tag:theconversation.com,2011:/global/topics/new-labour-13703/articlesNew Labour – The Conversation2023-08-08T16:52:05Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2100172023-08-08T16:52:05Z2023-08-08T16:52:05ZHow 25 years of education policy led us to believe we can only succeed in life with a degree<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540734/original/file-20230802-29-94osov.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=31%2C10%2C3517%2C1782&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The number of students going to university has increased significantly over the past 25 years. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/speaker-giving-talk-on-corporate-business-481869205">Matej Kastelic/Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The UK prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is putting measures in place to restrict student numbers on what he has termed “<a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/crackdown-on-rip-off-university-degrees">rip-off degrees</a>”: university courses that have high drop-out rates and are unlikely to lead to <a href="https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/publications/setting-numerical-thresholds-for-condition-b3/">highly skilled jobs</a>. </p>
<p>Instead, the government is <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/sunak-favours-apprenticeships-over-rip-off-university-degrees-w2cnsc8j0#">promoting apprenticeships</a>, through which young people train for a specific career while in employment. Ucas, the universities admissions service, is making it easier for applicants to <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/apprenticeships-boosted-under-plans-to-broaden-ucas">compare degree options with apprenticeships</a>. </p>
<p>But attempts to encourage people to take vocational routes as an alternative to studying for a degree are unlikely to work. </p>
<h2>The value of a degree</h2>
<p>A degree is a widely recognised mark of achievement, and its value does not look likely to diminish. Young people and their families aspire towards degrees. They also know that having a degree is likely to lead to a <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/graduates-enjoy-100k-earnings-bonus-over-lifetime">higher salary</a>.</p>
<p>Degrees now incorporate elements of vocational training that might traditionally have been associated with work-based training, and a degree has become an entry requirement for many careers. Even when people choose apprenticeships, they are increasingly taking up higher level courses that <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06113/">can lead to a degree</a>. </p>
<p>The current pattern of increasing higher education participation started with Tony Blair’s New Labour government. Blair <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/460009.stm">set a target</a> in 1999 for 50% of young people to enter higher education, which was <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-49841620">ultimately achieved</a> 20 years later. </p>
<p>But Labour’s expansion of student numbers was originally part of a wider plan to boost learning throughout life. This would be achieved by combining vocational and academic learning, rather than positioning them as alternatives. The plan was outlined in a consultation paper published in 1998 and titled <a href="https://education-uk.org/documents/pdfs/1998-the-learning-age.pdf">The Learning Age</a>. </p>
<p>The paper expected that more people progressing to higher levels of learning would benefit both individuals and the economy. It also claimed that “a culture of learning will help to build a united society”. </p>
<p>It stated that people should be able to access different types of learning more easily and at more stages in their lives. This would begin with a new qualification combining academic and vocational learning at age 16-18, which would replace A-levels. Then learning would expand through the growth of further and higher education together. </p>
<p>The proposals also expected that, as more people entered higher levels of education, it should increasingly be financed by learners contributing to the cost of their studies. </p>
<p>Only this last part has survived the 25 years since. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Woman wearing hijab in classroom" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/540739/original/file-20230802-23-rhni23.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Learning Age consultation paper expected significant numbers of mature students to enter higher education.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/muslim-woman-wearing-hijab-sitting-table-2160229043">Pressmaster/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In 1998, Labour introduced tuition fees of £1,000 per year. Under different governments and through re-payable loans, this fee <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-8151/">then increased</a>: to £3,000 from 2006, £9,000 from 2012, and £9,250 from 2017. </p>
<p>But rather than a united culture of education – integrating all kinds of learning – policies increasingly encouraged direct entry to degrees as the starting point for a career. </p>
