Kremlin O’Tankie

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 2 July 2012 at 12:23 pm One of the people quoted in this Birmingham Sunday Mercury report about the sad story of a man who set fire to himself outside a Job Centre is Stalingrad O’Neill of the Communist Party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), who said of the burns victim: “Presumably he was …

“Fresh consent for a fresh settlement”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Tuesday, 3 July 2012 at 3:16 pm Yesterday was a good day for the House of Commons, if you think it is important that members of the Government should spend a lot of time in the Chamber being accountable to our elected representatives. The Prime Minister on Europe and then the …

The royal family: a “progressive” institution

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Wednesday, 4 July 2012 at 12:01 pm George Orwell listed “progressive” as one of the “meaningless words” of which he disapproved, in his essay Politics and the English Language, 1946. In a small act of homage, I included it in my Banned List (buy or download the book , or browse the blog), despite …

The Coalition That Might Have Been

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Friday, 6 July 2012 at 2:51 pm I missed the start of the debate on the banking inquiry in the Commons yesterday, so I did not hear the start of Ed Balls’s opening speech: I rise to open this very important debate, and to support a motion that has been tabled in …

We ARE all in this together, after all

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Saturday, 7 July 2012 at 12:18 pm Britain has become a more equal society, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, in important research published three weeks ago, on 15 June, which went almost entirely unreported. It showed that post-tax incomes fell sharply in the first year of the coalition Government (April …

“It is not OUR red boxes that will go”

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Sunday, 8 July 2012 at 10:06 pm I digressed, in my article in today’s Independent on Sunday about George Osborne’s tussle with Ed Balls, on the reforms testing the coalition: House of Lords and boundary changes. There was a connection, because I said that Osborne won the argument on the substance, namely a …

A thousand years of history?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 9 July 2012 at 12:03 pm Not a major pronouncement, but a useful summary of Tony Blair’s views on the euro crisis in an interview with France 24, which I missed last week. He was clear about his wish to have “tightened” fiscal policy 2005-06. “I didn’t win that one” (against …

If Cameron recommends it, people will vote to stay in EU

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 9 July 2012 at 12:27 pm We psephological prudists do not normally approve of hypothetical questions in opinion polls, and I thought that questions about referendums had exhausted their limited value some time ago. But the YouGov poll in today's Sun manages to ask a hypothetical question about a referendum on this …

Twangtastic

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Monday, 9 July 2012 at 9:59 pm Lawrence Earle, the editor of the New Review, the Independent on Sunday colour magazine, had the good idea of asking some of the newspaper’s writers to try an Olympic sport for yesterday’s edition. I chose archery, for all the obvious reasons. You can read about it here. I …

Why oh why didn’t we see it coming?

By John Rentoul Eagle Eye Tuesday, 10 July 2012 at 11:11 am I shouldn’t bother, but it annoys me. There is a throw-away line in the excellent review by John Lloyd (pictured) of the current state of progressive politics: At gloomy meetings of UK and US progressives in Oxford and London earlier this month, the former Blair adviser Roger …