First published: July 1996

Some years ago the Financial Times ran an exceptionally instructive back page interview with Jean Marie Le Pen, the leader of the extreme right wing French National Front. It was instructive, not because of what it told the reader about Le Pen, but for what it reflected about the thinking of the Financial Times.

The article was entitled ‘Militant bourgeois’. The tone of the interview was precisely expressed by its title. It sought to foster toleration among the FT’s readers of Le Pen as a ‘militant’ representative of a ‘bourgeois’ political force – without, of course, endorsing his more obscurantist, racist and anti-semitic views. The approach was to create the kind of attitude to Le Pen among FT readers, that might have been found among militant car workers in the 1970s to a ‘communist’ shop steward – ‘we don’t agree with a lot of their ideas, but they are useful to have on our side in a fight with the class enemy.’

First published: May 1996

The most conclusive indictment of the economic policies which have devastated Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union since 1989 and 1991 is their contrast with the spectacular success of the reform of the world’s second major centrally planned economy – China – a model now being increasingly applied in Vietnam and Cuba. China’s success shows that the suffering inflicted upon the peoples of Eastern Europe and the former USSR, under the guidance of the IMF, was totally unnecessary.

[Continued from Part 1] The virtuous circle of the Chinese economic reform As the consumer boom took off however, it had an increasing knock-on effect upon the state-owned industrial sectors of the [Read more]

First published: 14 August 2006

The casualty figures for the fighting up to the ceasefire in Lebanon confirm once more that the real, that is the most strongly, terrorist state in the Middle East is Israel. In its entire struggle with the Palestinians, of course, Israel always kills a hugely greater number of civilians than it suffers casualties itself. In the fighting up to the Sunday evening before the ceasefire, Israel stated it suffered 167 killed, of which 114 were military personnel and 53 were civilians – that is, 68 per cent of Israeli deaths were military and 32 per cent were civilian (CNN, ‘Israel-Hezbollah cease-fire in effect’).

First published: 21 August 2006 If any further indication were required of the terrorist character of the Israeli state it is merely necessary to take the Palestinian casualty figures since mid June. [Read more]

First published: 13 June 2006

One of the chief areas where David Cameron has attempted to ‘rebrand’ the image of the Conservative Party is regarding women. This is unsurprising. The decline of support for the Tory party among women has been its single biggest loss of electoral support in the last two decades.

For most of the 20th century women were an electoral bastion of the Conservative party. From when women first won the vote in 1918 until the 1990s, they systematically voted in higher proportions for the Tories than did men. However this lead gradually eroded during the second half of the 20th century. From the 1990s onwards a higher proportion of women than men began to vote ‘left’ – i.e. for Labour rather than the Tories. This ran in parallel with the development in the US where more women than men now vote Democrat than Republican.