<p>Even though Labour increased tuition fees in 2006, the government was still also <a href="https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/ukgwa/20040117012057/http://www.dfes.gov.uk/highereducation/hestrategy/exec.shtml">providing funding to universities</a> for teaching students. This included funding for collaborations between further education colleges and universities, with the aim of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2006/feb/01/highereducation.uk1">enabling learners to progress</a> from vocational courses to degrees throughout life. But the idea for a single qualification combining A-levels with vocational qualifications in schools <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4299151.stm">was abandoned</a>. </p>
<p>A Conservative-led coalition elected in 2010 replaced most of the university teaching grant with tuition fee loans from 2012, then removed caps on student numbers for degree courses from 2015. This allowed even greater numbers of young people to go to university. It also placed reliance on <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/higher-education-white-paper-students-at-the-heart-of-the-system">student choice and competition</a> to shape the pattern of courses offered by universities. </p>
<h2>The higher education market</h2>
<p>This more competitive system made the educational vision presented in the Learning Age paper – learning for people throughout their lives and in all parts of the country – more distant. Universities <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/02/universities-spending-millions-on-marketing-to-attract-students">focused on</a> bringing young students to study full-time on their own campuses. </p>
<p>The proportion of undergraduates studying part-time, which is favoured by older students who are not entering directly from school, <a href="https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7966/CBP-7966.pdf">halved</a> across the decade until 2019. </p>
<p>The pathway from school to university and then into a graduate career became the definition of success for many students, parents and teachers. As a result, recent attempts to divert young people towards vocational routes have met with limited success. Since 2017, funding for apprenticeships in England has been boosted by a <a href="https://theapprenticeacademy.co.uk/the-apprenticeship-levy">levy paid by employers</a>, but apprenticeship numbers are <a href="https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/sn06113">going down</a> among school leavers. </p>
<p>The government is also <a href="https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/196242/education-committee-blasts-disappointing-govt-response-to-t-levels-report/">experiencing difficulties</a> implementing its new vocational T-level qualifications, which have been promoted as an alternative to the A-level path towards degrees. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"1685943556580466688"}"></div></p>
<p>The caps on certain courses being introduced by Sunak seem likely to encourage young people to move between degrees, rather than take other routes. A better option would be to accept the value of a degree, and make it easier for people to progress to them through vocational learning. </p>
<p>The growth of <a href="https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2023/06/02/degree-apprenticeships-how-you-could-get-a-degree-for-free/">degree-level apprenticeships</a>, which allow people to study for a degree during their apprenticeship, and a new <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/lifelong-loan-entitlement">lifelong loan entitlement</a> provide opportunities for this. But it is still much harder to move to a degree from a vocational course in a further education college than directly from school. <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21582041.2023.2219664">Better incentives</a> are needed for universities to create pathways for learners from further education colleges, rather than competing with them. </p>
<p>By encouraging diverse paths towards university degrees, the government can both meet the needs of employers and respect the interests of learners. The way to build a more unified society is to bring people together through the education system, not divide them.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/210017/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Chris Millward is Professor of Practice in Education Policy at the University of Birmingham. He previously worked as Director of Policy at the Higher Education Funding Council for England and Director of Fair Access and Participation at its higher education regulator, the Office for Students. Chris is a trustee of the Society for Research in Higher Education, a Marshall Scholarships Commissioner and Chair of the Advisory Board for the Centre for Global Higher Education. </span></em></p>The government in England is promoting apprenticeships rather than “rip-off” university degrees.Chris Millward, Professor of Practice in Education Policy, University of BirminghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1956082022-12-08T11:39:27Z2022-12-08T11:39:27ZResearch has long shown institutional misogyny and racism within the UK’s fire services<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499253/original/file-20221206-13-9iol76.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">shutterstock</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/red-white-striped-warning-tape-prevents-1349124620">Sarnia | Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Following the tragic death of trainee firefighter Jaden Matthew Francois-Esprit, who took his own life in August 2020, an independent review was set up to investigate the workplace culture at the London Fire Brigade. Chaired by the solicitor and former crown prosecutor, Nazir Afzal, the review <a href="https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/about-us/independent-culture-review/">has found evidence</a> of institutional misogyny and racism in the UK’s largest fire and rescue service. </p>
