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 […]
Posts Tagged ‘New Labour’
Blair’s covert party machine and culture of manipulation to be exposed in new book
Apr 28th, 2014 by Jon Lansman.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 […]
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Obama could yet make New Labour’s mistake
Nov 19th, 2012 by David Osler.MOST liberal post-mortems of the US presidential contest have been pretty upbeat; many comfortingly assert that the Republicans can never win again. The GOP is said to be irretrievably out of sync with the new America of openly lesbian senators, women who know their bodies cannot shut down rape pregnancies, and ever-increasing numbers of Latinos […]
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Scotland: at least Labour could oppose independence independently
Oct 19th, 2012 by David Osler.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. Thirteen-year-old Lee Heron was earlier this year sent home from his high school in Newton Stewart, Wigtownshire, for wearing a Union Jack T-shirt his mum […]
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The Wilderness Years
Oct 13th, 2012 by Jon Lansman.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 […]
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Tony Blair: PR man for Kazakhstan
Oct 24th, 2011 by David Osler.Nursultan Nazarbayev is clearly an extremely popular guy. Why, only last April, he secured 95% of the votes in Kazakhstan’s presidential elections. And just to underline how much his people love him, the name of the party which holds every single seat in the country’s parliament loosely translates as ‘Ray of Light of the Fatherland’, […]
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In (partial) defence of Gordon Brown
Oct 13th, 2011 by Andrew Fisher.Despite the claims of Cameron and Osborne (and that rather politically naive and economically illiterate note left by Liam Byrne), the last Labour government was not profligate, it did not over-spend. In fact, as the graph below shows, Labour actually spent less as a proportion of GDP than either the governments of Thatcher and Major. Labour […]
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Mandelson – Wanker (the sequel)
Sep 10th, 2011 by Jon Lansman.Hannah Rothschild’s first screenplay was entitled Wanker, which was the story of a student sperm donor whose progeny tried to find their father — the rights were bought by Ridley Scott. As a director, her latest documentary is Mandelson: The Real PM? If you missed it when it was broadcast last November on the BBC, you […]
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The Blairite ultras would lead Labour to surrender. They must be stopped
May 19th, 2011 by Owen Jones.I never thought I’d say but it but, Christ, I don’t half know how Thatcher felt. Until her administration came and put the ‘Great’ back into ‘Great Britain’ (and all that), post-war Britain was a picture of despair for Maggie. The Tories had capitulated to the political settlement established by Clement Attlee’s 1945 government, with […]
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The Tories: fear them, hate them by all means, but be in awe of their genius
May 6th, 2011 by Owen Jones.For many Labour supporters who woke up this morning, this is what ‘schadenfreude’ was introduced into the lexicon for. The smell of toast Lib Dem wafted through their windows up and down the country. In the year since Britain fell back under Tory domination, the most passionate vitriol has been reserved for the Lib Dems: […]
