Last year a book was published – Power Trip A Decade of Policy, Plots and Spin which promised to reveal “the personal feuds, political plots, and media manipulation which lay at New Labour’s core“. It would be, promised its publishers, “a fascinating, funny, and at times shocking account of how government really works“. At the end of this month, a book is to be published which makes a similar promise, though about the party machine at New Labour’s core, rather than the government machine, and it is likely to reflect badly on Blair rather than Brown.
Unlike Power Trip, however, The Blair Supremacy is written not by a discredited spin doctor but by an esteemed academic, Lewis Minkin, Visiting Honorary Professor in the School of Politics and International Studies at the University of Leeds. He is the author of two seminal works on Labour party organisation, The Contentious Alliance (the definitive study of the relationship between the trade unions and the Labour Party) and The Labour Party Conference (the definitive study of Labour’s intra-party democracy prior to the changes of the early 1980s). Continue reading
On this day, 23 November 1909, began a strike known as the Uprising of the 20,000. Over 20,000 Yiddish-speaking immigrants, mostly young women in their teens and twenties, launched a strike in New York’s garment industry.
Writing in yesterday’s 