IN CASE you missed the advertisement and would like to apply for the job, the BBC is looking for a new chairman. He or she will work a four-day week and the salary is around £80,000 a year- nice work if you can get it.
TONY BLAIR'S die-hard supporters have given up trying to trumpet the Hutton whitewash's discredited conclusions. They think they can convince us that we have all become thoroughly bored with the stream of revelations about the lies that took us to war. We're meant to be obsessed with the minutiae of I'm A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here!
In 1919, dockers in the city of Seattle refused to load arms for use against the recent Russian Revolution. They were followed by dockers in San Francisco, London, Hull and elsewhere.
What a fortnight...the top-up fees vote...the Hutton whitewash...Blair lurching from one crisis to the next...
ONCE UPON a time the Hutton report might have worked. Lord Hutton himself represented the British army at Lord Widgery's inquiry into the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry in January 1972. Widgery produced probably the greatest official whitewash in 20th century British history. After a chat with the prime minister, Edward Heath, he exonerated the Parachute Regiment of the charge of killing 13 unarmed civilians.
IT IS almost 20 years since the start of the miners' strike of 1984-5. I worked as a miner for 25 years and I was out picketing all through the Great Strike. Two TV programmes screened recently brought the memories flooding back. They are not the first such programmes-a small flurry came out on the tenth anniversary of the strike. The usual approach taken by such films goes along these lines:
RETURNING TO London from Mumbai (Bombay) was like moving from technicolour to black and white.
The argument for socialist revolution is not really a case about "violence". It's about developing genuine popular power within society. It's about a vast expansion of democracy.
AN ANNIVERSARY that may slip your notice: the 100th birthday of the intelligence test.
Who would have thought that the best known writer of spy novels in Britain in the late 20th century would become one of the finest literary critics of neo-liberalism, war and empire in the 21st?
KEN LIVINGSTONE'S return last week to the Labour Party was hardly a surprise. It had been trailed in the media for months.
