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Ivan

Greasy Pole: Baby David Speaks

Greasy Pole

Among the more memorable examples of urban unrest dredged up by the analysts after last August's riots was Tottenham, that place in North London with the Seven Sisters Road and White Hart Lane, Jimmy Greaves and, less happily, the tragedies of Baby P and Victoria Climbie. And the Broadwater Farm Estate where in 1985 there was a riot on a scale to ensure its place in the record books.  The riot  was notable, too, for the killing of P C Blakelock, an event which led to Winston Silcott being sent to prison for life only to be released in 1991 when his conviction was found to be based on fabricated evidence.

Bernie Grant

Greasy Pole: Getting on at Westminster

Greasy Pole

How would an ambitious politician make their way in the world if not through attracting the maximum of attention to themselves? Regardless of the effect on our limited reserves of patience and of the cruel reality that whatever attention they get only reveals their self-publicity as a substitute for any kind of talent?

A Message for Aldermaston Marchers

Nuclear Disarmament

When your house is on fire you drop everything until you have put out the flames: and if your neighbours come in to help, you are glad to see them, without asking whether they are vegetarians or teetotallers or anything else. So might the campaign for Nuclear Disarmament argue, to justify the political diversity of their membership, united as it is only in the desire to abolish nuclear weapons.

Greasy Pole: Theresa May ... or May Not?

Greasy Pole

When things are that desperate it is worth trying anything. Which is why the voters swing from one discredited party to another and back again and why they have at times experimented by trying women to lead the government instead of the wearily ineffective men. But then came the real experience of Golda Meir, Angela Merkel, and Maggie Thatcher.  And now, there is Theresa May, the first  female chair of the Conservative Party and, after holding other lesser roles,  Home Secretary – only the second woman to land in what one of its incumbents, Jack Straw, once called a “ministerial graveyard”. The first female to be there was Labour's Jacqui Smith who will not wish to go down in history as a minister who claimed parliamentary expenses for the cost of her husband watching television pornography.

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