Latest news with #Trotskyist
Boston Globe
7 days ago
- General
- Boston Globe
Alasdair MacIntyre, philosopher who saw a ‘new dark ages,' dies at 96
Advertisement MacIntyre belonged to a different moral universe. In his best-known book, 'After Virtue' (1981), he argued that thousands of years ago, the earliest Western philosophers and the Homeric myths generated 'the tradition of the virtues,' which was treated as objective truth. Value neutrality, to Mr. MacIntyre, was the goal of 'barbarians' and a sign of 'the new dark ages which are already upon us.' Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Such language might make Mr. MacIntyre seem like a wistful reactionary. In fact, his worldview was far less predictable. He never entirely disavowed his youthful Marxism, applauding Karl Marx's critique of the individualistic and acquisitive spirit of capitalism. He maintained a certain sort of modesty from his days as a self-appointed champion of the working class — he never earned a doctorate and disliked being called 'professor' — and he continued showing the dialectical passion of a Trotskyist, occasionally launching into what one colleague called 'MacIntyrades.' Advertisement His chief opponent was what he called 'modern liberal individualism,' a category in which he included not just supporters of the Democratic Party but also conventional conservatives, leftists, and even anarchists. All were guilty of 'emotivism': the belief that humanity was essentially a collection of autonomous individuals who selected their own principles based on inner thoughts or feelings. This starting point, Mr. MacIntyre argued, could lead only to eternal, unresolvable disagreement. He went so far as to suggest that every tradition of modern politics had come to 'exhaustion,' and he rejected many essential tools of modern moral philosophy: Thomas Hobbes' social contract, John Locke's natural rights, Jeremy Bentham's moral consequences, and Isaiah Berlin's pluralism. Instead, he valued storytelling, tradition, and rational debate, embedded within a shared moral community. He found these qualities in the thinking of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas, who promoted 'a cosmic order which dictates the place of each virtue in a total harmonious scheme of human life,' he wrote in 'After Virtue.' Within such an order, moral truth was objective. 'After Virtue' gained extraordinary popularity for a work of late-20th-century moral theory, selling more than 100,000 copies, Compact magazine wrote in a piece published after Mr. MacIntyre's death, titled 'Postliberalism's Reluctant Godfather.' That was an apt label for someone who managed, in recent years, to earn multiple tributes from Jacobin, a journal on the socialist left, and First Things, which is on the religious right. Mr. MacIntyre seemed to grow increasingly uncomfortable with his influence as it came unavoidably into focus. Advertisement In 'After Virtue,' he wrote that morality arose out of a belief in human telos — the ancient Greek notion of purpose being intrinsic to existence. People of the modern world, he said, had two choices: Follow Friedrich Nietzsche in trying to honestly face a world without the traditional notion of a human telos, rendering moral thought baseless, or follow Aristotle and recover moral purpose by fostering a society dedicated to the cultivation of virtue. Mr. MacIntyre illustrated what that might look like with an analysis of what he called 'practices' — shared, skillful activities including chess, architecture, and musicianship — as examples of where virtue still had meaning. These pursuits, he said, intrinsically provide 'standards of excellence' and reward traits such as justice, courage, and honesty. In them, he saw a possible modern basis for virtue. 'After Virtue' was acclaimed by leading philosophers, including Bernard Williams, who in a 1981 review for The Sunday Times of London wrote that even Mr. MacIntyre's exaggerations were 'illuminating'; that his intellectual history of the moral self was a 'nostalgic fantasy' and yet also 'brilliant'; and that, whatever questions the book raised, 'the feeling is sustained that one's question would get an interesting answer.' In a subsequent book, 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' (1988), Mr. MacIntyre provoked sharper criticism. His argument now promoted Roman Catholicism with Aquinas, not Aristotle, as its paragon of moral thought. Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote a memorable takedown in The New York Review of Books accusing Mr. MacIntyre of dropping some of his own principles — such as his devotion to local traditions — when discussing Aristotle, Augustine, and the pope. What really interested Mr. MacIntyre, she argued, was not reason but authority: the ability of the Catholic Church to secure wide agreement, and, by extension, order. Advertisement She was one of several distinguished thinkers to challenge Mr. MacIntyre's idealized view of the past, arguing that historical societies were not as unified as he claimed and that unanimity itself was not so great. In a review of 'Whose Justice? Which Rationality?' published in The Times Literary Supplement, Thomas Nagel wrote, 'MacIntyre professes to be freeing us from blindness, but he is really asking for the return of a blindness to the difficulty of moral thought that it has been one of the great achievements of ethical theory to escape.' Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born on Jan. 12, 1929, in Glasgow, Scotland. His parents, John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre, were both doctors. In the 1930s the family moved to London, where his parents treated patients in the working-class East End neighborhood. In 1949, he earned a bachelor's degree in classics from Queen Mary College at the University of London. In the 1950s and '60s, he earned master's degrees in philosophy from Manchester University and Oxford while holding several lectureships. As a student, he joined the Communist Party, but he also steered debates of Britain's Student Christian Movement as its chair. In about 1970 he moved to the United States, where he taught at Brandeis University and gradually left Marx for Aristotle. In the 1980s, he converted to Catholicism and took to seeing Aquinas as the master thinker of the Aristotelian tradition. He had a series of academic appointments but mostly taught at Notre Dame, where his wife, Lynn Joy, is also a philosophy professor. Advertisement His two previous marriages ended in divorce. In addition to Joy, his survivors include several children. He and Joy lived in Mishawaka, Ind., a city near Notre Dame. For decades, no single tendency seemed to define readers who took inspiration from Mr. MacIntyre's work. There were heterodox Marxists, the skeptic of liberalism Christopher Lasch, and former Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum. But more recently, one constituency claimed Mr. MacIntyre's work most completely and prominently: the Trump-supporting, religious, anti-consumerist, and illiberal right. Two leading commentators of this world, Patrick Deneen and Rod Dreher, have written books that pay tribute to Mr. MacIntyre. In 2017, the publication of one of these books, Dreher's 'The Benedict Option,' prompted an odd debate between Dreher and Mr. MacIntyre, with each man accusing the other of commenting on a book of his that he had not actually read. During a lecture at Notre Dame, Mr. MacIntyre deplored becoming part of an ideological battle of his own time. 'The moment you think of yourself as a liberal or a conservative,' he said, 'you're done for.' This article originally appeared in
The National
09-05-2025
- Politics
- The National
I tracked down Scottish Labour's London MSP candidate
TO Lewisham Town Hall, south London, there – somewhat improbably – to try and bump into Scottish Labour's candidate for Caithness at next year's Holyrood election. Some context: Labour have been taking pelters for selecting Eva Kestner, a councillor in London, as their candidate for the Highland seat. Her current patch is around 700 miles away from the constituency she supposedly wants to represent. Of course, Kestner knows she has about as much chance of becoming the MSP for Caithness, Sutherland and Ross as I do of becoming pope. Which is to say, remote but not completely impossible. But that's not what she told me on Wednesday evening. We'd yet to hear from the woman herself despite her taking a fair pasting on social media for being 'parachuted' into the seat last week. So we decided I'd go out to Lewisham Town Hall for the next annual general meeting of the council, to see if I might be able to grab Kestner for a quick interview while she was heading in. Eva Kestner is a Labour councillor in London ... running to be an MSP in Caithness, 650 miles away. 🥀 We approached her in London, where she squirmed through questions about the biggest issues facing Caithness - and denied being a paper candidate. — The National (@ScotNational) May 8, 2025 I got off the train and immediately saw a Portobello Brewing Pubco boozer, the Catford Bridge Tavern. Brilliant, I thought, there's a Scottish link right there. Sadly, I later found out that the titular Portobello refers to a part of London, not the sandy bit of Edinburgh. As I got closer, I spied a solicitor's office under the name 'Morrison and Spowart'. How Scottish can you get? Catford was feeling more and more like home with every step I took. Perhaps there was some Passport to Pimlico thing going on and Lewisham was actually an exclave of Scotland according to some long-lost treaty from the Wars of