Keep It Dense, Keep It Futile, Yeah?

The ever loveable and canny Michael Rosen was on Good Morning Britain this morning clearly and patiently explaining why the economy doesn't work as a household budget and that we do print our own money. Here's the clip on Twitter . Kate Garraway's response: "But the 1970s!" You can see how frustrated Rosen gets by his gesturing of the universal symbol for "Hen, you talk shite". So anyway, let's bust that myth of the 1970s right now because it's a constant stumbling block for the left. The first problem, inflation, was caused by two oil shocks . The second problem, the decline in manufacturing and productivity, results from two factors: imperial overhang (i.e. the end of Empire) and erratic government policy. What resulted was a crisis of production - lots of goods being produced but nowhere to sell because imports had cracked the markets and were generally cheaper. As oil prices rose, so did the cost of production resulting in various cutbacks, u

In 1983, Labour party member and Marxist Ted Grant said the following : "My final point, comrade chair and comrades. Michael Foot was expelled from this party. Nye Bevan was expelled from this party. (Interruptions) Mortimer was expelled from the party. (Calls of 'no, no') Yes, it's absolutely true, these were all expelled from the party. "Whatever the result of this vote, whether we gain a victory or whether we are expelled, we shall still continue to work for a Labour victory. "We shall still continue to work to make certain that this Tory government is thrown out, and preferably a Labour government with socialist policies returned. Whatever programme is put forward, Militant, as it has always done in the past, will continue to work for the victory of this movement. There is no way that Marxism can be separated from the Labour Party. There is no way you will succeed with these expulsions. We will be back. We will be restored, if not in one year, in two or t

It is with great annoyance that I must inform you all that once again, prominent intellectual charlatan David Baddiel has spun the mighty Wheel of Bad Takes.  Now, I'm no self-professed genius like Baddiel and I'm certainly not self-absorbed enough to write a book on Jewishness that subsequently gets dismantled and criticised by rabbis and Jewish groups , but I'm definitely smart enough to a write blog post to illustrate his quackery.  So what's this all about then?  Baddiel has resurrected the spectre of   Karl Marx's supposed antisemitism . As unwavering proof of this, he presents a snippet from an article published in the New York Tribune, circa 1856, called The Russian Loan. He also references Marx's work On The Jewish Question, a response to Bruno Bauer's The Jewish Question. He knows this is antisemitism because he used to be something of a Marxist. And a Jew, of course. To debunk Baddiel fully, I'm going to provide the historical and material con