Late last Thursday, Congress moved to vote on the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act , which proposed to give $7.8bn towards the healthcare costs of the brave "first responders" at Ground Zero in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Many firefighters and aid workers developed respiratory problems following their efforts, including 55 who developed cancer as a direct result of the toxins released. Unfortunately, though the Act won a majority – 255 to 159 – it was unsuccessful, as it did not secure a two-thirds super-majority (a condition the Democrats had brought upon themselves – more on this below). Yet, the outcome was overshadowed by the drama that took place moments prior to voting, when Democratic Representative Anthony Weiner took to the floor in the House of Congress amid a series of speeches from his party, and began to deliver one last, impassioned pitch to his colleagues – chiefly, to those on the other side of the fence – in ...

It took the final election result of 2010 before I truly understood the early eighteenth century. On the morning which marked the consummation of the New Politics, a noted, hirsute Liberal Democrat activist approached me over breakfast and shook me by the hand. This being Balliol JCR, I was the best he could do by way of symbolic Toryism: an underwhelming, motheaten tiger in a zoo more noted for its herbivore collection. "Welcome to government," I said, feeling uncomfortably far from satire. ‘The Coalition’ suffers from problems of definition more, I think, than from those of will. That bald ‘Coalition’ won’t do alone; it sounds dystopian, the government in a book by Cormac McCarthy or Magnus Mills, encompassing shades of the unsuccessful Mitchell and Webb sketch about the post-apocalyptic ‘Emergency’. My instinct – after considering the social ramifications of ‘The Operagoing Coalition’ – was to go back rather further. The first internet suggestio ...

It’s been a full sixteen years since the Labour Party last had a proper leadership election, and so much has changed since a fresh-faced Tony Blair triumphed over Margaret Beckett and John Prescott back in 1994. Then, the Labour movement was in the midst of a real debate that had been opened by Neil Kinnock with his policy review after the 1987 general election defeat; a debate that was dominated by characters of radically different political persuasion, from Tony Benn and Bryan Gould, to messieurs Mandelson, Brown and Blair. What is so remarkably refreshing when one looks back on the policy review period is the extent to which real dialogue flourished within the party, both within the academic sphere and at the annual conference, where speakers were regularly given a rough ride by the activists in attendance, and the leadership’s motions shot down. New Labour's leadership effectively succeeded in closing down internal dissent within the party Fast-forward to the Labour Party o ...

In Britain, we like to think of ourselves as fairly rational. However bad we are, at least we accept overwhelming scientific evidence. We might fly more than anyone in the world, but we feel slightly guilty because we know that we’re burning the atmosphere up. Our education system is a shambles, but at least some of our children have heard of Darwin. With regard to the war on drugs however, this week our government abandoned such principles by sacking David Nutt - previously their chief scientific advisor - for criticizing the government approach to drugs classification. No longer is drug policy based on science. Instead, it has become an article of faith that drugs are bad, and policy works from there. Anyone who says otherwise is a heretic, even our most respected scientists. Mr Nutt’s sin in this case was simply stating was has been obvious to most young people for years anyway. Outside of crack cocaine and heroin, most illegal drugs are much less harmful than our legal drugs ...

It could have been epic; it could have been huge. As the Tories launched their manifesto at Battersea Power Station this week, they rounded up a handful of their work experience girls and gopher boys to stand outside and hold aloft a great banner bearing the words “We’re All In This Together”, all for the benefit of the cameramen flying over the venue in the network helicopters. Inside, David Cameron invoked Kennedy’s line about asking what you can do for your country, whilst all around the keyword of the day was “Change”. We use words like “crisis” or “genius” or “legendary” so much that they begin to lose their meaning, and it becomes all the more difficult to realise when we are presented with the real deal. The same is true of the word “revolution”. The Conservative Party – whether out of earnest idealism, or a desperate attempt to throw together all the interesting ideas that have come out of the right-wing think tanks over the last decade in order t ...

On the first of May, 2010, at 5.57am I and a group of friends were pacing quickly down Longwall Street towards the High Street to see the May Day celebratory chants from the top of Magdalen College tower. We would have made it there for the 6am start, but for the fact that the road had been closed by police, who were adamant that we weren’t allowed past because the crowd was already too big. No amount of pleading on behalf of our American friends, for whom this was the only chance to witness the singing, nor the fact that we were the soberest there, having actually got up to go and see it rather than stay up all night, would convince the officers to let us through. Welcome to modern Britain. We are living in a state increasingly concerned, not with the individual, but about the enforcement of rules and hell-bent upon the homogenisation of society into a single, controllable entity. A state in which no trust is placed in the concept of individual responsibility, nor any regard to in ...

In the current political malaise, the story about how the public hate their politicians is as tired as the rhetoric being used to fight the election. Sanctimonious commentators, journalists and public figures are all out to wring as many column inches as possible out of our sorry and sopping political class. “They are all crooks,” we hear. “They’ve misspent all our taxes and I’m disinclined to give them any more,” they holler. MPs are woefully out of touch and out only for themselves it seems. The duck house has become the new ivory tower. The attraction of such arguments is that they are easy. In a sense they absolve all of us from bothering to look at the thorny issues that face a Britain on the slide. Like toddlers who take refuge under the table in a storm, we can duck the complicated jargon of the deficit by suggesting that most of the people in the know are probably lying anyway. Such arguments are the electorate’s blankey – a reassuring friend in the unknown and ...

The growing dispute between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs has become, with little doubt, the defining political conflict of our time. Despite the professed best interests of Western governments, the struggle for the Holy Land continues unabated, with more and more obstacles to peace surfacing almost every day. Arabs and Muslims around the world have responded with anger and insurgency to the continuing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, breeding a culture of terrorism and violence that threatens to undermine the very foundation of our safe and comfortable world. But hope still remains. In the Aida refugee camp on the outskirts of the Biblical town of Bethlehem - now annexed by the Wall of Separation - a small group of Palestinians are striving to create a better world for themselves; using theatre and the arts to provide the embittered community with a platform for “beautiful, non-violent resistance.” “This is the Palestine we want to show the world.” Wandering throug ...

Walk into any tourist shop in Australia and you’ll most likely be bombarded by Aboriginal paraphernalia – from boomerangs to didgeridoos. The lives of this indigenous Australian people have been embraced by a tourist industry eager to tout Aboriginal encounters to the ever-greater number of modern eco-tourists. Tour guides around Ayers Rock will tell you of the appalling treatment Aboriginal communities received at the hands of the invading colonial masses – that Aborigines were still classed under flora and fauna until 1967; that a government bent on selectively breeding out this gentle people tore children away from their parents and put them into adoptive families, who all too often ended up treating the children cruelly, with stories of physical violence, and even rape, rife; that Aboriginals are still struggling for recognition which they are only finally, and grudgingly, receiving in the form of meagre land hand-outs in inhospitable areas. But these stories, whilst all more ...