How Has Labour Done?
My friend and colleague, Austin Mitchell MP, asked me a month or two ago to write a short piece for the House Magazine on the state of the Labour government. He was kind enough to publish it on his own...
View ArticleTony Blair’s Easy Options
Writing in The Guardian on 27 June 2006, Tony Blair asserts that “economic efficiency and social justice are entirely compatible.” The assertion, quoted with approval in a leading article by The...
View ArticleBritish Labour in 2007
As we enter the new year, the first task for Labour should be to draw a line under an egregious error made in its name – an error that began with an abuse of power and a breathtaking deception of the...
View ArticleBryan Gould on Gordon Brown
The following article was published in the NZ Listener of 14 July. In the ten years after Gordon Brown and Tony Blair entered the House of Commons together in 1983, Gordon was always regarded as the...
View ArticleA Brown Study
The following article by Bryan Gould appeared in the Sunday Telegraph on 21 September The first two months must have been very heaven. The long-awaited prize had been grasped. Opposition from both...
View ArticleNew Labour – Not Labour
New Labour’s current travails have prompted a number of people to recall a piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 1999 – it was a review of Paul Routledge’s biography of Peter Mandelson – and to ask if...
View ArticleWas Gordon Brown’s Reputation Justified?
Like so many others, I looked forward to Gordon Brown’s accession to Number Ten. Here, I thought, was the chance of breaking with the spin and superficiality of the Blair years. With Gordon, we would...
View ArticlePutrefaction
I joined the Labour Party in 1964. I had been moving left since leaving home, and two years at Oxford during the fag-end of the Macmillan government had convinced me that Britain needed a Labour...
View ArticleSaving Labour
I surely cannot have been the only reader to stop short mid-sentence at Nicholas Watts’ statement (Guardian, 13 January) that Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson had “wrenched Labour out of...
View ArticleNot In My Name
Those, like me (and almost everyone I know in the Labour Party), who have been critical over the years of New Labour and its record in government might have expected that the passage of time would...
View ArticleThe Expense of New Labour
As the scandal of MPs’ expenses unfolds, it threatens not only to expose individual sleaze but to create a crisis of confidence that will engulf the whole of the political class and Parliament as well....
View ArticleNew Labour Betrays Its Supporters
As the Labour Party steels itself for electoral meltdown, it may seem ironic – after the global-sized catastrophes of the Iraq invasion and the worldwide recession – that it is the descent into...
View ArticleTragedy
One of the fascinations of politics is that it unfolds over different time scales and at different levels. At one end of the scale are the personal and short-term; at the other, the matters of policy...
View ArticleWhat’s Left for Labour?
Barring a miracle, and miracles seem likely to be in short supply, Labour will lose the next election. The question is not the survival of the Labour government, but the survival of Labour as a force...
View ArticleA False Dichotomy
Nothing better illustrates Labour’s current malaise than the reported difficulty the leadership group is having in agreeing on a strategy for an election that is now only a few months away. Some, we...
View ArticleA New Labour Leadership
In the aftermath of election defeat, Labour seems to be acting on at least some of the lessons of recent history. But there is little to suggest that any of the declared candidates for the leadership...
View ArticleLabour-Saving Devices
Bryan Gould was a contributor to a BBC Radio programme about the current situation of the Labour Party. The programme was broadcast on 7 September. Below is a link to the programme....
View ArticleThe Labour Leadership
After thirteen years in government, it is not perhaps surprising that Labour’s response to election defeat has been somewhat uncertain. Almost all of those who now seek to lead the party have spent...
View ArticleSeeking The Middle Ground
Labour has made its choice. The question now is, will that choice be shared and endorsed by the wider electorate? Ed Miliband must now not only re-energise a party that has been sapped of confidence...
View ArticleLabour Bounces Back
Eight months after the general election defeat, Labour is in surprisingly good shape – and, paradoxically it may seem, that perception is strengthened rather than reversed by the Shadow Cabinet...
View ArticleAn Economic Policy for Labour
It was significant that, in the seven issues that Tony Blair – in his article last week in the New Statesman – advised Ed Miliband to focus on, there was no mention of the state of the economy. It is...
View ArticleThe Labour Leadership
It may truly be said of David Shearer that nothing so much became him as the manner of his going. He is living proof that, in today’s politics, being a decent and thoughtful person is not enough....
View ArticleAiming at the Wrong Target
Labour will be “tougher than the Tories” when it comes to forcing long-term beneficiaries back into the labour market; so Labour’s new shadow Work and Pensions Secretary, Rachel Reeves, was reported as...
View ArticleWho Owns the Future?
There is no novelty is arguing, as George Osborne does, that there is no alternative to his destructive and divisive policies of austerity – TINA was, after all, the Thatcherite catch-cry and as...
View ArticleYes, There Is An Alternative
Phil Verry was a patriot, a leading businessman and head of New Zealand’s largest sawmilling firm. He was also an innovative thinker. I was privileged to become his friend and colleague, and to help...
View ArticleAnother 1945?
Steve Richards (The Guardian, 28 July) is right to say (and Ed Miliband obviously agrees with him) that next year’s election will not, and should not, be decided by personality politics. So what is it...
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