Tag Archives: Politics

Red Tory

Phillip Blond is sitting in his London office. “I think mine is a genuinely radical project,” he says. “Lots of people on the left have said to me that if the Tories do what I’m telling them to, they’ll vote for them.”
My profile of Phillip Blond, proponent of the “Red Tory” thesis and David Cameron’s [...]

Bermondsey 1983

An edited version of this piece about the 1983 Bermondsey by-election appears this week in Time Out.
[UPDATE: The edited, published version is here.]
Nearly twenty-five years ago, in late February 1983, Tariq Ali devoted his ‘Frontlines’ column in Time Out to the by-election campaign then taking place in Bermondsey. Beneath the headline ‘Bigotry and the Bermondsey [...]

The Death of Sigmund Freud

In 1914, Sigmund Freud published a short essay about Michelangelo’s statue of Moses. Freud had seen the sculpture, which shows the prophet holding tightly on to the tablets of the law, in the church of St Peter in Chains in Rome, and had been mesmerised by it. What was most arresting, he wrote, was that [...]

Richard Rorty: anti-foundationalism and politics

Reflecting on the legacy of the late Richard Rorty, Norm points out that there’s no necessary connection between philosophical and political commitments. In Rorty’s case, it’s entirely contingent that his (broadly anti-foundationalist) philosophical views should have lined up with his social democratic or liberal politics. After all, Norm argues, it’s possible to base a secular, [...]

Religion and the public sphere

Chris Dillow reminds us that secularists seek not to extirpate religious belief but to keep it out of the public sphere (a distinction that’s mostly lost on Richard Dawkins, incidentally). At least, that’s the moral I draw from his attempt to answer a “tricky question” raised by Johann Hari about the Christian roots of Gordon [...]

What’s Left?

This interview with Nick Cohen, in which he and I discuss his forthcoming book What’s Left?, appears in the new issue of Time Out (January 24-30; the piece isn’t up on their website yet).
In Ian McEwan’s novel ‘Saturday’, the protagonist Henry Perowne watches as demonstrators gather for the massive anti-war march of February 2003. He [...]

“Something loud and vulgar”

There’s a very famous remark of Stendhal’s, which Irving Howe discusses in Politics and the Novel. “Politics in a work of literature,” Stendhal said, “is like a pistol-shot in the middle of a concert, something loud and vulgar, and yet a thing to which it is not possible to refuse one’s attention.”
I’ve been thinking about [...]