Independence. Robert the Bruce used to own property in Tottenham before Edward II nicked it off him, after all. The prospect of some ancient thane of Catford rattling around my mind, I got to the building and was roused from my daydreams by a small protest which had assembled outside the town hall. READ MORE: SNP national secretary 'threatens' members amid 'stitch up' claims They were there to protest Labour's benefits cuts. Lewisham, for the uninitiated, is effectively a one-party state. There is just one opposition councillor, a lonely Green. I asked around a bit to see if anyone had ever heard of Eva Kestner. Blank looks all round. A very pushy man tried to sell me a Trotskyist newspaper and produced a card machine when I told him I unfortunately had no cash. He said we thought we should have a general strike and I found myself very much in agreement if it meant he'd take the day off. Just as I was beginning to lose hope, I felt that instant twinge of recognition as I spied someone out the corner of my eye. Was that … ? Could it be that woman in pink smoking a fag … ? 'Eva!' I shouted, practically running up to her. She had just tossed the dowt and was heading back inside. I began filming, slightly breathless. Kestner, to her credit, was more game than I'd been expecting. She answered all the questions I put to her and didn't tell me to do one, which is what I'd have done in her shoes. She insisted she was a 'serious candidate', which given the ridiculousness of our interaction, I think we both knew was a lie. Her local connections? She 'worked for MSPs up there' back in the day. Game, yes. Convincing, less so. But that is a matter for the good people of Caithness. When Kestner ran for the equivalent seat in last year's Westminster election, they rewarded her with 3000 votes. She'd have had to double that just to get into second place. I don't think she'll be hiring a moving van any time soon. You can get The Worst of Westminster delivered straight to your email inbox every Friday at 6pm for FREE by clicking here.
Yahoo
24-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Peter Taaffe, driving force behind the Militant Tendency which paralysed Labour in the 1980s
Peter Taaffe, who has died aged 83, was the driving strategist of the Militant Tendency, the Trotskyist group that infiltrated the Labour Party and reduced it to near-paralysis for much of the 1980s. Officially the editor of Militant, Taaffe was the linchpin of the Revolutionary Socialist League as it schemed to take over local parties and Labour's national organs, then resisted attempts to expel its leaders. Militant's biographer Michael Crick wrote in 1986: 'Peter Taaffe probably sees himself as the modern British Lenin, who will emerge at the moment of crisis and lead us to socialism.' At the time Crick rated Militant 'Britain's fifth largest political party'. Taaffe, a Merseysider, co-founded Militant in 1964 with Ted Grant, a veteran Trotskyist of indeterminate age who had arrived from South Africa in the 1930s. The bedraggled-looking Taaffe was a good mixer and conversationalist; Grant, having declared for decades that the collapse of capitalism was nigh, verged on the obsessive. An Evertonian, Taaffe was a keen footballer – but Grant usually beat him at table tennis. By the late 1970s, Militant's activities as a 'party within a party' were alarming Labour headquarters, but the Left-dominated National Executive (NEC) looked the other way. It was not until 1982 – with several Tendency members set to become MPs – that Michael Foot declared Militant a 'pestilential nuisance' and steps were taken to expel its leaders. Taaffe was ready for this, and Militant's five-strong editorial board (including himself) were only expelled after three years of debilitating argument and repeated legal challenges. Militant remained a force in the party – notably taking control of Liverpool council – until it rashly fielded a candidate against Labour in a by-election. Even then, it gained a fresh lease of life as Tommy Sheridan's Scottish Socialist Party. Taaffe and Grant eventually fell out over strategy – whether to keep infiltrating the Labour Party – and policy, notably Grant's insistence that the October 1987 stock-market crash was the crisis he had long predicted. The bulk of Militant's leadership sided with Taaffe. From 1997 to 2020 Taaffe was general secretary of the Socialist Party, which claims to be Militant's successor. He was also an executive member of the Committee for a Workers' International, which claims sections in more than 45 countries. In 2016, after Jeremy Corbyn's election as Labour leader, Taaffe and others expelled in the 1980s applied to rejoin the party. When Labour's deputy leader Tom Watson objected, Taaffe called him a 'Stalinist'. Peter James Taaffe was born in Birkenhead in April 