One of the strangest things about Jeremy Corbyn’s ascension to the leadership is that nobody’s quite clear as to who the people are who made it happen. Many commentators have made lazy and inaccurate assumptions about the class backgrounds of the new recruits, and the prevalence of hardened Left activists has been greatly overstated. There […]
We need to stop using the word ‘progressive’
Jul 31st, 2015 by Max Leak.The vocabulary of the Labour moderniser is narrow and confusing. To start with there’s the word “moderniser” itself, denoting members of a kind of desperate tribute band to the original mid-nineties New Labour gaggle. “Reform” is another favourite – it’s a polite word for “destruction”, or at the very least wholesale privatisation. Welfare “reform”; public […]
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Austerity is a hard untruth for Europe to swallow
Jul 20th, 2015 by Max Leak.The most galling aspect of the Conservative Party’s ongoing political success is that its all-important austerity narrative is objectively, straightforwardly untrue. Every Conservative politician of note must be fully aware of this, and there are no words to describe the cynicism that it requires to keep trotting out the flagrant lie, year in, year out. […]
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The Left needs to unpack what “Electability” really means
Jul 4th, 2015 by Max Leak.The candidacy of Jeremy Corbyn for the Labour Party leadership has stimulated the party’s old debate surrounding the Left and “electability”: supporters of the Islington North MP claim that elections are won by a clear and confident statement of one’s ideas, whilst opponents universally claim that elections are won, always and in any circumstance, by […]
