3 May 1999
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From the Editor…
Welcome to the New Statesman website. Whether you are a new reader or an existing one - online or via the magazine - I hope you'll enjoy the great writing, fresh ideas and provocative debate that make the New Statesman Britain's award-winning current affairs weekly
Features
Cook declares total war on fascism
John Lloydfinds the Foreign Secretary adamant that Kosovo is the defining moment for the left in the 1990s, just as Spain was in the 1930s
Asylum Bill - Anne Frank would be turned away
Nick Cohen on new Labour's intolerance of asylum-seekers
Politeness is a racist's secret weapon
Ziauddin Sardar finds the bigotry of the respectable worse than a bomb in Brick Lane
Labour: the best and the worst
The New Statesman asked a number of public figures to give their verdict on the government's record, two years on.
Poverty: well done, but can do better
Education matters, but it's still the class system that makes children poor
We must still tax and spend
The Third Way, argues Robert Reich, means a deal between economic winners and losers. But the winners haven't been told their side of the bargain
Is it all more trouble than it's worth?
Kirsty Milne finds Scots and Welsh asking if devolution just means more mediocrity
No rockets if you're Scottish
Westminster will keep power over space travel, gambling, abortion, vets and much else. George Rosie predicts trouble
Salmond had better watch his back
A Labour victory seems certain in Scotland, but it will settle nothing
For freedom, and thinner opera singers
Only an artistic revival can save Wales, believes Tom Davies. That's why he formed a new party
Do we really want to be Welsh?
Christopher Meredithgave his kids a tenner to celebrate the "yes" vote. Perhaps it should have been a fiver
They're set on keeping Blair at No 10
Simon Heffer finds the Tories plunging into yet another quite unnecessary argument
Regulars
Arts & Culture
Building on tradition
Hugh Aldersey-Williams visits two British cities that have chosen distinctive architecture as a means of constructing a new identity
Bad dreams
Film byJonathan Romney
All the raga
Music byDermot Clinch
Age shall not wither him
Jazz byRichard Cook
One-piece wonders
Design byHugh Aldersey-Williams
Books
The allure of the camps. A moralising impulse dominates much recent rethinking on the Holocaust and the gulags. This has encouraged sentimentality at the expense of hard ideological analysis
A French Tragedy: Scenes of Civil War, Summer 1944
Tzvetan Todorov University Press of New England, 138pp, £13.95
Facing the Extreme: Moral Life in the Concentration Camps
Tzvetan Todorov Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 307pp, £20
Symphony of sin
Seven
Richard Dyer BFI Publishing, 88pp, £7.99
Exciting friend
Anthony Crosland: A New Biography
Kevin Jefferys Richard Cohen Books, 270pp, £25
Bananas are better
The Improvised Woman
Marcelle Clements W W Norton, 351pp, £18.95
For the Union dead
Devolution in the United Kingdom
Vernon Bogdanor Oxford University Press, 304pp, £8.99
The sound and the fury
Andrew Marr is haunted by a near-invisible Scottish poet and nationalist
Bum notes
An Equal Music
Vikram Seth Phoenix House, 381pp, £16.99
Observations
Letters to the Editor
New Statesman readers give their views - see what they said and find out how to contribute yourself by going to our letters pages
