Stuff

The excellent David Aaronovitch of The Times now has his own web log. Which reminds me I should put the links back up on the right-hand margin of this site. I never got round to it after changing the design, and I am not the most technically proficient of bloggers. But it will be done.

The Labour Friends of Iraq web site has an article by Harry Barnes commenting on Andrew Murray's long review of my book in The Communist Morning Star. Barnes comes from a different part of the Left from me, and rightly writes not to defend me but to criticise Murray's extraordinary insouciance about, inter very much alia, Soviet imperialism. Much of what Barnes says is sensible and welcome, until you get to the preposterous last sentence when he urges "Democratic Socialists should avoid the twin dangers of New Labour and the New Fascism" - as if these were comparable forces.

My interview on the Little Atoms radio programme last week is now available for download from the programme's web site, should you have nothing better to do than listen to me opining for an hour - or even for a few minutes. We talked about anti-totalitarianism, foreign policy, Noam Chomsky, the Middle East and other things. Nick Cohen will be the next guest on this programme, on Friday 20 January.

I don't exactly urge you to do this, but following this link to Sky News is an education. As the report says:

There have been extraordinary scenes broadcast from the Big Brother house. A highlight of the reality television footage was George Galloway pretending to be a cat, as he licked milk out of the hands of actress Rula Lenska.

The description doesn't prepare you for the sight of a bald middle-aged man nuzzling the cupped hands of an aging actress. It is physically repellent. I went on Sky News this evening to debate Galloway's antics with John Rees, national secretary of the Respect 'Coalition' and a leading member of the Socialist Workers' Party which controls it. For some reason Galloway himself was unavailable. I confess I didn't listen to a word Rees said, I was so engrossed by the body language: shiftiness scarcely covers it.

I expressed sympathy for Rees for coming on the programme when his party had previously condemned Big Brother as 'sewer-dredgingly awful', and I said that Galloway's appearance had the merit of not being the least creditable thing or most egregious debasement of public office he had done. After George travelled to Damascus last July to tell the Syrian people, who had had no say in the matter, how fortunate they were to have Bashar al-Assad as their leader, there were few ways open to him to lose his dignity further, and he at least showed imagination in finding one of them.

UPDATE: Nick Cohen in The Observer makes the essential point about Galloway:

When Galloway comes out of the Big Brother house, no one in the middle classes will want to know him and that will be for the good. Far from being sinister, Celebrity Big Brother deserves to win a Bafta for its exposure of the truly sinister.

Still, aren't they weird? The liberals who think it is worse to appear on a TV show than in the court of a fascist tyrant; the socialists who believe that it is left wing to ignore Iraq as the forces of the far right blow it to pieces. Not just fatuous and immoral, but weird beyond measure.