1942, one of six children of a sheet-metal worker of Irish origin, 'an intelligent worker-socialist who could mend anything.' His father died when he was small, and Peter grew up in 'atrocious' conditions, bearing throughout his life a scar on his nose after the ceiling fell in while he was asleep. Leaving school, one of his first jobs was in Liverpool's city treasury department. Taaffe joined the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, then in 1959 the Labour Party, where he 'discovered radical, socialist, Marxist ideas'. He was attracted by a group around the newspaper Socialist Fight, led by Grant, who pressed Trotsky's argument that only in advanced industrial countries could the working class lead a revolution to establish socialism. Taaffe worked with them to foment strikes on Merseyside, notably one by apprentices at English Electric which spread to 20,000 workers. Early in 1964, Grant's group decided to relaunch Socialist Fight as Militant, a monthly 'mass journal of Labour and socialist youth' aimed squarely at the Labour Party Young Socialists. They chose Taaffe as its editor because of his incisive mind and organisational skills. Issue No 1, days before that October's election, carried the headline: 'Drive out the Tories – but Labour must have socialist policies.' The first iteration of Militant's demand for the nationalisation under workers' control of a specific number of companies came in a 1965 article by Taaffe, splashed under the headline: 'Nationalise the 400 Monopolies'. That year Taaffe moved to London, becoming full-time national secretary of the RSL. Money was short, and at times he had to sleep in doorways. After he married, he rented two floors of a large terrace house in Islington. Lynn Walsh, a Sussex University graduate, succeeded him as editor of Militant, with Taaffe writing mainly on international topics. To him – as for Militant – the struggle was worldwide, and sister organisations from Belgium to Sri Lanka were encouraged. Militant purchased headquarters in Bethnal Green in 1970, setting up the Cambridge Heath Press, which also printed Militant Irish Monthly and Militant International Review plus – despite instructions from party HQ – literature for some Labour councils and parties. Gradually Militant's 'entryism' paid off. In 1970 it took control of the Labour Party Young Socialists' national committee. Two years later the NEC gave a seat to the LPYS, giving Grant and Taaffe access to confidential party documents. In 1975 Reg Underhill, Labour's national agent, handed the NEC a 45-page report outlining the extent of Trotskyist infiltration. Militant, he reported, had an organisation with a full-time staff and claimed to control the LPYS at national level. The NEC did not want to know. In 1981 Taaffe codified the Tendency's demands in Militant: What We Stand For: a 35-hour week, a £120-a-week minimum wage, abolition of immigration controls, putting the police under elected local committees, MPs and union officials to receive a worker's wage, massive defence cuts, national strikes to force out the Tories, abolition of the monarchy and the Lords, and nationalisation of 200 major companies under workers' control. By late 1981 the pressure for action against Militant became irresistible. Labour's general secretary Ron Hayward and Underhill's successor David Hughes interviewed Taaffe, Grant and Walsh, who denied that Militant's annual 'readers' meeting' was a formal conference. In June 1982 Hayward and Hughes proposed a 'register of affiliated organisations' for which Militant would have to qualify. Hayward then retired; his successor Jim Mortimer was an ex-Maoist with no time for Trotskyists. That September, 2,600 Militant supporters staged a show of strength at Wembley under the slogan 'Fight the Tories, not the Socialists'. Labour's 1982 conference voted 3-1 for action against Militant, and the Right captured the NEC, which recommended expulsion of the editorial board: Taaffe, Grant, Walsh, Clare Doyle and Keith Dickinson. Taaffe retorted: 'We do not accept summary execution or expulsion. We shall fight it.' The five went to court, forcing Labour into a legal minefield. That December the NEC declared Militant ineligible for affiliation to the party. The five appeared and made brief statements, but for legal reasons the NEC could not question them. Only in February 1983 did it vote for expulsions, and it took two years more for them to be confirmed. No action was taken against any candidates, and to Taaffe's relief two Militant supporters – Dave Nellist and Terry Fields – won seats at the 1983 election. 