"There is a crack in everything, that's how the light gets in"
(Leonard Cohen)
"Ignore all proffered rules and create your own, suitable for what you want to say"
(Michael Moorcock)
"Look for your own. Do not do what someone else could do as well as you. Do not say, do not write what someone else could say, could write as well as you. Care for nothing in yourself but what you feel exists nowhere else. And, out of yourself create, impatiently or patiently, the most irreplaceable of beings."
(Andre Gide)

"I want my place, my own place, my true place in the world, my proper sphere, my thing which Nature intended me to perform when she fashioned me thus awry, and which I have vainly sought all my life-time."
(Nathaniel Hawthorne)
“A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
(Franz Kafka)
"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated"
(John Donne)
“Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”
(Robert J. Hanlon)
"Life is beautiful, but the world is hell"
(Harold Pinter)

Friday, July 20, 2012

Bans Could be a Double-Edged Sword

EXTRACT: It would be profoundly mistaken to think that Miliband’s speechifying at Durham is just Blairite/New Labour business as usual - to be totally dismissed as reactionary politics and nothing more. And the same goes for his Hyde Park speech last March at the TUC-organised ‘March for the alternative’ protest - a mass display of resistance to the politics of austerity. Could you imagine Blair or Mandelson, the New Labour apostles, turning up to either event or making such speeches? Over their dead bodies, if truth be told.
Yes, ultimately, Miliband represents the politics of capitalism within the Labour Party and the wider workers’ movement - that is obvious. Unlike New Labour though, Ed Miliband’s Blue Labour - in so far as you can call it that - represents a form of working class politics, albeit one that is thoroughly nationalistic and backward. The fact remains that Miliband’s Blue Labourite recognition - and extolling - of the existence of the working class, with its “values” and “community”, does represent a partial step to the left when compared to the naked money-worship espoused by creatures like Blair, Mandelson, etc.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I actually wrote the article!