Tag Archives: John Bew

Of paradoxes

 

 

 

 

 

Newton Emerson is a journalist whose articles are always worth reading. His unique contribution is to engage honestly and intelligently with Irish politics without indulging those liberal pieties, that all too often provides thin cover for ancestral voices. He is all the more refreshing when found in the Irish Times which particularly lends itself to liberal piety, thinly covering ancestral voices, conveyed in the tone of smug Southern self-righteousness.

Corbyn has betrayed Labour’s noble history of liberal internationalism

A noble tradition of liberal internationalism has pumped blood to the heart of the Labour Party since its foundation. It is an essential part of the Labour story.

As a biographer of Clement Attlee, I can testify to that skein running through Labour history like an arterial vein. It was the British Labour Party that was most enthused by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points of January 1918, which aimed to put progressive, democratic and ethical aims at the heart of international affairs. At its pinnacle, socialist internationalism even went so far to envisage a “world state” that would eradicate war and want.