<p>The report is based on the accounts of more than 2,000 current and former staff members and community groups. It details racial, ethnic and misogynistic abuse by co-workers, as well as unacceptable behaviour towards members of the public. </p>
<p>If <a href="https://theconversation.com/misogyny-in-police-forces-understanding-and-fixing-cop-culture-176303">similar accusations</a> have regularly been associated with the Metropolitan police, fire and rescue services have <a href="https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/publications/public-perceptions-of-fire-and-rescue-services-2018/">consistently enjoyed</a> some of the highest satisfaction ratings from the public. But Afzal has warned that this culture of discrimination could be emblematic of wider structural problems within fire services across the country.</p>
<p>The question is how much of this was already known. My research <a href="https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/31645/1/9086_Murphy.pdf">consistently shows</a> that if some progress was made in the early 2000s as a result of comprehensive performance assessments and fire sector reforms, little progress – if any – has been made since 2010. Not only has the push for equality, diversity or inclusion died down, misogyny and racism have not been completely eradicated. </p>
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<img alt="Pipes and bits of equipment in racks at the back of a fire truck." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/499251/original/file-20221206-21-4v17is.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Diversity and equality in the fire sector continues to be woeful’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/fire-truck-open-side-hatch-hydrant-1431493637">Parilov | Shutterstock</a></span>
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</figure>
<h2>Illegal behaviour</h2>
<p>Former Labour MP Nick Raynsford, <a href="https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/substance-not-spin">in his 2016 book</a>, Substance Not Spin, An Insider’s View of Success and Failure in Government, highlights the decades of policy neglect by successive governments between the 1947 Fire Services Act and the end of the 20th century. In 2001, Tony Blair’s New Labour government commissioned an independent review of the UK’s fire service. The final report left little doubt about the decline in organisational culture. As the authors put it:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>We have been, frankly, appalled at some of the stories we have heard of bullying and harassment. The harassment has been both racial and sexual, even given the very small numbers of non-white and female personnel in the service. Such behaviour is illegal as well as being morally repugnant".</p>
</blockquote>
<p>This resulted in a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-62155-5_10">series of national policy reforms</a>, by both the Blair government and subsequently under Gordon Brown. These aimed to modernise the service – and its management in particular – seeking to increase equality, diversity and inclusion. After the Equalities Act was passed in 2010, the Local Government Association <a href="https://www.local.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/guidance%20-%20equality%20frameworks%20-%20Equality%20Framework%20for%20Fire%20and%20Rescue%20Services.pdf">produced</a> a a fire and rescue service equality framework and toolkit to help councils implement these reforms at local level.</p>
<p>Public management scholar Julian Clarke was a member of the team that developed the first equality standard for local government. He contributed a <a href="https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-62155-5_11">chapter</a> to the book I edited with Kirsten Greenhalgh, in 2016 entitled Fire and Rescue Services Leadership and Management Perspectives. Looking back at the evidence, Clarke was still able to be quite optimistic. If fire and rescue services had been late to improving equality policy and practice in both service delivery and employment, he deemed that in the years since 2006, they had made progress: perhaps, he wrote, “more than any other set of public service organisations.”</p>
<p>But he noted that things had slowed down. After 2010, he said, “equality improvement in employment outcomes appears to have been much more limited, when the detailed regulatory regimes of the previous decade disappeared and were replaced by ‘light touch’ oversight”.</p>
<h2>Regulatory failings</h2>
<p>In reality, the writing was already on the wall. In the context of the austerity measures put in place from June 2010, public scrutiny and assurance of the service were systematically and significantly weakened as the Audit Commission – the statutory agency that coordinated audit and inspection of local authorities – was abolished and external inspection of the services abandoned. </p>
