Thatcher has at last agreed to shut up, although Tony Blair has now continued her legacy.
It was not the foot of Beckham, the last breath of some old royal or even Kylie's bottom that was the cause of most interest in trivia corner over the last month. No, it was the Trappist vow of silence that we are being assured Margaret Thatcher will keep from now on that caught this columnist's imagination.
The rising cost of living and shortages of labour means London's workers now have more industrial power.
On the face of it the issue of London weighting payments is not all that thrilling. Nevertheless, it has helped add a bit more spice to the recent upsurge of rank and file militancy which has managed to send the mainstream press into such a lather.
As renewed political crisis sweeps Argentina, Chris Harman following a recent visit to the country argues there is a huge opening for the revolutionary left, provided it breaks from its sectarian past.
'It must have been fantastically exciting,' a lot of people said to me on my return from a visit to Argentina last month.
Has the dream of the hippy commune now turned into a nightmare?
Twenty five years ago groups of hippies and squatters took over a military barracks in the centre of Copenhagen and announced the creation of a 'free territory at the heart of the city'. It was called Christiania. Walking through it today, the marks of the Christiania commune are still there--the makeshift huts surrounded by plants neatly set inside tin cans, the military blocks occupied by squatters and, in one case at least, turned into a halfway house for the homeless.
It's working class Americans we side with, not their government.
One of the most common accusations against those of us who are against this 'war on terrorism' is that we are anti-American--that we have a knee-jerk opposition to all that the US says and does because we hate the place the people and all things American.
This I find very strange, as in the various anti-war rallies and meetings I have attended, plus the wide variety of anti-war articles I have read, I have seen very little evidence of this anti-Americanism. Hostility to the Bush regime? Yes. Hostility to US foreign policy? Yes. Hostility to the large US corporations? Yes.
The work of Studs Terkel lets ordinary Americans speak for themselves.
The working class has its historians too. Sometimes in the great debates about historical changes you miss the voices of people describing ordinary lives. After all, the sweep of history is as much about experience, about living through things, as it is about forces and events that shape us. In his great study 'The Making of the English Working Class', EP Thompson's preface was far reaching in its modest comment that 'I do not see class as a "structure", not even as a "category", but as something which in fact happens in human relationships...
Despite its military dominance the US still has reason to fear its rivals.
Is there only one imperialism left? That is the question many people are asking as the US prepares to launch another war against Iraq.
It's fashionable to speak of a 'unipolar' world, in which the US is the 'great hegemon', its 'empire' unchallenged like that of Rome 2,000 years ago. In reality things are not that simple. The multiple war criminal Henry Kissinger certainly has his doubts. He wrote after the Gulf War and the collapse of the USSR:
Is your pension at risk? Yes, minister.
You would either need to have a very short memory or a tremendously blinkered New Labour kind of mindset to regard the latest crisis in the pensions industry as not worth getting all that worked up about. When a whole series of the biggest firms in the country suddenly announce that they are pulling out of 'final salary' pension schemes--because they claim they can no longer afford the payouts--and the top man at the National Association of Pension Funds starts talking about people having to work on to the age of 72, some of us might start to get a bit nervous.
The rail unions have built up some powerful muscle they can flex.
When Stephen Byers was spotted in a Westminster canteen just before Xmas, deep in talks with Mick Rix of Aslef, eyebrows were raised all round. We were all under the impression that trade unions had been virtually airbrushed out of the frame. Now here was one apparently on the best of terms with the transport secretary. One interpretation might be that, with the railways in particular, the government has dug itself into such a hole that it needs every bit of help it can get to winch itself out again.
Can workers take control in Argentina? Chris Harman examines the evidence.
Mass demonstrations dispose of two presidents in as many weeks. A star performer for the IMF-World Bank Washington consensus circus, Cavallo, is forced to flee the economics ministry. A leader of the largest political party warns of the danger of civil war. Such has been the picture in Argentina since the end of December. Yet much of the western media give the impression that these events are of marginal interest. They are happening a long way away, we are told, in a 'developing country' or an 'emerging economy', very different to western Europe, North America or Japan.
