Just because it isn't said in polite company doesn't mean people aren't thinking it. A Home Office study has found that: 16% of people in England and Wales think it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend if she nags; 13% think it is acceptable for a man to beat his wife or girlfriend...

The Real IRA's campaign seems to be directed as much against Sinn Fein as the British state. The latest attacks include not only the killing of a peeler, but also a (failed) pipe bomb attack on a Sinn Fein office. Gerry Adams argues that it is an outright attack on the 'peace process', and risks squ...

Northern Irish politics is, as a rule, boring. Think about the material you have to work with. Between Martin McGuinness' lachrymose banalities and Peter Robinson's rigid bigotry (there is a great deal of both in Stormont), there is little room to be inspiring. The only occasional frisson is when on...

I was sorry to hear yesterday that Hicham Yezza has been jailed for nine months. Hicham Yezza was arrested and held last May for a period of six days, alongside student Rizwaan Sabir. The incident provoking this farce was the appearance of an 'Al Qaeda' training manual downloaded from the US governm...

Yesterday, headlines informed attentive audiences that the president of Sudan, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, had been issued with an arrest warrant by the ICC's prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo. A straightforward success story according to Human Rights Watch and like-minded organisations. Regimes that murder...

It turns out that construction firms have been buying private data on employees , and using it to blacklist union activists . I can only think that practises like this must be fairly widespread, even in those industries where unions are generally banished. Informal spying on potential employees is u...

I have heard that Bookmarks is experiencing its own, painful credit crunch at the moment, and needs to raise approximately ten grand in a very short period of time. Bookmarks is one of the few socialist bookshops in the UK, contains a lot of material that you would otherwise find hard to get hold of...

So, I don't know if you saw it or not, but there's apparently this huge crisis in the capitalist system right now. No kidding . One hears from various sources that this has to do with the 'animal spirits' of workers, investors and consumers. Would it not, then, be possible to revive the whole system...

I stopped watching/listening to Hicks' performances a while ago, as it had become too familiar. And anyway, some of my worst writing was inspired by failed attempts to imitate his sardonic mien. But with all the 15th anniversary celebrations in the media, I had a chance to review. I had forgotten ho...

This is a few loosely connected thoughts and observations, prompted by the sudden, intense sensation, while on the DLR to Greenwich last week, of travelling through occupied territory. The Xanadu-like compound that is Canary Wharf was the topic of an earlier post , and here I just revisit some of it...