Mother cooks the Sunday roast
And listens to Fleetwood Mac;
As heat steams kitchen windows,
She pours herself a glass.

Father in his garden clothes,
Shoos away a neighbour’s cat;
Then collects dead fallen leaves
To tend the hidden grass.

Carefree kids play make-believe,
No heed of these Sabbath acts,
Which few fleeting autumns more
Will be but memories long past.

Harsh but sad delicate mouth
Nested oval chin
Scowling downturned lips
And slanted Cupid’s bow,
Beneath a fiery gaze like portraits we know.
A mirror image of that ‘dear, great soul’ -
The visionary young seer: Arthur Rimbaud.

A Stranger’s Gift

While on Southsea beach at sunset
A stranger stopped and sat with me,
To watch the tides consume the day
Into a golden Solent sea.

The stranger sought to test the mood
With jokes that fell on sand and stone.
He looked upon my ashen stare
And chanced grief be my heavy load.

“A friend has passed too soon” I spoke.
In soothing tones the stranger said;
“When overcome with grief and loss,
Try and think about this instead:

“Death may come for friends or loved ones,
But not our memories of their smiles.” …

There is a well known Indian fable which supposedly dates back to the mid 1st millennium BC called The Blind Men And The Elephant. The fable tells the story of six blind sojourners who encounter different parts of an elephant on their life journeys. As the fable progresses, each blind man, in turn, conceptualises what the elephant is like by touching a different part of its body.

The first man touches the side of the elephant and proclaims the animal to be like a wall. The second man feels the smooth and sharp tusk and determines the elephant more comparable…

Marxism is a political theory and method of socio-economic and historical analysis that originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

In this article, I consider how Marxism helped shape Western culture in the 20th-century and provide a commentary on the Marxist ideas that inform the Culture War in the West today.

I sketch a brief history and overview of three critical neo-Marxist and post-Marxist schools of thought which extend the classical Marxist tradition and explain how they were embedded into Western institutions.

To conclude, I provide a short commentary on contemporary Marxist strategy in…

In a previous article published last November, I explained the reasons why I cancelled my membership of the Labour Party and how, for the first time in twenty years, identity politics had left me questioning who to vote for at a general election.

There was no way I would vote for the Liberal Democrats, and I couldn’t bring myself to vote for the Conservatives. In the end, I opted to vote Labour. A decision I made based solely on the party’s proposals for renationalisation of our utilities and railways, and progressive taxation as a means for reducing income inequality.

It…

On offer at this election are two distinct visions of political change. One from Boris Johnson’s spiritually-absent Conservative Party and another from Jeremy Corbyn’s ultra-woke Labour. For many people, these two options present no appealing choice at all, just merely an opportunity to pick the least bad party.

But where is the party that is neither distinctly ‘red’ or distinctly ‘blue’ but a combination of the two? What would such a party look like? What should it say to the electorate?

Below are 30 suggestions on the vision and policies a hypothetical party of the centre might propose to motivate…

Much has been written about the crisis in the Labour Party and of progressive politics as a whole. I’m adding to it not because I claim to hold any authority on the subject, but from a compulsion to share my personal experience, and, as an ex-Labour member, because of my deep frustrations with the current situation in the party.

I first voted Labour in 1997 when I was eighteen. The year a New Labour landslide general election victory ended eighteen years of Conservative rule, winning 418 seats in the House of Commons — the largest victory in the party’s history…