1983 also saw Militant take over Liverpool council, with Derek Hatton its deputy leader. Taaffe oversaw a campaign to 'strengthen the position of the [Liverpool] labour movement and of Marxism in the eyes of the broad mass of the working class' – aimed at getting the council's workforce into a position where it would stage a general strike. Militant – by then selling 20,000 copies – celebrated its 20th birthday in 1984 with a rally at Wembley Conference Centre addressed by Taaffe and Tony Benn. The next year Militant hired the Royal Albert Hall for what The Daily Telegraph dubbed 'the last night of the Trots'. Taaffe slipped into Labour's 1984 conference using press credentials, using 'runners' to instruct delegates on the floor. That winter the Islington South party issued him and Grant with membership cards. After Liverpool council set a budget bringing matters to a head, Taaffe and Grant realised tactical mistakes were being made – particularly the declaring of 31,000 redundancies to force the government to cave in or take over. This prompted Neil Kinnock at Labour's 1985 conference to condemn 'the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers'. Taaffe was influential in formulating Militant's position on the poll tax, urging Labour councils to refuse to collect it. With the Community Charge levied first in Scotland, he assessed the prospects first with Scottish members of Militant. A conference in Glasgow in April 1988 opted for mass non-payment, building 'a Scottish-wide network of local anti-poll tax unions and regional federations'. Thousands failed or refused to pay, there were riots against the tax in London in May 1990, and its unpopularity was said to be a factor in the overthrow of Margaret Thatcher that November. With Labour unable to reap the political benefit, Militant claimed the credit. Taaffe wrote later that 'the experience of mass struggles outside the Labour Party, above all in the poll tax, were to convince the majority of Militant's supporters that the old tactic of concentrating most of its forces in the Labour Party had been overtaken by events.' Only in 1991, after Labour disciplined 62 party members for campaigning against its candidate in the Liverpool Walton by-election, did matters came to a head. Even then, just 150 Militant supporters had been expelled. Taaffe and a majority on Militant's executive voted to abandon infiltration of what had become a 'thoroughly bourgeois' Labour Party and form a separate party, initially based in Scotland, as Scottish Militant Labour – against the wishes of Grant, who insisted entrism had to continue. The collapse of the Soviet Union put Britain's Trotskyists on the spot. Taaffe and the majority believed the restoration of capitalism in Russia was possible, but Grant declared: 'Any illusions of Gorbachev changing anything fundamental will be shattered by the attitude of the Moscow bureaucracy to this crisis.' There were also differences of style. Taaffe accused Grant of 'never being prepared to enter into a dialogue' and claiming a right of veto. He scorned Grant's faction as 'political dinosaurs operating with outmoded formulas ... a dogmatic, black and white, undialectical approach towards political phenomena.' Early in 1992 Taaffe announced a 'parting of the ways' in an extended Militant editorial. Militant expelled Grant and the 'minority', who reconstituted themselves as Socialist Appeal. South of the Border, Taaffe and Nellist launched Militant Labour in 1993. Rebranded the Socialist Party in 1997 with Taaffe as general secretary, it fielded 27 candidates at that year's election, making no impact. It went on to campaign that the trade unions should break with Labour and found a new working-class party. Today it fields candidates under the Tusc banner. Taaffe retained control of the RSL's internationalist arm. It started a website commenting on the developing world situation and how to win the working class to Marxism. He wrote numerous books and pamphlets, among them Liverpool – A City That Dared to Fight, with Tony Mulhearn (1988), The Masses Arise: The Great French Revolution, 1789-1815 (1989), The Rise of Militant (1995), The History of the CWI (1997), Post-September 11: Can US Imperialism Be Challenged? (2002), Afghanistan, Islam and the Revolutionary Left (2002), Empire Defeated: Vietnam War – The Lessons for Today (2003), A Socialist World Is Possible (2005), 1926 General Strike – Workers Taste Power (2006) and Socialism and Left Unity (2008). Peter Taaffe is survived by his wife Linda and two daughters. One, Nancy Taaffe, fought Walthamstow for Tusc at the 2005, 2010 and 2015 elections. Peter Taaffe, born April 1942, died April 23 2025 Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
Local France
09-04-2025
- Politics
- Local France
OPINION: The race to defeat the French far right in 2027 starts now
