The 156th anniversary of the birthday of one of the Labour party’s finest minds, if not the finest, should be a day to celebrate – for without him we wouldn’t have had Attlee, Bevan and Castle and the soul of the party would have been different.
The post-war settlement, the NHS, the only woman to have held the office of First Secretary of State; all the heroes and all the achievements were able to come to life by the enabling work of this one great man. Continue reading
If you needed any evidence that I am obsessed with politics, the fact that I was sitting in the stuffy environment of Camden Town Hall on one of the hottest nights of the year, rather than chilling on my balcony with a glass of something cold in my hand, should be more than enough.
It was an event I’d been looking forward to for a while – a debate on the future of Labour. The speakers were Owen Jones (needs no introduction), Richard Angell of Progress and Patrick McFarlane of so-called Blue Labour.
In other words should Labour go left, stay true to the legacy of Blair or pursue some strange, slightly metaphysical direction that the speaker defined as ‘democratic resistance to commodification’? Well that makes everything crystal clear, doesn’t it?
The rise of Owen Jones as a persuasive and articulate exponent of socialist politics is certainly a very welcome development, and the reach of his articles in the Independent gives him a useful vehicle for propagating left-wing ideals, which he does very well. However, I want to take issue with Owen’s recent article about Tony Blair.
One of biggest intellectual challenges for the left in Britain is to assess the degree to which Blairism, the phenomenon we know as New Labour, has transformed the Labour Party. There are two vital questions to consider. Did Blairism represent a discontinuity with traditional centre-right Labourism (revisionism)? and whether any such discontinuity has fundamentally and irrevocably changed the nature of the Labour Party? Continue reading
