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

Far right contentious claims about immigration and midwife services must be contested, says Cathy Warwick

Is exposure or censorship the best way to beat the BNP asks Paul Donovan

Six months ago, just before I vanished from these pages on a prolonged sickie, I wrote a column expressing the opinion that the mothers of Alistair Darling and Gordon Brown must have been frightened during their pregnancy by rabid Trotskyists. No other explanation, I felt, could account for the terror both men exhibited when faced with the danger that what they were doing might actually be socialist.

Brownism was a difficult political creed in the best of times to define within “new” Labour, an occasionally wobbly blancmange of moral fervour and opportunism. The economic prosperity and social justice preached by Gordon Brown were deliberately vague, loose aims Tony Blair could also happily endorse – and sometimes did.

I am delighted to announce the launch of my professional advice service for Government ministers who are intent on resigning from their posts. It became very apparent from the performance of those luminaries who departed in the recent “Long Night of the Blunt Pen-Knives” that they had very little understanding of the finer points of resignation.