Channel 4 tries to stuff Boris

I have just been watching an attempted stitch-up of Boris Johnson by C4 Dispatches.

The reporter, previously unknown to me, was a snide cove called Antony Barnett. Never heard of him but he could sneer for England. His interviewees consisted of a variety of political has-beens and never-heard-ofs.

Boris is certainly not your average on-message politician but at least he tells it as it is, is clever, and has an original take on the problems facing our capital. So he got rid of Sir Ian Blair. Bravo. That's more than any other politician managed when it was abundantly clear Sir Ian had lost the confidence of Londoners. He wants to replace bendy-buses with new routemasters. Why not? Routemasters were an iconic symbol of London.

Boris will grow into the job just as Red Ken did. (Ken's big problem - he is a man who really cares about London - was not realising he had had his turn and no-one can go on forever).

C4 has done its reputation no good by this cheap, one-sided, apology for a programme.

Nanny State

It looks as though the Government is for once going to avoid a knee jerk reaction to the barking suggestion from Sir Liam Donaldson that no drinks could be sold for less than 50 pence per unit of alcohol they contain.

That's the good news. But unfortunately the reasons seem to be rather more about avoiding upsetting the voters in difficult economic times than a realisation that it is no business of the Government to interfere in people's lives like this.

Such attempts to manipulate behaviour penalise the sensible majority and usually fail to solve the perceived problem. If the Government wants to impact on binge drinking or over consumption of alcohol it should educate rather than legislate. It might also ponder why after more than a decade of Labour Government we have a society that feels it needs to blot out their lives with alcohol!

So Marxism isn't dead after all

When I did my OU degree in the 1980s it was obligatory in every essay to examine the Marxist explanation for the issues under analysis. I always found it provided interesting insights and it was also pretty easy to get good marks as the Marxist perspective was always the same.

Then, with the rise of the neo cons Marxism appears to have almost vanished. It seems that the only Marxist left in the UK is Prof Eric Hobsbawm. Once demonised by the right, he is now a Companion of Honour and almost as venerated as the Honourable Anthony Wedgwood Benn.

Anyhow, browsing the internet I was interested to see a video (now widely available) of one Professor Rick Wolff, Department of Economics at the University of Massachusetts. Prof Wolff is an American Marxist who has finally found his voice and audiences prepared to listen to him.

His lecture in Amherst on October 7, 2008 is available here

http://www.vimeo.com/1962208

I found it riveting. It is still in part the familiar glib Marxist line but it does put the present economic crisis in a new perspective.