Bright's Blog

There has already been a phenomenal response to our New Statesman Investigates feature. At the last count more than two-thirds of people were voting for us to look into the scandal of the treatment of asylum seekers in this country. There are still large numbers voting for us to have a dig around the UK's lobbying industry. But not so much interest in Tory party funding, Prince Charles ... read more

The summer is the time to try of new columnists or just mix it around a bit. Rafael Behr makes a good fist of it in the Observer's main politics slot arguing for the Westminster Village to take "fourth-party politics" more seriously. Despite the excruciating premiership football references (such laddishness is seen as necessary in case anyone mistook Britain's oldest newspaper for the senior common room), this is ... read more

Thanks to the wonders of Google and the New Statesman's peerless web team I can now reveal the articles that you readers have loved and loathed the best. Click on the links to be angered or soothed one more time.

1. The Great Betrayal2. Hamas at Olympia3. Wanted: New Thinking Pioneers4. Unity Mitford and Hitler's Baby5. ... read more

When Livingstone and his Trotskyist cronies were given a multi-million pound payoff from city hall I wondered how much they would be giving away to good causes. As it happens it's Livingstone and his aide John Ross who have been reviving charity - from the Chinese government.

As Andrew Gilligan reports in today's Evening Standard these champions of the working person stayed at ... read more

The battle lines are now drawn and the fight for the soul of the Labour Party has begun in earnest. In some ways this is a blessed relief. David Miliband's pre-holiday intervention in the Guardian lanced a disfiguring conspiratorial boil that had been festering for far too long. The candidate of the "anyone but Miliband" campaign has yet to emerge, but already there is talk of a union-backed "bloke ticket" ... read more

In recent years the New Statesman has developed an unrivalled reputation for investigative journalism. Whether it was Stephen Gray's revelations about CIA rendition flights, Martin Bright's string of stories exposing the link between the Foreign Office's and radical Islamists or Chris Ames's work on the government's notorious dossier on weapons of mass destruction, the NS has a trackrecord of being there first.

Now we want to get you involved.

The speed with which the French president has reacted to events in Georgia is impressive. New Labour has always had a blind-spot for foreign affairs (its main players speak no foreign languages and have little knowledge of, or interest in, "abroad").

It is deeply embarrassing that Sarkozy has spoken to Merkel, Berlusconi and "colleagues of Mr Brown". What is going on? David Miliband issued a statement on Monday condemning ... read more

Michael Gove always looked on shaky ground after his comments about the lads magazine Nuts and the end of civilisation. It later turned out that Gove had taken money from a company called Red Fig, one of the backers of Nuts TV, the magazine's broadcast oulet.

Now it seems that shadow arts minister Ed Vaizey took £1,500 from Red Fig in thr run-up to the last election. Naughty, naughty.

Good ... read more

I've just been re-reading Bernard Donoughue's Downing Street Diary and stumbled across the following entry:

Tuesday 20 January 1976"I raised the question of the future of the New Statesman with him. Its circulation is now down to 33,000 and he wants Kissin and Lever* to buy it. He had told Kissin he would do the negotaition, but now wants to stay out of it and let them do it."

A good start from Toby Helm, the new Whitehall Editor of The Observer with a story about the trade union dream ticket of Jon Cruddas and Alan Johnson. The idea is that the unions feel this is the only way to stop David Miliband and a perceived return to Blairite free market fundamentalism. So there is now a pincer movement from the left and right to replace Gordon ... read more

Over the summer, as new Labour's "Prosecco plotters" plan the overthrow of Gordon Brown from their Tuscan villas, they could do worse than plan a day trip to nearby Siena to visit the city's town hall, a symbol of civic autonomy since the 14th century. There, spread across three walls of the so-called Sala della Pace (Room of Peace), is a magnificent fresco by Ambrogio Lorenzetti known as the Allegory ... read more

When Randy Newman released the single "A Few Words in Defence of Our Country" last year, it was something of an event, and not just because it heralded Harps and Angels, the first studio album by the Los Angeles songwriter in nearly a decade. The song was a spoken-word polemic about Bush-era America set to a nostalgic, old-time country waltz. The lyrics caught the imagination of liberal America to the ... read more