Dear Liz, Re: Leadership of the Labour Party I noted the other day that leadership contests are that rare occasion when MPs and ordinary members are frank about the personalities and policies at the top of the party. Some also over egg the pudding and go for outright abuse. I’m thinking mainly, this time around, […]
Posts Tagged ‘The state’
Dear Liz Kendall, about the differences between socialism and liberalism…
May 24th, 2015 by Phil Burton-Cartledge.
Do we want predatory capitalism or an economy geared to the common good?
Mar 29th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.Despite the predictable whines of some FTSE-100 bosses reported yesterday about a post-election Labour-SNP pact, Ed M should flesh out more about his vision to replace ‘predatory capitalism’ both because that is what a majority of people want and also to put paid to the ignorant mantra that self-interested executives like to propagate that anyone […]
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The Tories won’t win because they’re barking up the wrong tree
Mar 1st, 2015 by Michael Meacher.George Eaton in the New Statesman has done us a service by revisiting the informative audit of the 2010 election by the Tory pollster Lord Ashcroft, entitled Minority Verdict, which throws new relevant light on the likely outcome of the present election campaign. In 2010, despite Labour polling the second lowest total of electors since […]
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How the austerity con works
Feb 24th, 2015 by Michael Burke.‘The Austerity Con’ is the title of a recent article in the London Review of Books. It is written by a leading Keynesian economist Professor Simon-Wren Lewis, who is also a fellow of Merton College, Oxford. It deserves to be widely read because it contains two important arguments against austerity. The first argument nails the […]
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The economy, the state and my crisis of faith
Nov 5th, 2014 by Daniel McAteer.Last week I had a crisis of faith in Labour. Looking at the Scottish polling, it looks as if Labour’s journey back to government may be longer and harder than we thought. Yet that is not what caused my questions to synchronise into a cacophony of doubt. My worries are for what happens if we do get […]
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To reinvent our economy we need to reframe the debate
Sep 12th, 2014 by Dave Watson.The left needs to reframe the debate by imagining a different way of running our economy. In his Guardian column last week, Oliver Burkeman commented on the reclining airline seats ‘war’ by saying, “Stop arguing. Capitalism already won this stupid war“. It’s not the fairness of reclining or not, it’s because airlines cram so many […]
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Labour will inherit a crisis, not a recovery
Jun 27th, 2014 by Michael Burke.At a certain point in the next few months the recession in Britain will officially be over as the real level of GDP will finally exceed its previous peak in the 1st quarter of 2008. The media coverage will be generally very favourable, in the hope that this will boost the Tory vote and vindicate the […]
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State ownership of rail is only the start
May 6th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.As the 31 Labour parliamentary candidates are demanding in their letter to Miliband, the case for returning rail to the public sector after the botched privatisation of 1996 is overwhelming. Private ownership has produced for the UK the highest fares in Europe, extensive overcrowding on commuter lines because of giving priority to dividends for shareholders over […]
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Playing the neo-liberals game
Apr 7th, 2014 by Bryan Gould.The advice offered by some of its leading thinkers that Labour should switch the focus away from the role of central government and towards a greater devolution of power to the regions and communities has a fashionable ring to it. But it is another, perhaps unwitting, admission of the left’s damaging loss of intellectual self-confidence. […]
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Two Milibands, One Nation, One Monarchy
Dec 4th, 2012 by David Osler.The late Ralph Miliband made his name as a Marxist theoretician through detailed elaboration of the proposition that the Labour Party can do absolutely nothing for the working class. His two boys, or so the lefty joke has it, have very loyally done their best to prove the old man right. Now it looks as […]
