Month: December 2014

Time again for this year’s most-viewed pieces in our, ahem, glittering Hall of Fame at the Centre Left. A year of interesting resurgence of the anti-politics brigade, whether nationalists, independents or on the far left, as reflected in the top posts: 5. Venezuela on the edge While the trials of the long-suffering citizens of Nicolás Maduro’s… Continue reading The best of 2014

Jim Murphy is the new leader of Labour in Scotland. It is hard to see this as other than good news; irrespective of political leanings, he is an experienced, Cabinet-level politician, with the kind of clout and vision that the Scottish party urgently needs. The SNP is sneering as best it can, but it is… Continue reading Murphy’s push on party rebuilding should not stop at the Tweed

Jim Murphy is, thankfully, the new leader of Scottish Labour. If you were to believe Tom Watson MP or Len McCluskey, leader of Britain’s largest trade union, you would be convinced that this is a major disaster, the beginning of the end for Scottish Labour. But it is not. The sky is still up there,… Continue reading Murphy wins. Sky fails to fall in. Three cheers.

I am a little late to this and I also fear I may just have asked one of my friend John Rentoul’s fabled “Questions To Which The Answer Is No” (that is, a headline question to which the writer wants to imply the answer is yes, but it is not). However, I have seen an… Continue reading Could this be the beginning of the end for London Labour’s Stockholm Syndrome?

Last week, we started to see just how much some quarters of the Labour Party do not want Jim Murphy to become their leader in Scotland. It was not so much the carefully-crafted hatchet job from Tom Watson, which followed that of old flat-mate Len McCluskey, leader of the Unite union, from a few weeks… Continue reading Unite has learned nothing from the Falkirk debacle