KEVIN BRYAN reviews new releases by The Outlaws, Mark Radcliffe & David Boardman, Clarence White
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Books: Review - The State We Need by Michael Meacher
LUKE JAMES reads the veteran MP's 'uncompromisingly positive vision' of the changes Britain needs
BOB NEWLAND reviews a book that will take many back to the final years of apartheid in South Africa
GAVIN O’TOOLE examines the fatal relationship between environmental crimes and politics in Brazil and the inspiration provided by Indigenous people
MARIA DUARTE and LEO BOIX review Little Trouble Girls, Big Boys, The Roses, and Caught Stealing
MARY CONWAY admires a study of environmental idealism that aspires to Chekhov but is arrested in a deluge of middle-class opinion
ANGUS REID questions whether a human scriptwriter is behind the multiple plagiarisms of Disney’s much-lauded and vacuous extension of the Alien franchise
The State We Need
by Michael Meacher
(Biteback Publishing, £18.99)
Once fabled festivals of debate and democracy, party conferences are now bemoaned as mere political pep rallies, led by identikit cheerleaders chanting vacuous slogans. If they're not being stage managed by spin doctors, then they're being upstaged by former spin doctors.
Labour conference delegates vote for policies which their leaders have already agreed will never be pursued. Unable to speak or cast even a token vote, the dwindling number of their Tory counterparts nod obediently like novelty dogs while their masters bark their noxious rhetoric.
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