Earlier this year I dropped out of university after a period of illness and found myself in this new era of "near full employment" working in the private service sector.
MENTION CLASSICAL music to many people and it is an instant turn off. So probably not that many Socialist Worker readers would instinctively tune in to watch a BBC programme due to be broadcast this Saturday (9.15pm, BBC2) dedicated to the Third Symphony by the composer Beethoven. Yet that is precisely what I recommend you do, because Beethoven's music is above all about struggle and freedom.
MANY PEOPLE who voted for the winning Liberal Democrat in the Brent by-election last week were motivated by good reasons. Brent saw traditional Labour voters turn away from Blair in disgust at his government's record on the war, privatisation and public services. Many voted Lib Dem believing this was, on the day, the way to give Blair a bloody nose.
WHAT ELSE can Gordon Brown do to convince us not to look to him as an alternative to Blair? At the TUC conference he was surrounded by bureaucrats who are desperate to have Comrade Brown as their dear leader. Brown gave the progressive elements a stern telling off for suggesting that society could be made any better through the Labour Party.
"IRAQ: THE New War". That headline in the prestigious New York Review of Books captures the scale of the fighting that continues in Iraq. The word occupation does not adequately describe what is happening. There is a new phase in this war that we were assured was won when Western television stations took carefully choreographed shots of the fall of statues to Saddam Hussein five months ago. It is like the colonial wars conducted in the 1950s by the British army in Kenya, Malaysia, Aden and Cyprus, and by France in Algeria.
THE FEROCITY of the attacks on the BBC was underscored last Saturday when Radio 4's flagship news programme, Today, handed its weekly essay slot to Charles Moore, editor of the Daily Telegraph. You had to suspend disbelief as Moore told his listeners the BBC was left of centre, anti big business and-wait for it-passionately opposed to the war in Iraq.
ENGINEERS AT British Airways voted by over two to one to reject a 3 percent pay offer that was tied to a new swipe card time recording system. The introduction of the swipe card system was the issue that saw check-in staff take extremely effective unofficial action at Heathrow two months ago.
The occupation of Iraq has turned into a disaster for George Bush as well as for the people of that country. And disaster for Bush can be catastrophic for Blair. Just four months ago Bush made a special, triumphant "mission accomplished" television address and Blair went to Basra to congratulate British troops. On Sunday Bush made another broadcast, this time to claim that Iraq was the "centre" of a global "fight against terrorism" in which the very future of "civilisation" was at stake.
I DON'T know about you, but I hate columnists who write about their holidays abroad. So I had better apologise in advance! This year I stayed in a tiny village just outside Marciac in the south west corner of France. Marciac, a village of 6,000 inhabitants, puts on the biggest jazz festival in Europe. Over two weeks some of the greatest names in jazz played there-Wayne Shorter, Oscar Peterson and Wynton Marsalis.
"THE FAR Left Is In Fashion". That was the headline in the right wing French daily Le Parisien on Wednesday last week.
ONE OF the sideshows to the Hutton inquiry is how the press report what's going on.
"WE ARE fighting for the inalienable right of humankind, black or white, Christian or not, left, right or merely indifferent, to be free," said Tony Blair in his fawning speech to the US Congress last month. Lying, as we know, comes naturally to Blair.
