Reflecting on his experience of applying to university, Patrick Phillips gives a critical appraisal Last summer I applied to ‘attend’ university. ‘What are you attending to, or, for?’ was a question that made me wonder. When we say we are ‘going to university,’ how have we imagined, or rather perceived, what our final destination will […]
General election 2019 analysis We would welcome any responses to the analysis contained in this issue – what’s right, what’s wrong, what’s missing etcetera – as we intend to continue our coverage of the implications. Please send any comments, articles or suggestions to the editor, Gregor Gall (gregorgall@outlook.com), for the March/April issue by Friday 21 […]
Campbell Martin gives an update on his expose on the PPP scandal in North Ayrshire When ‘new’ Labour swept to power in 1997, the party embraced the Tories’ Private Finance Initiative (PFI) method of funding public sector capital projects. However, having ridiculed the funding method while in opposition, ‘new’ Labour, once in government, rebranded PFI […]
The Big Meeting (2019), director: Daniel Draper, editor: Christie Allanson Reviewed by Jackie Bergson The Big Meeting is a documentary by film company, Shut Out The Light, which follows from the success of its Nature Of The Beast (2017) about now former Labour MP, Dennis Skinner. Its latest feature-length chronicle of the 134th Durham Miners’ […]
Gerry Hassan and Simon Barrow (eds.) Scotland the Brave? Twenty Years of Change and the Future of the Nation, 2019, Luath Press £14.99 Reviewed by Gordon Morgan This is a hugely ambitious book to mark the twentieth anniversary of the Scottish Parliament. It consists of forty chapters each written by a diverse set of people […]
Classic recounted: Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey, Mainstream Publishing, new edition, 1996 Commented on by Rory Green Maggie Chapman reviewed James McEnaney’s A Scottish Journey in Scottish Left Review (Sept/Oct 2019). My eye was drawn to her review as it brought to mind a book of the same name, one briefly referenced but rightly praised by […]
Slavoj Žižek Sex and the Failed Absolute, Bloomsbury, 2019, £20.00 Reviewed by Sean Sheehan Žižek’s first English-language book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, appeared in 1989 and was an immediate sensation, comparable to watching Pulp Fiction when it came to cinemas in 1994, or seeing one of Alexander McQueen’s runway shows a decade later. There […]
Gardner Thompson, Legacy of Empire: Britain, Zionism and the Creation of Israel, Saqi Books, £20.00, 9780863563614 Reviewed by Sandy Hobbs Sixty years and more ago, when involved in socialist politics, I had many Jewish comrades. When I and other socialists organised the first Glasgow meeting of the Campaign against Racial Discrimination, there was a friendly […]
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Profile Books, 2019, £10.99 Reviewed by Colin Fox Whilst reading this international bestseller by Harvard academic, Shoshana Zuboff, I also happened to watch the Netflix documentary, The Great Hack, about the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. Both the paperback and the film exposed a practice that claims human experience […]
As the bells rang in the New Year and 2019 drew to a close, many on the left were still in a state of shock that a philandering sociopath who had lied to the country, lied to MPs, lied to the Queen, attempted to shut down Parliament and dodged multiple medias interviews had still managed […]