Emmanuel Macron will have served two five-year terms, which is all that the constitution allows. Marine Le Pen will be banned as a convicted embezzler of public money, unless she at least partially wins her appeal next year. So who will be the next President of the Republic? Jordan Bardella, Marine Le Pen's glib sidekick, will be only 32 years old. Even Le Pen suggested publicly the other day that her protégé was 'not ready'. And yet the long-range polls put him far ahead of the rest of the potential 2027 field, with the same projected first-round result as Le Pen (33-36 percent). Those, however, are first-round scores. They are menacingly high but do not guarantee a Far Right victory in the run-off. On three occasions in the Fifth Republic, in 1974, in 1981 and in 1995, it was the runner-up in Round One who topped the poll and became President in Round Two. Explained: How France's two-round voting system works That could easily happen again in 2027. The projected Far Right score is historically high but polls suggest that both Le Pen and Bardella would still struggle to reach 50 percent in the second round. Their negative ratings are in the upper-40s. In other words, almost half the electorate says that they would not vote for either of them. Advertisement The Far Right score tends to peak between presidential elections and deflate as voters come closer to polling day. The destructive behaviour of Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin in the next two years could undermine the popularity of populists throughout Europe. In France, much will depend, nonetheless, on three things: which other candidate reaches the second round; their momentum at the end of Round One; and the size of the gap to be made up on Le Pen/Bardella. Two years out, the chasing pack is already enormous and growing all the time. I can count 18 declared or likely runners. Only five, in my view, have even a slim chance of reaching Round Two. In the Centre, the four would-be successors to President Macron include three of his five Prime Ministers: Edouard Philippe (a declared candidate); Gabriel Attal (who all but declared last weekend); and François Bayrou (who is widely suspected of thinking that his turn has come). The justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, also believes in his own destiny. Bayrou is sinking. Darmanin is nowhere. Philippe and Attal have by far the highest first-round poll scores in the pack chasing Le Pen/Bardella (23 percent and 18 percent in an Elabe poll last weekend). These projections assume, however, that only one Centrist front-runner exists and that the other has miraculously vanished. On the Left, there are at least eight probable contenders, if you include the stubborn candidates of the rival Trotskyist tribes plus the Communists and the Greens. There are only three Left candidates who could approach or exceed double figures. They are Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the perennial tribune of the rip-it-all-down Left; François Ruffin, his more moderate and more likeable rival; and Raphael Glucksmann, the would-be revivalist of the reformist, pro-European centre-left. The former Socialist President, François Hollande, also dreams of a Trump-like resurrection. He shouldn't. On the broadly Gaullist centre-right, there are four declared or likely runners, including three no-hopers and a dark horse. The no-hopers are the hapless leader of Les Républicains, Laurent Wauquiez, who is widely detested even in his own party; the president of the northern French region, Xavier Bertrand; and - implausibly but insistently - the former Chirac-era Prime Minister and Foreign Minister, Dominique de Villepin. Advertisement The dark-horse is the hard right interior minister Bruno Retailleau, who is credited with 10 percent in some first round polls. It is unlikely, however, that both candidates in Round Two could come from the hard-and-far Right. To this jostling crowd should be added two candidates of the xenophobic, nationalist but anti-Le Pen Right: Eric Zemmour and Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, whose main significance will be to add another 7 points to the potential Le Pen/Bardella total in Round Two. Of these 18 candidates (others will doubtless emerge) only one can reach the second round alongside Le Pen/Bardella. That is the golden ticket. Whoever joins the Far Right in the run-off will have a good chance of being the next President. The five with at least a slender chance of reaching Round Two are, in my opinion, Philippe, Attal, Mélenchon, Glucksmann and Retailleau. The race starts, in effect, now. There are so far no agreed systems to thin out the crowded field. There could be a primary election once again next year for the Centre-right. That is unlikely on the Left and in the Centre. Advertisement For them the only primary will be the public, opinion polls, giving the pollsters enormous power. Will Mélenchon continue to dominate the Left? Or will the bulk of left-wing