<p>In contrast to the extensive coverage of diversity and workforce issues in previous national frameworks, the 2012 fire and rescue national framework included only one single mention of the need to comply with the Equality Act and that was in a list of statutory obligations. By 2015, <a href="https://anyflip.com/nwgw/wkpy/basic/">an independent review</a> by Irene Lucas into one regional fire service warned of extreme variabilities within the nation’s services more broadly. Of Essex county fire and rescue service (ECFRS) in particular, Lucas <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/sep/02/review-dangerous-pervasive-bullying-essex-fire-service">reportedly found</a> that it was culturally, “a failing organisation”, writing: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The organisational culture in ECFRS is toxic. There is dangerous and pervasive bullying and intimidation.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Lucas had been commissioned to undertake this review after two serving firefighters took their own lives amid reports of bullying. Two government reports on fire service finances – from the <a href="https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/financial-sustainability-of-fire-and-rescue-services/">National Audit Office</a> and the parliamentary <a href="https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201516/cmselect/cmpubacc/582/582.pdf">Committee of Public Accounts</a> – were also highly critical, leading to some big political gestures. In September 2015, the government published a white paper <a href="https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/459986/Consultation_-_Enabling_closer_working_between_the_Emergency_Services__w__2_.pdf">commission</a> that proposed making police <a href="https://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/who-we-are-and-what-we-do/elections-and-referendums/past-elections-and-referendums/police-and-crime-commissioner-elections/report-how-2012-police-and-crime-commissioner-elections-were-run">commissioners</a> responsible for <a href="https://www.gov.uk/police-and-crime-commissioners">fire services</a> too. External inspection was also reestablished, through His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Police and Fire Rescue Services (HMICFRS). </p>
<p>In practice, however, this has occasioned no greater interest or action on equality, diversity or inclusion. Human resource management referred to as “people” issues by HMICFRS have repeatedly been found to be the poorest aspects of annual fire service inspections. This is at least in part due to a lack of diversity in recruitment to the fire service, especially at senior levels. In his final 2021 State of Fire report to the government, former chief inspector Thomas P Winsor <a href="https://www.justiceinspectorates.gov.uk/hmicfrs/publications/state-fire-rescue-annual-assessment-2021/">stated</a> that “diversity and race equality in the fire sector continues to be woeful”.</p>
<p>Despite this, as <a href="https://www.fire-magazine.com/the-mis-interpretation-of-section-25-of-the-fire-and-rescue-services-act-2004">my colleague and I have shown</a>, since 2010, not one of the home secretary’s biannual reports to parliament on fire service compliance with the national framework has ever mentioned equality, diversity or inclusion, still less the possibility of misogyny and racism in the service.</p>
<p>The evidence has long been clear and it just keeps coming. Since Afzal’s report, five firefighters in the West Midlands have <a href="https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/five-west-midlands-fire-service-25644386">reportedly been fired</a> for alleged misogynistic bullying and harassment on WhatsApp and are now fighting this dismissal in ongoing tribunal proceedings in Birmingham. </p>
<p>This comes mere weeks after allegations of <a href="https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/lostwithiel-firefighters-sacked-over-inappropriate-7209320">inappropriate behaviour</a> were made at the Lostwithiel community fire station in Cornwall. Our fire and rescue services need rescuing from organisational cultures that are not only inefficient and ineffective, but also damaging and harmful to the frontline staff who keep them functional. They deserve better.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/195608/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Murphy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>If some progress was made in the early 2000s, austerity measures from 2010 saw the push for equality, diversity or inclusion die down.Peter Murphy, Professor of Public Policy and Management, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1845062022-07-18T17:46:58Z2022-07-18T17:46:58ZWho is Emmanuel Macron? Cracking the riddle of France’s divisive president<p>France’s June <a href="https://theconversation.com/parliamentary-elections-shock-frances-political-order-to-its-core-185413">parliamentary elections</a> dealt a heavy blow to President Emmanuel Macron and his place in France’s political arena. Holding an outright legislative majority in 2017, with 345 of 577 seats, his parliamentary group shrunk to 245 – a drop of 100 seats. That left him 34 short of the 289 required to have an absolute majority.</p>
