There was once a cheater called Renan Calheiros. He was born in Alagoas, Brazil. In the seventies, during Brazil’s military dictatorship, he stood for democracy and the end of a bi-partisan era, affiliating himself to the Brazilian Democratic Movement (Movimento Democrático Brasileiro). Fast forward a few decades later, as the […]

Launch a discussion or debate about ‘socialism’ and, before you can say ‘religion is the opium of the masses’, some cynical bright spark will pipe up with the usual string of cliches. ‘Ah,’ they’ll say. ‘Socialism doesn’t work. Look at Stalin. He had more people murdered than Hitler ever did. Revolutions always  […]

I know we shouldn’t blame all of our economic woes on the haughty George Osborne, but someone’s got to own up: 1. He told us that the most important thing is that we keep our triple A credit rating and now we have lost it. So he has failed. For […]

So David Cameron has changed his mind about immigration (certain types of immigration). His stance for the last two years has been, ‘you are not welcome’. He spoke of getting migration targets down to tens, rather than hundreds of thousands and the way he was to achieve that was to […]

Anyone interested in political writing who has not been listening to BBC Radio 4’s ‘George Orwell Season’ has been missing a real treat. George Orwell is one of our foremost writers – novels, essays, journalism, reportage, short stories, newspaper columns – he left behind a body of work for us to step back and […]

More than 2,500 business leaders and politicians discussed the current economic situation and took part in the annual World Economic Forum (WEF), which ended in the Swiss ski resort of Davos on Saturday, January 26. The theme of the meetings was Resilient Dynamism, with the largest number of discussion sessions […]

If ever there was a turning point in British postwar history, it was the Miners’ Strike of 1984-85. When the strike ended in defeat for the National Union of Miners (NUM), the full force of Thatcherite monetarist policies could be more thoroughly unrolled. Without the defeat of the NUM, the […]

Watch any TV news report, political show, read any newspaper article, and you will find a common thread amongst our political class across the main parties. ‘We have no money’ they say. ‘The cuts are necessary’. ‘We must reduce the deficit’, and, of course, the phrase that will be hung […]