James Bloodworth

Too much learning is a dangerous thing

It is often said that the left does not understand human nature. Yet it is difficult to think of anything as antithetical to Homo sapiens as the notion, popularised by free marketeers during the 1980s, that people would willingly evacuate those parts of Britain where ‘market forces’ had decreed that collieries and steelworks were no

Return of the infamous five

It has become fashionable since the fall of the Soviet Union to diagnose communist fellow travelling as a form of Freudian neurosis. Where class resentment exists it is said to emanate less from angry young proletarians than from well-spoken youths intent on garrotting their dividend-drawing fathers. Most contemporary accounts of the Cambridge spy ring, which

So what if the Canadian terror attacks are blowback?

Anti-NSA crusader Glenn Greenwald published an article on Wednesday morning where he explained that the recent murder of a Canadian soldier by a radicalised Muslim convert was down to Canadian foreign policy. The important sentence in Greenwald’s piece is this one: ‘A country doesn’t get to run around for years wallowing in war glory, invading, rendering

I’ve just seen Nazi banners in Trafalgar Square. Well, almost

Picture the scene. Skinheads march through Trafalgar Square wearing SS uniforms and holding aloft portraits of the Fuhrer. They bring along a few right-wing Members of parliament who deliver comradely speeches and swear, arms raised in a sieg heil, to stay faithful to the party and the ‘race’. Thankfully, there would be universal outrage at

Where Boris was right on inequality

Hold the front page, Conservative Mayor of London Boris Johnson has made a startling confession: he’s not a communist. Well not quite, but almost. Boris in fact said in a speech to the Centre for Policy Studies yesterday that he does not believe economic equality is achievable, and that natural differences will always result in

Venezuela: a shining example of how not to help the poor

No serious person today views the Cuban Revolution as anything other than an impoverished tyranny – up to and including the leaders of that Revolution, who have been hastily turning toward capitalism since learning in 2009 that the island was on the brink of insolvency. It remains much easier to find useful idiots willing to

Russell Brand: The Jeremy Clarkson of the left

Until Wednesday I couldn’t decide whether Russell Brand was a fatuous buffoon or a misunderstood genius. But then nor, I think, could he.  I’m still unsure, although I suspect that he is a lot smarter than some of those who were going into raptures on Wednesday evening because Newsnight featured a guest who was spouting a