<p>The results in 2022 contrast with the praise heaped on the French president by the English-speaking media since his rise to power in 2017. Macron has variously been depicted as “young, clever and eminently reasonable” (<a href="https://www.economist.com/leaders/2022/04/09/why-macron-matters"><em>The Economist</em></a>), “solid” and “urbane” (<a href="https://twitter.com/JoyAnnReid/status/885551424452612099">MSNBC</a>) and a “striver” (<a href="https://www.politico.eu/list/politico-28-class-of-2022-ranking/emmanuel-macron/">Politico</a>). In the United States, he was seen by some Democrats as a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/emmanuel-macron-speaks-to-the-world-but-what-about-the-french/2017/12/08/c0b22612-d9e1-11e7-a241-0848315642d0_story.html">model to emulate</a>. A year into his mandate, the <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3d3856d4-4d96-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4"><em>Financial Times</em></a> marvelled how he had turned France “into a refuge for entrepreneurs”.</p>
<p>Such views are anything but universally held in France, however, a point brought home by the drubbing that Macron and his party took in the June elections. Simply the difficulty of pigeonholing the him can inspire suspicion. Ever since entering the public eye, Macron has revelled in paradoxes. In a <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/3d3856d4-4d96-11e8-97e4-13afc22d86d4">2018 speech</a>, he said: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“One must be very free to dare to be paradoxical and one must be paradoxical to be truly free.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>He is France’s youngest president, having entered the Élysee Palace at age 39 without any previous electoral mandate, but also the preferred candidate of older voters. He’s a champion of Europe, but a polished product of France’s <em>grandes écoles</em> (elite universities). When he was <a href="https://theconversation.com/french-president-emmanuel-macron-wins-re-election-a-victory-with-deep-challenges-181843">re-elected in April</a>, he was the first to do so outside of a “cohabitation” (power-sharing with an opposing party), yet did so with a historically low percentage of the vote.</p>
<p>So, who is Emmanuel Macron? To crack that riddle, let’s take a close look at the concepts that have defined his paradoxical politics.</p>
<h2>Disruption and revolution</h2>
<p>In 2016, Macron published a political essay, <a href="https://www.eyrolles.com/Litterature/Livre/revolution-9782266281867/">“Revolution”</a>, and there was a lot of talk about “disruption”. The term is often used in the digital world – it’s about thinking differently (to borrow a page from Steve Jobs and Apple), and it is also a way of thinking about business and marketing.</p>
<p>Revolution is to politics what “disruption” is to the economic world. But as was observed by <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/campus/article/2018/03/21/la-disruption-est-t-elle-positive-et-nous-fait-elle-progresser_5274406_4401467.html">Thomas Schauder in <em>Le Monde</em></a>, “the facts quickly point to a return to the same”. In other words, there was neither revolution nor disruption, but a massive shake-up especially concerning the left-right political divide. At the same time, the state returned to its classical form, <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/election-presidentielle-2022/article/2022/04/24/emmanuel-macron-de-la-revolution-a-la-continuite_6123513_6059010.html">vertical and relatively conservative</a>.</p>
<p>Few terms embody Macron’s chameleonic ideology more than his much-parodied adverbial phrase <a href="https://theconversation.com/et-en-meme-temps-une-pensee-macronnienne-de-la-complexite-77917">“En même temps…”</a> (“at the same time”). On the one hand, it can point to a similarity between two entities (in English: “at once”, “simultaneously”). On the other, it can also designate an opposition (“however”, “and yet”). Here is an example from the <em>Journal du Dimanche</em>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I have always accepted the dimension of verticality of transcendence, but at the same time, it must be anchored in complete immanence, of materiality.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>During an April 2017 campaign meeting, he even said:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“You must have noticed, I said ‘at the same time’. It appears to be a verbal tic. I will continue to use it.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Yet in 2018, the president <a href="https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/tics-de-langage-en-meme-temps-le-peche-mignon-de-macron-21-04-2018-7676160.php?ts=1657029219944">fully owned up</a> to its underlying function: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I will continue to use it in my sentences and thought, as it means one takes into account seemingly opposed principles.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Macron has never believed in being a <a href="https://www.challenges.fr/election-presidentielle-2017/interview-exclusive-d-emmanuel-macron-je-ne-crois-pas-au-president-normal_432886">“normal president”</a>, as his predecessor Francois Hollande once described himself. On the contrary, he wants to embody the presidency in word and deed. He wants emotion and “fiery” politics, as exemplified by a speech he made on July 14, France’s national holiday: “Perharps I’m Vulcan, the one who forges” – in a way, “the one who works”. Macron seeks stature, in the truest French monarchical tradition.</p>
