Write for us!Authoritarianism
Why World Government Would Be a Bad Idea
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In 1964, the Labour Party manifesto declared an aspiration for a single world government Labour always regarded the cold war strategies as a second best, forced on us by Russia’s obstinacy and remained faithful to its long-term belief in the establishment of east-west co-operation as the basis for a strengthened United Nations developing towards world government. World Government is not a mainstream idea in UK politics – and I can’t imagine today’s Labour Party going there. But within liberal and progressive circles, there’s some sympathy for the concept, presumably motivated by that liberal sense of internationalism and a desire to…
The Ballot and the Manipulated: Has Democracy Lost Its Way?
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Other than being friends, Dan and I don’t have much in common on paper. He was born into poverty in Liverpool, left school at sixteen, joined the army, protested nukes at Greenham Common, drove taxis, raised a couple of children alone on next to nothing, and arrived at philosophy and anarchism through sheer intellect led bloody-minded curiosity. He’s precisely the kind of intellect that Stalin would have sent to Siberia. Me on the other hand, I came from a middle-class background that turned out to be as fractured as any – a mother who resented me, an early exit from…
“Does Magna Carta Mean Nothing to You? Did She Die in Vain?”
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In the current political climate and with the increase in the intolerance of others, human rights have acquired a curious reputation. To listen to certain rightward leaning voices on the airwaves, one might conclude that they are a recent foreign invention – a bureaucratic imposition dreamed up by progressive ‘lefty’ lawyers in Strasbourg to frustrate the will of the British people. Nothing could be further from the truth. The idea that every human being possesses inherent dignity that no state may trample upon is not a creation of the twentieth century. It is, in fact, one of the oldest political…
Have the LibDems Been Captured by “Authoritarian Progressivism”?
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In the Lib Dems’ 35 year history, the ideological divisions that have emerged in the party have always, predictably, been along left-right economic fault lines, with Orange Bookers on the right and social democrats on the left. Meanwhile, social issues have been largely understood to be matters of conscience. The thread that knitted individuals together as a party was liberalism – a fundamental commitment to individual freedom tempered by an imperative to avoid harm.
