It does genuinely seem to me that things changed in 2011, in ways that have major consequences for radical politics. Marko Hoare’s “The year the worms turned ” and Kenan Malik’s more downbeat “Chewing over the old year, spitting out the new ” summarise this shift well. Read More »

Post of the week Contentious Centrist on recognizing righteousness . (And while you’re there, read this interesting post on the Haredim, solidarity and tolerance in a multicultural society , and watch this interview with Irving Howe and this one with Roger Scruton . Read More »

After I finished writing my first thoughts on the Stephen Lawrence verdict  last night, I read two articles which gave me pause for thought. One, entitled “Stephen Lawrence and the politics of race “, is by David Goodhart in  Prospect ; the other is “This isn’t justice – it’s politics ” by Brendan O’Neill in  Spiked . Read More »

Chris Ofili: No Woman No Cry So, the jury has decided and the judge has sentenced and David Norris and Gary Dobson , two of Stephen Lawrence’s five or six killers, will be serving time. The wait has been long: almost the same length as Stephen’s short life. And the time they serve will be short: the pair have been sentenced today as juveniles. Read More »

2011 has been a strange year at BfB. Lots of guest posts , some of them inciting considerable controversy, and sometimes acrimony. The controversy made me think I was doing something right, but the acrimony made me think I was doing something very wrong, and there was a period in the middle of the year when I came close to shutting up shop. Read More »

Post of the week: Johnny Guitar: Defending the indefensible with the absurd . Kellie rounds up some of the commentary on the passing of Vaclav Havel . And here’s a superb Hitchens post I would’ve included in the last one if I had read it sooner. Oh, and another from Rosie . Read More »

Bob:   John Hamilton , of Lewisham People Before Profit and the Strawberry Thieves Choir , has been mentioned in a few posts on this blog. I should probably have contacted him to inform him, but didn’t get around to it (this is, after all, a personal blog written in my spare time, and not a form of public service broadcasting). Read More »

Even in death he stands tall and apart from the parochial, bien-peasant, trilling, beard-stroking mediocrities – face-timers and time-servers of the writing life, men and women who have never written a good line of prose or provided a single insight into our universe or touched a human heart. Fuck them. Read More »

I drafted this late last week. However, I read through lots of obituaries since then and before tidying it up. It now seems a little pointless to post, when so much has been written by much better writers with much more to say than me, but having written it it seems silly to leave it un-published. Read More »

Bury the rag deep in your faceFor now’s the time for your tears. The brutal suppression by the forces of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the un-elected junta that rules Egypt, of the pro-democracy forces in Tahrir Square has taken a severe Read More »

Two very lovely posts honouring Christopher Hitchens, from two of my favourite bloggers: “Decline and fall” by Rosie Bell and Noga on Hitchens’ “Vocabular Cornucopia” .Also: Alan A:  Gilad Atzmon: Honorary Raelian Priest ; Jim D:  Morning Star’s “fellow feeling” with Cameron on EU ; Ben Six:  Multicultural muddles . Read More »

This is the first in a short series on the music played by political blogs. I think there’ll be three instalments with three blogs in each. In this one, I’ll focus on three of the grand old fellas of the genre. Read More »

First, Andrew C’s books, blogs and journals of the year , which includes a good book selection, but also this: Dave’s Part pursues a vigorous public debate, and very readable posts, on key political issues for the Left. Read More »

When the liberal intellectual thinks of himself, he thinks chiefly of his own good will and prefers not to know that the good will generates its own problems, that the love of humanity has its vices and the love of truth its own insensibilities.- Lionel Trilling Bloggery Let’s start with this week’s blog recommendation. Read More »

1. No damp squib . Unsurprising but incredibly irritating how devious David Cameron and his henchmen are. Read More »

A quick post in solidarity with tomorrow’s public sector strike. The explicit issue is public sector pensions, but of course the strikes also represent the anger and bitterness of stupid and pointless spending cuts which put public service workers Read More »

I actually wrote this post a week ago, but it was not published due to a technical glitch. (That’s a self-serving way of saying due to my incompetence. Read More »

Villains of the week Obviously, I have been a bit obsessed with Gilad Atzmon  this week and his local acolyte, John Hamilton’s Telegraph Hill ant-Zionist choir , the Strawberry Thieves . Read More »

There have been a few updates to the Gilad Atzmon in Bradford story I posted about at the start of the week, with Atzmon’s gig almost certainly going ahead tonight. Most notably, the Dean of Bradford came out against Atzmon being hosted, and then apparently changed his mind. Read More »

RAISE YOUR BANNERS is a festival of political song in Bradford , partly funded by a public body, the Arts Council. It has been going for sixteen years. Read More »