Posted in Ideology

What’s love got to do with it? A brief rejoinder to Peter Hyman

Whats-Love-Got-to-Do-With-ItThe Labour right and the Labour left never was one of the great romances. Ever since the couple plighted their troths on 15 February 1906, theirs has always been the very exemplar of loveless marriage.

Little wonder that both partners have been guilty of flirtation – and sometimes adulterous couplings – at repeated intervals, for more than a century.

The right walked out to shack up with the Tories in 1931, and decided to live on its own in 1981, when I guess it ‘needed some space’, as the saying goes. More recently, it has repeatedly been hitting on the Lib Dems. Continue reading →

Is capitalism “mutating” into an infotech utopia?

9781846147388I was privileged to be invited by the St. Paul’s Institute to discuss (on the 3 November) the thesis in Paul Mason’s recent book Post Capitalism: A Guide to Our Future with a keynote speech from the author.

Mason’s book is both a riveting and intellectually exhilarating read. It challenged me at a range of levels, and has added considerably to my list of must-read books. However, I have strong disagreements with Mason, and these are outlined in my review, published as a PRIME e-publication. Continue reading →

An Osborne Supremacy?

Cameron and Osborne“The best things are when you get your opponents to end up agreeing with you because then you’ve really won the argument. When you finally agree – that’s when it’s going to last, that’s when you’ve won’.”

It is statements such as that which have earned George Osborne so many plaudits in the press recently, from the left and right, and his thinking put into practice which has the Tories polling at over 40%. The claim is that the Tories are stealing ‘the centre ground’, with their ‘National Living Wage’, workers’ party rebrand, and rhetoric around ‘fairness’, and has been made by everyone in Labour from Owen Jones’ belief that Osborne is making “an audacious raid on Labour territory” to Dan Hodges obvious trolling that David Cameron is now the “leader of the British left”.

But the most well-argued and detailed analysis of this new ‘Osborne Supremacy’ is a publication by Compass bearing that title. Written by Ken Spours, a Gramscian Professor at UCL and now Compass Associate, the “The Osborne Supremacy” uses the concept of ‘hegemony’ to argue that the conservatives have embraced progressive values and rhetoric, posturing in hard hats and using the language of a ‘living wage’ to eat into Labour’s support base.  Continue reading →

What Labour can learn from the Thatcherites

6391840805_37db042a8d_mThatcherism wasn’t always as popular as it is today. For David Cameron to be able to introduce the market so heavily into the NHS, universities, even schools, to privatise the Queen’s head, as Dennis Skinner described the Royal Mail sell-off, shows the strength of right-wing politics in Britain. For Cameron to then be re-elected with a majority, and for half of voters to opt either for him or UKIP, a party ostensibly to his right, shows the political consensus remains firmly on enemy terrain. Continue reading →

The new mainstream versus right-wing orthodoxy

corbyn and cameron at PMQsOne of the main obstacles to making sense of today’s politics is the insistence of commentators that any shift in political position can only be described as either rightwards or leftwards. This over-simplified and one-dimensional view of the political landscape means that many of the possible directions of political travel – directions that cannot or should not be characterised in such limited terms – are simply not recognised or are overlooked.

When a party elects a new leader, as the Labour Party has just done, this lazy shorthand automatically describes the change as a shift to the right or – more usually and, as in this case – a “lurch” to the left. But such language significantly misrepresents what has happened. Continue reading →