'Al-Qaeda threat used by NATO as smoke screen for re-colonization of Northern Africa’

Above you can watch a new interview with me on RT on the reasons behind western interventions in North Africa. More on this story here.

Harold Laski - the man who influenced Ralph Miliband

This piece of mine appears in the New Statesman.

Neil Clark: Why Ed Miliband should follow in his father's footsteps and consider the ideas of this former Labour Party chairman
During the 2010 Labour leadership campaign, much was written of the influence of Ralph Miliband, the brilliant Marxist academic and father of two rivals for the job of leader, Ed and David. Yet what of the man who influenced Ralph Miliband?

Harold Laski, who taught Miliband Sr politics at the London School of Economics, was one of the giants of 20th-century British socialism. A panellist of the anti-fascist Left Book Club along with Victor Gollancz and the Labour MP John Strachey, Laski was the most popular – and most argued-about – public intellectual of his time. As an influential figure in the Labour Party, he played an important role in its landslide victory of 1945.

You can read the whole of the piece here

Let's save the High Street- and how we can do it

This piece of mine appears in the Sunday Express.


WOOLWORTHS. Littlewoods. Allders. Clinton Cards. And now Jessops. Last week the photography chain became the latest in a growing list of familiar names to disappear from our high streets.

Politicians tell us how concerned they are about “saving the high street” but although there have been initiatives aplenty (the Coalition has pledged a £5.5million package of support for 400 high streets in response to the 2011 Portas Review) the situation seems to be getting worse. In November, figures revealed one in nine shops in UK town centres was empty.

You can read the whole article here.

Shrink the State: Cameron and Clegg out to complete Thatcher's task

This piece of mine appears over at The Week.

Neil Clark: Privatising the probation service is not about cutting the deficit – it's a purely ideological coalition move

IT ALL started on a late spring day back in 1979. Delivering his very first Budget, Geoffrey Howe, Chancellor of the Exchequer in Margaret Thatcher's new Conservative administration, announced the government's support for "sales of state-owned assets to the private sector" and that "the scope for sale of assets is substantial".

Very few people listening to Howe's speech that day could have envisaged just what the government's privatisation programme would lead to. Or that, 34 years on, we'd be witnessing the wholesale outsourcing to private companies of our probation service, set up in 1907.

Privatising the probation service is not about cutting the deficit – it's a purely ideological coalition move.

You can read the whole of the article here.

'Cameron's Falklands buzz seeks to distract public from domestic woes'

Above you can watch an interview with me on RT  why David Cameron will be hoping that the Falklands issue stays in the news this year. More on this topic here. 

Europe's support for the US has made the world a more dangerous place

This piece of mine appears on the Guardian's Comment is Free website

Neil Clark: In the 1960s and 70s European leaders criticised US foreign policy freely – their successors' compliance has been disastrous

How have we got here? What has happened over the past 30 years is that the main parties of the left and right in several European countries have become more Atlanticist and the neo-conservative movement has successfully hijacked Britain's Conservative party, and made inroads in France as well. While the staunchly pro-US "anti-anti-war left", to use Jean Bricmont's phrase, have come to exert great influence in the parties of the left and centre-left. 

You can read the whole piece here.