shop for the summer holidays and the Brexit negotiations formally started, the dust is beginning to settle after Britain’s bizarre general election – but only a fool would pretend to know what happens next.

What was extraordinary about the election was that nearly everyone expected it to turn out differently. All but a couple of opinion polls, every columnist in the national newspapers, every TV pundit – and the word on the street from canvassers from all parties – pointed to a giant victory for Theresa May’s Tories and humiliation for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, campaigning on what everyone said was the most leftwing manifesto since 1983. Continue reading →

MAJOR AND THE LABOUR PARTY

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Paul Anderson, in Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams (eds), John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister? (Biteback, 2017)

John Major’s governments of 1990-97 are not often discussed in terms of their impact on Labour – except insofar as Major’s travails with his party from summer 1992, particularly over Europe, provided the backdrop against which first John Smith and then Tony Blair built commanding opinion-poll leads for Labour, culminating in Blair’s general election victory of May 1997.

Even two decades after that triumph, protagonists, commentators and historians typically assign only a minor role to Major in the making of New Labour. As in the dog days of his administration and in Blair’s first years in office, he is still considered primarily as the inept grey man who happened to be at the helm of the doomed Tory ship as Labour rode a tide of popular enthusiasm to win an inevitable landslide. Continue reading →

BREXIT TAKES LABOUR TO THE BRINK

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Paul Anderson, New York Times, 28 June 2016

London – British voters’ rejection of European Union membership in last week’s referendum has set in motion the biggest political crisis Britain has faced since the second world war. The surprise is that the real storm has hit not the ruling Conservative party, but the opposition Labour party.

The immediate fallout was expected to be worst for the Tory leader, David Cameron, who had promised the referendum to pacify Eurosceptic rebels in his ranks. Having in effect staked his job as prime minister on winning for the Remain campaign, Cameron announced his resignation. In parliament on Monday, he conceded that a general election might soon follow a party leadership contest. Continue reading →

DEAD CATS DON’T BOUNCE

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The new conclusion to Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British Left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey. Published by Little Atoms, 28 December 2015

By the end of the 1990s, to most observers of the British left, the Leninist era seemed to have come to an end. The Socialist Workers Party, quasi-Trotskyist and owner of a competent offset press in east London, still had some life about it, but not a lot.

The Scottish Socialist Party – essentially the renegade Glasgow office of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been expelled by Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with SWP and independent barnacles hanging on – had some support in urban western Scotland. And the hardline Communist Party of Britain, the main Stalinist splinter from the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain (which had given up the ghost in 1991, 70 years after its launch with a giant subvention from Moscow), was still influential in a few trade unions. The CPB still had a daily paper, the Morning Star, though hardly anyone read it any more. Continue reading →