Many people on the left are wrapped in gloom at the moment.
There has been a slight recovery of nerve in the financial centres of Wall Street and the City of London over the past few weeks.
Reading Ken Livingstone in the Guardian on Friday of last week, I almost convinced myself that 1 May had been a bad dream and that Boris Johnson hadn’t been elected mayor of London.
Gordon Brown's biggest problem lies with the state of the economy. As Andrew Rawnsley put it in last Sunday's Observer, "The economy was the pillar of his reputation with the public."
For the past few years the chief role of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has been to act as praise-singer for global capitalism. Its traditional job of bullying governments into implementing policies of economic austerity had become harder to perform.
The outcome of Zimbabwe's elections remains shrouded in uncertainty. But one thing is clear. The country's politics remains dominated, as it has been for the last decade, by the struggle for power between the regime of Robert Mugabe and the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).
The Chinese crackdown in Tibet has raised the pitch of criticism of China’s government in the US. Calls for a boycott of the Olympics, originally in protest at China’s support for the Sudanese regime, are gaining strength.
Every anti-war activist should have a little gauge that measures, week by week, the risk of an attack by the US on Iran. Last week that gauge rose sharply.
White Season? Whitewash more like it. A backlash against multiculturalism has been gathering strength ever since the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. It has now become a tidal wave, sweeping through that supposed liberally temple, the BBC.
The collapse of Romano Prodi’s centre-left government in January was a miserable end to the hopes of all those who had wanted to see an end to the sleazy right wing politics of Silvio Berlusconi.
Talk of a "new Cold War" between Russia and the West seems to be getting more strident by the week.
"It is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows – the Iraq war is largely about oil," Alan Greenspan, the arch-Republican ex-chairman of the US Federal Reserve Board, admitted in his memoirs last year.
