January 2009

The Archives

• The world beyond West Lancashire

  What the Left needs now is love, sweet love: plans for new leftwing publishing house exclusively revealed

  01.29.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  I have spent several seconds recently ruminating on Dave Osler’s recent post about the lack of humour in the Left, and on Chris’s retort that the comments on that post left a lot to be desired fun-wise, though I put many of them down to very subtle irony myself. 
  On balance, however, I have decided that [...]

• The world beyond West Lancashire

  The ‘socialist strategy’ of Laclau and Mouffe: the hegemonic baby of discursive social antagonsism and the murky bathwaters of post-Marxism

  01.28.09 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  (Absurdly long post alert (3800 words) with some layout difficulties as result IT illiteracy.  Word version available here.) 
  Now then, there’s no time like the woefully overdue, as they say, so let us turn, dear reader, to this foolishly promised matter of the partial defence of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, and the ideas they set out [...]

• Being Labour, Breaking News

  A letter from the bank

  01.25.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  I’m not a member of the ’shareholder society’, because I’ve not got any shares.  Apart from about two, which I acquired back in the mists of time through having an account with the Trustee Savings Bank when I was a kid; in those days you joined the closest one, and that was the closest one.
   These [...]

• Being Labour

  Lamont’s lie-based lament

  01.16.09 | Permalink | Comment?

   What is it with Lamont?  17 years on and still trying to clear his name.  Here he is in today’s Guardian letters page:
  ‘You refer to my speech in October 1991 about ‘green shoots’ and you describe it as ‘disastrously misplaced’.  It is true that it was much criticised at the time, but was the [...]

• Bickerstaffe Thoughts

  Bickerstaffe highways matters – quick update

  01.13.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  I thought it might just be useful, in advance of the next Bickerstaffe Record newsletter, to do a straight copy and paste of a ’round up and hassle’ letter to Lancashire County Council Highways on several Bickerstaffe highways matters.  It’s below. I’ll cover HGV enforcement issues separately as this is dealt with separately at the [...]

• Being Labour, Breaking News

  Statement of blogging intent

  01.13.09 | Permalink | 5 Comments

  As readers may know, I have very recently offered a full apology to the Chief Executive of West Lancashire District Council for any offence caused to him or any other reader in a now removed post.
  Clearly it would not be judicous therefore to cover the substantive issues raised in that (satirical) post further here. However, as [...]

• Breaking News, Cotterill on the Council

  Frank apology

  01.13.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  Although I have not had any formal communication from West Lancashire District Council, I have been informed by my own Labour group leadership that the Chief Executive of the Council was unhappy with my recent post, which made reference to him, and has demanded that the post be removed from the site and an apology [...]

• Being Labour, Breaking News, Cotterill on the Council

  People of West Lancs mildly perturbed as Council Chief announces abolition of local democracy

  01.10.09 | Permalink | Comment?

   This just in from the West Lancashire District Council Chief Executive, in his weekly message from on high to Council staff, councillors and anyone else he feels like telling at the time:

  ‘Our task as I see it in the months and indeed years ahead is to find ways of continuing to provide quality services, particularly in [...]

• The world beyond West Lancashire

  Mil as intellectual disciple of Norm?

  01.08.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  Not many of the same words, but a striking similarity of relucant acceptance, all the same:
  From Mil:
  ‘So can we keep the label as we simply change who’s got their grubby mitts on the levers that move millions? Is it possible, by some weird accident of history, for a society of consumers – the very offspring of [...]

• Breaking News, Cotterill on the Council, The world beyond West Lancashire

  West Lancs Council Chief Executive and the ‘fuelling of community tension’

  01.07.09 | Permalink | Comment?

  (Longish post alert – 2,700 words.  Click here for word version)
   Last night I finally got round to having a look at the pre-Christmas ‘The View from The Top’, the weekly column written by the District Council’s Chief Executive, and published in the Ormskirk and Skelmersdale Advertiser.
  Hereit is.  Please just take a minute to read it, then [...]

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