<p>In 2022, however, the reality of France’s electoral landscape brought Emmanuel Macron back down to earth. <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/594a1d27-53f9-4409-b97f-e6de9e4c6fe1">“Jupiter no more”</a> observed the <em>Financial Times</em>. Indeed, it is rather as if Icarus had burned his wings: the disruptive president of the left and the right, the one who was going to defeat the extreme right, <a href="https://www.courrierinternational.com/article/vu-de-l-etranger-les-elections-legislatives-ont-sonne-la-fin-de-jupiter">fell short</a>.</p>
<h2>New public management, the “third way” and triangulation</h2>
<p><a href="https://books.google.com/books/about/The_New_Public_Management_in_Action.html?hl=fr&id=I6wDeR2WXjMC">New public management</a> (NPM) is a way of introducing private sector methods into public organisations, the pretext being efficiency. It was born in the 1970s and contributed to putting pressure on public service, the idea being that they should be efficient in the same way as the private sector. For France, however, this quickly led to the public-service mission of administrations being overshadowed by the demand for efficiency.</p>
<p>The “third way” is a kind of political transposition of the NPM. Tony Blair, former leader of the UK’s Labour Party (1994–2007) and prime minister (1994-2007) was <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yueksel-Demirkaya/publication/333517831_Public_Management_Development_in_England_New_Right_New_Left_and_Third_Way/links/5dc41ac94585151435efe4e7/Public-Management-Development-in-England-New-Right-New-Left-and-Third-Way.pdf">its most visible face</a>. He was neither left nor right, and yet both – at the same time.</p>
<p>Macron has also been considered France’s champion of triangulation. A way to weaken one’s enemies and gain power, the <a href="https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/interviews/morris.html">theory of triangulation</a> was developed by Dick Morris for Bill Clinton in the mid-1990s.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I felt that what you should do is really take the best from each party’s agenda, and come to a solution somewhere above the positions of each party. So, from the left, take the idea that we need day care and food supplements for people on welfare. From the right, take the idea that they have to work for a living, and that there are time limits. But discard the nonsense of the left, which is that there shouldn’t be work requirements; and the nonsense of the right, which is you should punish single mothers. Get rid of the garbage of each position… and move up to a third way. And that became a triangle, which was triangulation.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Following in Blair’s and Clinton’s footsteps yet shifting inexorably to the right, Emmanuel Macron is champion of NPM, the third way, and triangulation. It is about being beyond the parties, rallying voters beyond the left and the right. It is also – more prosaically – appropriating the ideas of others. In so doing, he has succeeded in breaking the left-right divide that structured the French political landscape for more than 50 years.</p>
<h2>“Pantouflage” and “progressivism”</h2>
<p>In France, the term <em>pantouflage</em> refers to the practice of leaving the civil service to work in the private sector. Macron’s career has followed the opposite direction – closer to the US practice of “the revolving door”: having attended France’s elite Ecole Normale d’Administration in the early 2000s, he left the public sector to work as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co. His return to politics has been shaped by the corporate spirit and, in particular, the banking world. His resumé reveals both everything and its opposite: major companies and public service.</p>
<p>In 2019, two of Macron’s former advisors, Ismaël Emelien et David Amiel, attempted to <a href="https://www.nouvelobs.com/politique/20190326.OBS2434/emelien-et-amiel-les-deux-ex-strateges-du-president-le-macronisme-est-une-ideologie.html">define the president’s ideology</a>. Their take was “progressivism”: </p>
<blockquote>
<p>“The first principle of progressivism is to maximise the possibilities of present and future individuals.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>To them, Macron believes that it is the individual that is important and that categories such as religions, social classes, and the left-right divide are outdated. The concept promotes the individual without individualism, globalisation without submission and diversity without division.</p>
<p>By affirming that the world has changed and that it is necessary to govern beyond the parties, Macron thought – in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy – that he was going to defeat the extremes. However, the opposite occurred: while Macron succeeded in occupying the centre and centre right, in the process he favoured the rise of the extreme right: the Rassemblement National (RN) party has 89 deputies in the new assembly, a total never before seen.</p>
