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Freethinking with Rob Marchant As we pass an unusually newsworthy summer on the domestic front with phone-hacking and riots, not to mention economic wobbles in the US and China, let alone Libya, it might be wise to return for a moment to…
By Rob Marchant / @rob_marchant So, parliament is to be recalled for a day to debate the disturbances in London and elsewhere. Now, there is clearly an arguable case for the home secretary, the mayor of London and even the Prime Minister to…
Freethinking with Rob Marchant Democracy, as even that oft-pessimistic Marxist historian, Eric Hobsbawm, noted in his rather good volume Age Of Extremes, is one of the great unsung advances of the twentieth century. The post-war period…
Freethinking with Rob Marchant We cannot ignore the weighty events going on around the Murdoch empire, which are at least starting to wobble, if not rock, the foundations of the British Establishment. But these are heady times. We - and it…
Freethinking with Rob Marchant Let me tell you about Raed Salah. Or, rather, let him tell you about himself in the following quote: "You Jews are criminal bombers of mosques, Slaughterers of pregnant women and babies. Robbers and germs in…
By Rob Marchant / @rob_marchant As you read this, union leaders are meeting and discussing, moving seemingly inexorably towards industrial action over the summer. And you know what? It's entirely understandable. After all, as Dan Hodges…
Freethinking with Rob Marchant Ok, I am going to make a confession now which will probably damn me forever. In my foolish youth, I once used to work for a bank. There, I've done it. I've come out. I hear a faint chorus of "aha"s and knowing…
By Rob Marchant / @rob_marchant Hate figures and bogeymen are convenient for everyone. Up to a point, they can be harmless. I'm not averse to a bit of knockabout with the Tories or the Lib Dems: that's the rough and tumble of tribal…
By Rob Marchant / @rob_marchant Steel yourselves. Labour has had a single-figure lead in the polls for a while, but the principal question has always been: is it, like Kinnock's in the 80s, a soft lead; or a real one? Well, the election…
By Rob Marchant / @rob_marchant For the nth time in the last few days, the Lib Dems have shown themselves thrown by the basic politics of government; as opposed to opposition, where they were supremely comfortable. Whilst our own reaction…
Free Thinking with Rob Marchant After the weekend's national outpouring of sentiment, I want to take you back to another, earlier one. Almost exactly fourteen years to the day, on the 2nd May, 1997, a new dawn had broken - had it not? - at…
Free Thinking with Rob Marchant Dear Brendan, I am proud of much of the work that the union movement has done in the international sphere over the years, including its support of the anti-apartheid movement and supporting fledgling unions…
