>'Free speech on trial':
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> 'The most worrying aspect of the UK libel law is the effect it has on
free speech. If authors, editors or publishers have the smallest inkling
that the truth of a proposition cannot be proven in court (even when made in
good faith), the knowledge that they would have less than a one-in-five
chance of success in a libel trial means that the story is most likely to be
dropped.' Helene Guldberg, legal
> coordinator of LM's libel defence, examines the iniquities of English
libel law.
>
>'Tony Blair's therapeutic state':
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> 'The subject of the therapeutic state is the vulnerable or the victim,
above all the child - hence the emblematic significance of child poverty in
the rhetoric of New Labour. The government's emphasis on the feebleness of
the individual in society serves to justify its drive to intrude more and
more into the regulation of everyday life...' Michael Fitzpatrick on New
Britain, where we are not citizens, but clients.
>'Making the ordinary extraordinary':
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> 'For Sillitoe, writing about working-class people was a way of imbuing
them with "a kind of dignity": "Here they were, in writing, in literature,
and that can be all right, a dignifying experience." But today the working
classes seem only to appear in literature and film as objects of
ridicule...' Writer Alan Sillitoe talks to Brendan O'Neill about the
degradation of the working-class hero.
>
>'Returning fire':
> . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
> 'Unlike popular psychology, Cathy Young's interest is not in the
everyday tensions and conflicts that arise in intimate relationships. "When
it comes to treating one another badly on a personal level, men and women
generally give as good as they get", she says. Young is more concerned with
the sex war being waged at the level of feminist theory and how it impacts
upon academia, legal reform, education, health and family policy, and
popular culture.' Cathy Young, author of Ceasefire, a fresh
> challenge to American feminism, talks to Jan Macvarish about why the
personal should be anything but political.
>