My weigh in on the media’s coverage of the death of Margaret Thatcher: my reaction to the reactions.    Whatever you think about Thatcher, old women, strokes, strikes, Tories, the dead; your view was probably echoed thousands of times across the internet last week. At lunchtime on Monday, the web experienced [...]

Margret Thatcher. The only political leader in Britain whose time in office is automatically referred to as a “reign”. Her time in office can be considered akin to the 11 years of tyranny to rival that of Charles 1st, the last UK monarch to wield real executive power. Like the intrepid King, [...]

Widespread revulsion met the shootings of striking workers at the Lonmin mines in Marikana, South Africa last August. Police opened fire and killed 34 miners, wounding 178 more. It proved to be a turning point in the post-Apartheid era, it promised so much for ordinary working class people, after ridding themselves of oppressive minority rule [...]

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 [...]