<p>As for the political left, they recoiled from Macron and in opposition built a new alliance, the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/may/13/france-left-macron-le-pen-jean-luc-melenchon">Nouvelle union populaire écologiste et sociale</a> (Nupes). In June’s legislative elections, they won <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/20/france-parties-reject-melenchons-call-to-form-opposition-bloc">131 seats</a>, second only to Macron’s party, and deprived him of his political majority. If Macronism changed from 2017 to 2021, in 2022 it failed.</p>
<h2>Macron: an outline</h2>
<p>Ultimately, Macron evades labels. However, his essay “Revolution” does provide us with some clues on his few but enduring political values that still hold today.</p>
<p>Macron’s statements are often vague and can be easily adapted, but <strong>Individualism</strong> is arguably one of his founding principles:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“I deeply believe in a society of choice, that is to say, freed from its barriers, from an obsolete organisation, and within which, each individual will be able to decide upon his/her life.”</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Even if Macron was part of a <a href="https://fee.org/articles/emmanuel-macron-is-surprisingly-pro-market-for-a-socialist-sometimes/">Socialist government</a> under François Hollande, he is <strong>pro-market</strong>: “Competition is essential for innovation”, he has said.</p>
<p>He has <strong>little sympathy</strong> for those who have difficulty finding work, as exemplified by a 2018 remark to a job seeker: “I’ll cross the street and I’ll find you a job” <a href="https://www.lemonde.fr/politique/article/2018/09/17/je-traverse-la-rue-je-vous-en-trouve-en-une-petite-phrase-emmanuel-macron-expose-sa-vision-du-travail_5356365_823448.html">Macron replied</a>, an off-the-cuff phrase that shocked many in France.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/FHMy6DhOXrI?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">In 2018, Emmanuel Macron told a job-seeker that all he needed to do to find work was “cross the road”, implicitly putting the responsibility on him.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Macron is <strong>pro-European</strong> and champions France as an influential country in a European Union that is dear to him: “To regain control of our destiny, we need Europe.” France’s presidency of the Council of the EU from January 1 to May 31 was a <a href="https://www.elysee.fr/emmanuel-macron/2022/06/30/six-mois-de-presidence-francaise-au-service-de-europe">highlight for Macron</a>, especially concerning the Ukrainian crisis.</p>
<p>Beyond these themes, the question of the <strong>environment</strong> appears to be more of an intention than a major ambition. While Macron began his first mandate by the naming of the famed ecological activist Nicolas Hulot as environmental minister, he <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/62e582ee-ab7e-11e8-89a1-e5de165fa619">noisily resigned in 2018</a>. And with Macron’s second mandate, the minister of ecological transition has moved from fifth place in the protocol to <a href="https://www.francetvinfo.fr/meteo/climat/remaniement-le-climat-reste-t-il-l-urgence-du-gouvernement-borne-ii_5237080.html">tenth place</a> – the implications are clear.</p>
<h2>Fractured France</h2>
<p>Rather than bringing together everyone to a new centre, freed from political parties, Macron’s strategy has fractured France’s political life into <a href="https://iai.tv/articles/how-macron-polarized-politics-and-won-auid-2114">three entities</a>, centre right, left and far right.</p>
<p>Defining Macron is ultimately tied to his character, his electorate and the consequences for the French political landscape. In the end, he may just be a “partyless” catch-all man. As the sociologist Max Weber would say, he has a “charismatic legitimacy”, drawing his authority from his person rather than his moral strength, or even his connection to those who voted for him. After all, many in France did so only because they refused to support either of the two alternatives. That’s a <a href="https://www.history.com/news/5-famous-pyrrhic-victories">Pyrrhic victory</a> at best for Macron and the “Revolution” of which he dreamed in 2016.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/184506/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Les auteurs ne travaillent pas, ne conseillent pas, ne possèdent pas de parts, ne reçoivent pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'ont déclaré aucune autre affiliation que leur organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>Freshly re-elected in April, France’s president lost his parliamentary majority in June. So who is Emmanuel Macron and what defines his paradoxical politics?Virginie Martin, Docteure sciences politiques, HDR sciences de gestion, Kedge Business SchoolNeville Dyer, Head of Language department, Kedge Business SchoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1765982022-02-08T12:06:32Z2022-02-08T12:06:32ZThe politics of Neighbours: what the Australian soap can teach us about post-Thatcher Britain<p>Channel 5’s <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-6027793">decision to axe</a> Australian soap opera Neighbours has led to widespread dismay among British people in their thirties and upwards. After 36 years on British screens, the network said it will instead invest more in “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2022/feb/06/curtains-for-ramsay-street-as-channel-5-no-longer-needs-good-neighbours">original UK drama</a>”.</p>
