Muser's blog

‘Money, Money, Money, must be funny in a rich mans world’, so sang Madonna. One has to wonder if any of
Britain’s major political leaders are laughing today, the day it was disclosed that in total they are collectively nearly £60 million in debt. David Cameron’s Conservatives top the debtors list with £35.3 million in outstanding loans. However, it is Tony Blair’s Labour Party, with £23.4 million worth of debts, that is by far the more serious political and financial position. It issued a statement admitting to “acute financial problems” and that it had been a “difficult financial year”.  Read More »

I was recently challenged on a political forum for my association of the term ‘progressive’ with the left. Given recent form it’s not hard to see why, being brutally honest, the left lost pretty much any more than a nominal notion of standing for real progress somewhere in-between Russia’s Red October and the Fall of the Wall. Liberals became caught in the dilemma of defending capitalism as a more democratically structured society but also a viciously socially unequal one. Pulled both ways they engineered a compromise in statist socialism; ironically mimicking communism in seeing the state as the vehicle through which Utopia would be delivered, gift-wrapped in suitably radical blandishments as it was handed down to the grateful masses. Communism meanwhile became the exact opposite of what it was intended to be; far from an ideology of liberation it became a tool of vicious repression, mainly of the very people it was supposed to liberate.  Read More »

I remember when I first joined the Labour Party, a starry-eyed youth of 16; the country was sick of the Conservative government and as the 1997 election the mood was the closest you could imagine to a social revolution. Politics was engaging the mass of people, in both the negative and positive sense. Negative because people were fed-up and positively because people were excited about the prospect of a ‘New Labour’ government. Who can forget how the people lined the street as Tony Blair entered 10 Downing Street??  Read More »

Cameron steals a march

It pains me immensely to admit a Conservative might be right; but David Cameron’s speech on foreign policy sounded much better than anything that has recently issued forth from either 10 Downing Street or from the Liberal Democrat leadership. Rather than being an objection to a single incident – ie, opposition to war in Iraq - it amounted to a coherent ideological program to oppose the ‘war on terror’. This is not to say that Cameron suggested we stop fighting it, which is maybe the preferred option, but rather he tried to ‘move beyond it’.  Read More »

Do you ever wonder what kind of world your kids will grow-up in? Is it a something that you stop to think about? I don't have kids; some may think that I am a little young at 25 to have them. However, it is perhaps a question that should bother people more; even those who don’t have any.

Look on the front page of any newspaper and the outlook for the future isn't that rosy; flames of intolerance and hatred are burning embassies to the ground, costing lives and destabilising governments. It is worth pointing out that we only have ourselves to blame in this regard. Regimes in the Middle East have been meddled with and propped up by western nations for along time and often against the will of the people in those countries. An admission that the current problem with terrorism and fundamentalism is partially one of our own making is essential in actually solving it; such an admission presupposes a necessary radical change of outlook.

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