comedy

Ralph Miliband on Labour’s last year in opposition

But that was in 1963, sixty years ago. Due to some personal reappraisals of my politics, I have been looking at the writing of Ralph Miliband and was pointed at an article he wrote in the run up to the 1964 election, called “If Labour wins”, republished in the New Left Review. I found it worth reading to observe the parallels between then and now. Wilson’s Labour were leading in the polls, the Tories had suffered the setbacks of Suez, and the Profumo affair and replaced a popular and powerful leader with a patrician land owner who was not even an MP arguable a stalemate choice between the then two leading Tory candidates.

This article contains a number of quotes from the article, as they speak for themselves, although of course I can’t help but comment. I have collected the quotes and comments into pieces on culture and comedy, economics, foreign affairs, corruption, campaigning and hope and the Labour left. … …

You gotta laugh (or not!)

I had reason to look at a YouTube compilation of what passed for comedy when I was growing up, in the Seventies. I was shocked at how poor it was; I actually saw very little of it. One reason for this was that we had only one TV in the house and my parents controlled the channel selector switch, there was no catch-up technology. Some of what we watched, and more importantly didn’t watch may have been based on their cultural aspirations; certainly we never had “The Wheeltappers and Shunters Social Club” on in our house, or in any house in the street; I grew up in, in Ruislip, not a hot house of working class or socialist culture. …

Back in the USA

I have arrived in Palo Alto, after my flight since I am spending the week at Menlo Park for some readiness training. I wasn’t feeling very intellectual, so instead of watching the Al Gore’s polemic on the environment, “An Inconvenient Truth” I checked out Mitchell & Web, who you can see asking if any of the Nazi’s Wermacht questioned the fascist imagery of the Nazi state, and advertising Macs [See Charlie Brooker’s comments at the Guardian…] all over the world, I then watched Tenacious D: the pick of destiny. Jack Black swears a lot. The journey was made more exciting by forgetting to move my clock forward and the worst queue for security I have ever seen, but I made the flight with a couple of minutes to spare. …