Harry's Place

Interesting piece by Jonathan Freedland in the Guardian on what the Hutton Inquiry reveals about the state of our democracy:
Start with the delightful novelty of open government. The Hutton inquiry has thrilled political observers by allowing them to wallow in paper normally kept secret for decades. But releasing government documents is not just a treat [...]

I’m still waiting for that damned television to be delivered. In the absence of East Enders I’m forced to search the web to entertain myself. Here’s a particularly entertaining article by Tariq Ali I found earlier. I swear he’s turning into Dave Spart.
Tariq’s first point is that “The Republican Administration has utilized the national trauma [...]

National Public Radio had a nice feature this morning about one of the most beautiful and inspiring pop songs ever recorded: Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready.”
The song itself was inspired by, among other events, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (which, by the way, my father attended). The 40th anniversary of that [...]

Republicans like to boast about how they are the truly color-blind party, while Democrats are cynically race-conscious. So I find it amusing that the Bush re-election campaign’s web site features a photo gallery depicting the President’s “compassion,” in which virtually all the recipients of that compassion are African-Americans. Isn’t that a rather stereotyped view of [...]

I first saw this sentence embedded in an article in the New Statesman (pay per view so no link) and it reminded me of an essay written by a 19 year-old “Cultural Studies” student circa 1989. I’d forgotten about it until it turned up in Private Eye’s Pseuds Corner a week later. It’s found a [...]

Marcus has posted below his personal thoughts on what ‘being on the left’ means to him. I’ll do the same sometime soon and I hope Gene will have time to post his thoughts as well.
It has been an underlying current to nearly all the serious discussion on this site - the search of those of [...]

Yeah, Yeah - I know I said Harry’s Place contributors didn’t have time to define what the non-Trotskyist, non-New Labour Left was but I’m in all day today awaiting delivery of a television so I can at least begin to attempt to define my position while I’m not too busy. Harry and Gene may [...]

A couple of people posting recently in the comments boxes of this site have brought up the question of why Harry and I continue posting stories on organisations like the Socialist Workers Party and other groups like them. Surely such groups are irrelevent and marginal they ask? It’s a question which requires an answer.
Anyone who [...]

Barbara Ehrenreich’s book Nickel and Dimed, based on her experiences working at a series of low-wage jobs, was selected for reading and discussion by incoming students at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill this year. And then the fun started.
(Via Demisemiblog.)

With access to the web we have so much information at our finger-tips, so much material that we can reach with a quick tap into Google. But I am increasingly frustrated at the lack of a decent left wing read.
I’m not talking about news. There are plenty of good outlets for hard news. I am [...]