Banksy’s identity may have been published – but was the investigation in the public interest, asks PETER BENGTSEN
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Up your expectations!
FIONA O’CONNOR examines a new book by Labour’s media-savvy MP and new Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls
POACHER TURNED GAMEKEEPER? Jess Phillips MP holds the Sue Gray report up as she responds to a statement by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to MPs in the House of Commons, January 31, 2022
RON JACOBS recommends a book that charts the disparate circumstances that defined the lives of two prominent black Afro-Americans — one a communist, the other an anti-communist
CHRIS MOSS joins the hunt in Argentina for the works of Poland’s most enigmatic exile
SYLVIA HIKINS welcomes a survey of successful contemporary worker co-operatives and economy-based co-operative systems
DAVID NICHOLSON recommends the staging of this Wagnerian classic minus one or two insignificant quibbles
JOHN GREEN relishes the record of a life well lived in the service of the fight for justice and socialism
Let’s Be Honest: Truth, Lies and Politics
Jess Phillips, Simon & Schuster, £15.95
LET’S Be Honest, the title already of Jess Phillips’s latest autobiography – her fourth – raises the stakes for her going forwards. That’s Jess Phillips, outspoken MP for Birmingham Yardley, now Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls; potentially one of the most important voices in government for British women today.
In this most recent chronicle of her parliamentary career Phillips writes from her personal experience in opposition under the rule of Rishi Sunak’s dying government. It’s a notes-from-the-battlefield attempt to cut through “the bullshit” of Tory populist tactics: distraction, division, distraction, more division, while the country went belly up.
The book has been criticised by some reviewers for missing its sell-by date, arriving just as the country freed itself from Tory rule.
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