Tribune – Comment, news and reviews from Britain's democratic left

IT HAS become a depressingly familiar sight. Whenever something awful happens in our country, up pops former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith to proclaim it as just the latest example of our so-called “broken society” – and that, somewhat bizarrely, David Cameron is the man to fix it.

PHILIPPINES senator Pia Cayetano has accused South Korea’s ambassador Choi Joong-kyung of threatening the senate with “deep and far-reaching effects within and beyond the boundaries of the Philippines” if it pursues an investigation into deaths at the shipyard owned by Korean company Hanjin Heavy Industries and Construction-Philippines at Subic Bay.

IT’S a strange world when Barack Obama and bloggers Guido Fawkes and Derek Draper are bedfellows in the same sentence. But as the President of the United States says, the world is changing.

ONE of the authors of Labour’s 1945 general election manifesto, the late Lord Young of Dartington, also co-wrote Family and Kinship in East London, one of the most influential sociological texts of the 1950s. He would no doubt be both bemused and saddened to see that, despite this great Labour heritage, the only party with anything to say about the importance of grandparents and the extended family is the Conservative Party. Where is Labour on this issue?

WHEN we finally get out of this mess – the economic one, obviously – Labour is going to have to tell voters what it stands for. That isn’t going to be easy for the party because it involves unpalatable things: acknowledging the mistakes that were made under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown and not adopting easy, populist solutions. Last month, the Government faced what will no doubt be the first of many demands to go for crowd-pleasing initiatives when there was a wave of unofficial strikes, inspired by the Prime Minister’s dreadful slogan “British jobs for British workers”. On this occasion, ministers resisted temptation, but the issue is bound to come up again as unemployment rises.

REPUBLICANS might just trump Northern Ireland’s Unionists in June’s crucial European elections. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that nationalists could win two of the north of Ireland’s three seats in the European Parliament. And if similar results were seen at Westminster’s 2010 general election and the Northern Ireland Assembly elections scheduled for the following year, Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams could see his dream of a united Ireland by 2016 become a reality.