Monthly Archives: May 2010

Not new but next….

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My latest post from Public Finance. – with a little bit added!

It’s official: New Labour is no more. We have it on the word of one of the previous government’s sharpest political brains, former Foreign Secretary David Miliband, the first to throw his hat into the ring for the party leadership. With his trademark air of authority, Miliband has informed us that we are now living in the era of Next Labour.

Personally, I’m still reeling from the demise of the old regime. Although never a fan of New Labour, it seemed indomitable in its way. But then so did Thatcherism and Blairism ( the yolk to New Labour’s egg) once upon a time.

So what will Next Labour look like? Of course, it’s too early to say. Labour faces a prolonged period of soul searching. It urgently needs to reconnect with both the public and the party’s grassroots, many of whom fell away, particularly in the years after Iraq. In fact, I suspect that none of the leadership candidates will continue to profess loyalty to the decision to go to war in 2003.

The Miliband brothers have both declared a refreshing willingness to re-think the party from the ground up. Idealists within the party over the last 13 years may have been dismissed as dinosaurs or utopians or both but David himself now talks of the need for ‘idealism and transparency’ and radical political reform. His younger brother Ed, currently the only other contender for the leadership, has talked of the ‘loss of a sense of progressive mission and of being in touch with people’s concerns’.

Of course, New Labour was always good at talking the talk, on fairness, flexibility, aspiration and the rest, often leaving the rest of us unsure what they actually hoped to achieve, a skill that the Con/Dem coalition leaders have successfully reproduced. By September, however, vaguer talk of change will need to solidify around some clear pledges for progressive reform on everything from housing to education, welfare and the living wage .Despite, or perhaps because of, the fast moving 24/7 news age, with its newly Presidential tone, never has it been more important to say what you mean and mean what you say. Neither the public nor the party faithful have the stomach for more high flown fluffy generalities, with the real stuff of government going on behind closed doors.

For that reason, it is vital that the next Labour leadership engage with, and show greater respect towards, their own activists.…

Where are the women?

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Great piece by Katharine Viner in The Guardian today about the dearth of women or indeed any diversity in the new Con/dem coalition and how this reflects the general absence of women from mainstream political life over the last few weeks. Read it and weep. And then get organised………

Strange days indeed

Posted on by Melissa Benn • 2 Comments

In this strange post election time everyone is trying to make sense of what has happened and what should happen next. (This blog for instance got a lot of hits yesterday which I can only presume was people keen to find others with whom to share the surreal political moment; sorry but I was glued to the television watching events unfold! )

Questions today: will the Lib Dems actually do a deal with Cameron’s Conservatives? ( Current thinking among those who know most is: probably not; Cameron will go it alone.) Will there be another election soon? Who will lead Labour into that? But of course these questions of process both disguise and give form to the hopes and anxieties of progressives everywhere, those of us who desperately do not want a Tory government again, particularly now that Cameron sniffs power, less acceptable Tory attitudes and politics are beginning to come into the light.

A consensus seems to have emerged on what needs to be protected now: our vital public services, civil liberties, substantive action on climate change, progressive political reform and a change in direction in our foreign policy.

For more details of post election mobilisation, I direct you for the moment to the Compass website.Plus join this group while you are it.

An important ps: this election has also shown up how far we have to go in terms of getting women into the centre of our political life. By the end of the election I was sick of the sight of rows of men in suits, at press conferences, political meetings, in the tv studios. We need real women at the forefront of every level of our politics. How do we achieve that?…

Dreamers of a new day?

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This really doesn’t seem an apposite title for a blog post as we head, in a matter of hours, into May 6th and a possible hung parliament or worse, a Tory victory. But it IS the title of my latest published article; for anyone interested in our rich radical past, please read my New Statesman review, published yesterday, of Sheila Rowbotham’s magisterial new study of feminist campaigners, activists, pioneers and dreamers at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century.…

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THE CRISIS OF THE MERITOCRACY

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The crisis of the meritocracy: Britain’s transition to mass education since the Second World War

PETER MANDLER, 2020

Oxford: Oxford University Press

361pp, hardback, £25, ISBN 9780198840145

Cambridge historian Peter Mandler has a fundamentally optimistic story to tell about the growth of universal education in Britain over the last seventy years and one can sense his stubborn resistance to any more sceptical interpretation on almost every page of this dense and impressive history. Since the close of the ‘people’s war’ in 1945, Mandler argues, we have witnessed the rise of mass education, initially at secondary level, and more recently in higher education where participation rates currently nudge New Labour’s much vaunted promise of 50 per cent. Contrary to established narratives that have put this development down to economic growth or significant pieces of legislation, Mandler identifies the expansion of educational opportunity as the result of a constantly shifting interplay of demand and supply that has reinforced ‘the deepening compact between the individual citizen and the state which came with formal democracy and the idea of equal citizenship’. Education continues to be seen by the public as one of the ‘decencies’ of life’; hence the inexorable rise in demand for what Mandler often refers to as ‘more and better’.

In short, the people (sort of) did it themselves.

On the face of it, this is an attractive proposition, yet one that is oddly tricky to grapple with, given the mass of contradictory or partial information available to us concerning what the ‘people’ have wanted at any given historical moment or, indeed, who exactly the people are. Mandler deliberately employs ‘a promiscuous array of methods and sources’, sifting through realms of evidence from official publications, interviews, academic studies, pollsters’ findings and demographic surveys in an attempt to clarify the complex relationship between government policy, public demand and social change. This promiscuity encourages him to prosecute his subsidiary critique of the alleged tendency of academic disciplines to work in unhelpful silos. Economists and social scientists, he charges, have paid scant attention to educational expansion while educationists and political historians tend to ‘chop up long-term trends into short political segments’ with many on the left falling into a ‘declinist narrative’ in which the failures of a ‘divided’ Labour party feature heavily as a reason for a lack of genuine progress (an analysis Mandler anyway rejects). But we shall return to the problem of we whingeing progressives in a moment.…

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A Cold War Tragedy

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Melissa will be in conversation with Anne Sebba about her new book, ‘Ethel Rosenberg – A Cold War Tragedy.’

Weds 15th September 2021, 5-6pm, in the Robert Graves Tent at the Wimbledon Book Festival.

More information here.

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