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 sector “reform”; student finance “reform”: to “reform” something, in Westminster slang, is to pound it into a smoking mound and then sell its parts as scrap.
It’s a fool’s errand trying to stay on top of all of these verbal weeds in our political garden. But I do make one exception – there is one weed so pervasive, so threatening to the garden’s diversity and vitality, that it must be uprooted at any cost in time or effort. The word “progressive” should cease to be used at all future Labour Party events. Continue reading
MOST liberal post-mortems of the US presidential contest have been pretty upbeat; many comfortingly assert that the Republicans can never win again.
In a part of Britain in which the population still gets overly excited about the ideological alignments of its football clubs, the British flag is not just a neutral patriotic symbol.
If you haven’t seen The Wilderness Years, a BBC series of four hour-long documentaries broadcast in 1995, it’s well worth watching – and you can by following the links below. Documenting the period of Labour’s history from losing the 1979 election to the election of Blair as Labour’s Leader, it relies entirely on archive footage alongside in-depth interviews with those most closely involved in the events, a format which really does allow the viewer to draw their own conclusions. 