Comment

WHAT an unappealing, self-obsessed, sleazy cabal the new Labour in crowd portrays itself as in their pre-election-oblivion recollections - as if we didn't already know it.

ISRAEL celebrated its 60th anniversary this week, but, for the dispossessed Palestinian people who paid the price for this new state, there is nothing to celebrate.

IT was, perhaps, inevitable that the current trials and tribulations of the Labour Party's embattled and politically compromised leadership would bring the Blairites out of their burrows, bleating for yet more of the neoliberal medicine that their departed hero dished out to an unsuspecting Britain.

WHAT is needed is not a review of the Serious Fraud Office inquiry into the al-Yamamah arms deal but the inquiry's immediate reinstatement.

GORDON Brown's claim to be a listening and learning leader will be put under daily scrutiny for as long as he occupies 10 Downing Street.

CABINET members queued up on Monday to pledge their loyalty to the Prime Minister as though the electorate would be impressed that this gang of brown-nosed toadies remains obsequious in the wake of last Thursday's disastrous election results.

THE absolute hammering taken by Labour in the local elections and the victory of the upper-class buffoon Boris Johnson in the London mayoral election seem to have sparked a massive outbreak of revolutionary defeatism in the ranks of the left nationwide.

THERE is only one thing worse than suffering electoral meltdown and that is emerging from a disaster with no idea how to overcome it.

WHAT a way for Northern Rock workers and their union representatives to celebrate May Day - having to make a case to the government-appointed executive chairman Ron Sandler not to make any of them compulsorily redundant.

AT first sight, Gordon Brown's belated admission that he made mistakes in abolishing the 10p rate of income tax and not covering "as well as we should have" the effects on childless low-paid workers and on pensioners aged 60 to 64 is heartening.