Solidarity 085, 8 December 2005

David Broder reviews ‘Is it just me or is everything shit?’, by Steve Lowe and former solidarity deputy editor Alan McArthur The culture of ridiculously overblown praise, as embodied in the title, is merely one of the elements of modern society that Is it just me or is everything shit? lambasts. The book is an “encyclopedia of modern life” — an A-Z of attacks on subjects as diverse as Robert Kilroy-Silk, Che Guevara merchandise and “Fast food chains marketing themselves as ‘healthy’ (and feminist)”. Before reading the book, I’d thought that books/programmes/articles being cynical about modern...

Had we but World enough, and Time, This coyness Lady were no crime. We would sit down, and think which way To walk, and pass our long Loves Day. Thou by the Indian Ganges side Should’st Rubies find: I by the Tide Of Humber would complain. I would Love you ten years before the Flood: And you should if you please refuse Till the Conversion of the Jews. My vegetable Love should grow Vaster then Empires, and more slow. An hundred years should go to praise Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze. Two hundred to adore each Breast. But thirty thousand to the rest. An Age at least to every part, And the...

By Heenal Rajani We should remember George Best for his football alone and not his decline. All the rest, everything else that has contributed to the legend of George Best, is supplementary, incidental. Remember his achievements, remember how Best and a few other men helped to heal a city devastated by the Munich air crash (of February 1958 in which 23 Manchester United players, staff and supporters died). Some unkind commentators have remarked that Best’s death has only been covered with such volume because most sports journalists are middle-aged Manchester United fans. Unfair. He deserves...

In the run-up to the 2005 election, AWL formed an alliance — the Socialist Green Unity Coalition — with the Socialist Party, the Alliance for Green Socialism, the remnants of the Socialist Alliance, and the Socialist Unity Network. The coalition stood 30 candidates in the general election. Almost all the candidates stood as representatives of their own groups, mostly SP and AGS. Only one, AWL member Pete Radcliff, in Nottingham East, stood formally as a socialist-unity candidate, and formed a local Socialist Green Unity Coalition for the campaign. Still, there was a joint platform, a joint...

This is no peace conference The SWP and their Stalinoid allies in the leadership of the Stop the War Coalition have been working hard to present their 10 December “Peace Conference” as a left-wing, labour movement-oriented event. Its sponsors include not only the usual trade union and Labour left suspects such as Paul Mackney and Jeremy Corbyn, but international trade union figures including activists from the Korean Confederation of Trade Union and Democratic Labour Party, and Hassan Jumaa from the Iraqi Federation of Oil Unions. In fact, far from providing an organising space for working...