voters, desperate for a winning candidate, reinforce early or late trends in the polls and switch to Ruffin or Glucksmann? The other race-within-a-race will be the battle between two ex-Macron prime ministers, Philippe and Attal. They are performing a high-wire act: attempting to succeed Emmanuel while distancing themselves from Macron. If one sprints far ahead in the polls, the other may concede and give up. If they remain neck-and neck-into 2027, the Centre could be disastrously split going into the first round on April 11th or 18th. That might allow a left-wing candidate or Bruno Retailleau to take the second place by a fraction and confront Le Pen/Bardella in Round Two on April 25th or May 2nd. A close finish for second place in Round One could mean no momentum for the challenger to the Far Right in the run-off. It might leave a 12 or 13 point gap behind Le Pen/Bardella – wider than any gap that has ever been bridged by a runner-up in any presidential election in the Fifth Republic. It might mean a Far Right President. In the last two elections, I was convinced that Le Pen could not win. In 2027, I think a Le Pen/Bardella victory is far from certain. But it is possible. Consider the likely permutations. Edouard Philippe v Le Pen/Bardella? Philippe wins, probably. Gabriel Attal v Le Pen/Bardella? Attal wins, probably. Jean-Luc Mélenchon v Le Pen/Bardella. The Far Right wins, almost certainly. Bruno Retailleau v Le Pen/Bardella. Retailleau wins. Raphael Glucksmann v Le Pen/Bardella. A coin-toss.
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Judge tells Derek Hatton not to chew in court during bribery hearing
The former leader of the Trotskyist group Militant was told by a judge not to chew in court during a bribery hearing. Derek Hatton, who was deputy leader of Liverpool city council in the 1980s, was charged with bribery after a police investigation into the awarding of commercial and business contracts from Liverpool city council between 2010 and 2020. The 77-year-old was also a well-known figure of Militant, a Left-wing group that infiltrated Labour from the 1960s through to the late 1980s. Mr Hatton, of Aigburth, Liverpool, denied one count of bribery and one count of counselling or procuring misconduct in a public office at Preston magistrates' court. Before he confirmed his name, age and address, District Judge Wendy Lloyd asked Mr Hatton not to chew in court. Former mayor of Liverpool Joe Anderson, 67, also appeared in court accused of involvement in council corruption. On Friday, he indicated not guilty pleas to charges of bribery, misconduct in a public office and conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office. On the misconduct charge, he is said to have sent and/or arranged to have sent 'threatening letters' to himself. The ex-social worker, of Knotty Ash in Liverpool, was elected mayor of the city from the time the role was created in 2012 until 2021. Previously in a statement posted on social media site X, formerly Twitter, he said: 'I am innocent of charges and will fight to clear my name.' His son David Anderson, 37, of Wavertree, faces a charge with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office, which he denies. Hatton's wife, Sonjia Hatton, 49, of Aigburth, indicated a not guilty plea to one count of misconduct in a public office by providing and seeking confidential council information over matters of commercial and business use to Mr Hatton's contacts and to his business dealings. Andrew Barr, formerly the council's assistant director of highways and planning, 51, of Ainsdale, Merseyside, is charged with conspiracy to commit misconduct in a public office and also faced a charge of bribery for which he indicated a not guilty plea. Adam McClean, 54, of Woolton, also entered the dock on a charge of conspiracy to bribery, to which he entered no plea. Other defendants appeared at court remotely via video link. The council's former head of regeneration Nick Kavanagh, 56, of Mossley Hill, Liverpool, indicated not guilty pleas to two counts of bribery. Phillipa Cook, 49, of the same address, also indicated not guilty pleas to two counts of bribery. Alexander Croft, 30, of Aughton, Lancashire, indicated a not guilty plea to one count of bribery. Julian Flanagan, 53, of Knowsley; Paul Flanagan, 71, of Knowsley; and James Shalliker, 38, of Downholland, Lancashire, are all charged with conspiracy to commit bribery and entered no pleas. The Flanagan brothers founded construction business the Flanagan Group. All 12 defendants were granted unconditional bail ahead of a plea and trial preparation hearing at Preston Crown Court on April 25. Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. Try The Telegraph free for 1 month with unlimited access to our award-winning website, exclusive app, money-saving offers and more.