<p>Although its 1990 heyday of 20 million viewers on BBC One are long behind it, the show still does comparatively good numbers. Its <a href="https://www.thinkbox.tv/research/barb-data/top-programmes-report/?tag=Channel5">20% market share</a>
makes it the most successful show on Channel 5. Presumably, the soap must be too expensive. But given it has relied on a very visible <a href="https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/soaps/neighbours/toadie-and-dee-reunited-6-crazy-must-see-moments-as-neighbours-plot-explodes/">mannequin in a wig</a> to function as a body double during a car crash, where any big budgets are going is difficult to ascertain.</p>
<p>Business case apart, a lot of the anguish is due to the loss of a communal experience. In the 1990s, Neighbours was a perennial part of young people’s lives, no doubt a product of its repetitive, five-day-a-week transmission. With 83% of 12-15-year-olds claiming to watch the show at <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583">its height</a>, there is a generation of British people for whom the surname Kennedy will conjure up Karl and Susan before it does John F. or Bobby.</p>
<p>That said, despite its uncontroversial, amiable vision of the world, the show was not unrelated to the rough and tumble of party politics. Neighbours was at the peak of its popularity as the UK was beginning to transition away from Margaret Thatcher’s long tenure in Downing Street towards the New Labour period after 1997.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583">I’ve argued</a>, the politics of Erinsborough is small “c” conservative and certainly capitalist. But, unlike Thatcher, Neighbours demonstrated there was <a href="https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689">such a thing as society</a>. All told, it was (and to some degree still is) very Blairite. </p>
<p>Indeed, the type of people who were so drawn to Neighbours – women and those who lived in suburbs – were precisely the type of voters who would go on to fervently back Tony Blair in 1997. The reasons people tuned in to Erinsborough in the late 1980s and early 1990s were largely similar to those they gave for backing New Labour: they wanted an escape from the realities of Thatcher’s Britain. They initially sought it on screen in the form of Australian sunshine and then, when Labour found a charismatic, moderate leader, at the ballot box. Some of Neighbours’ appeal was largely imagined – Australian cul-de-sac living can’t always be so pleasant – but it was certainly enduring. </p>
<p>Like opposition era Blair, the show was (and is) safe, reassuring television. This undramatic tendency would destroy its fortunes in the thrill-seeking US market, but its reliable niceness was a significant draw for the British public. Indeed, while the socially conservative activist Mary Whitehouse took issue with Eastenders’ “violence”, “bad language” and “demoralising situations”, viewers have consistently <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583">told</a> audience researchers that they trust Neighbours with their children’s unsupervised attention. </p>
<p>For its star <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/culture/tv-and-radio/looking-back-at-80s-neighbours-scripts-how-much-has-really-changed-20200228-p545d6.html">Geoff Paine</a> (now back in the show as Dr Clive Gibbons), “the test was could adults and kids watch the show without either getting embarrassed, or the kids asking ‘what does that mean’”? Nearly all of the time, it passed this test. Viewers praised the soap’s lack of “extreme” content, and would make similar comments about New Labour.</p>
<h2>Neighbours’ opposition</h2>
<p>The interesting thing was that politicians didn’t get this at the time. Few watched the show (a product, perhaps, of its daytime transmission), but they would have been well advised to do so to get a more rounded understanding of its appeal.</p>
<p>In May 1991, schools minister Michael Fallon called for Neighbours to be removed from British screens altogether. For Fallon, it was harmful to Britain’s young and served to “dull their senses, making teachers’ jobs even harder”. Labour’s Jack Straw mostly agreed, calling Neighbours “a pretty trashy programme”. Some of this was proto-culture wars nonsense. At the time, only 7% of Neighbours’ viewers <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583">found it</a> “unsuitable for children”. How could they? Dr Clive Gibbons wasn’t even allowed to say the word “pregnant” lest it raise any awkward discussions.</p>
<p>Equally, the fact that Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue were glamorous heartthrobs no doubt helped its ratings, but many Erinsborough watchers were more likely to cite its “harmless, sexless stories about everyday people” than anything raunchy. Indeed, in so far as remarks were made, Minogue’s role as a car mechanic was seen as groundbreaking – and the female mechanic has formed something of a trope in later years. Neighbours told a narrative that was often empowering, did not appear tokenistic, and certainly proved popular among women. In 1990, almost two-thirds of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13619462.2021.2019583">female viewers</a> saw it as a programme “for people like me”. </p>
<p>Altogether, the show was and is well written. Although occasional comparisons at its height with Shakespeare were a bit much, it does comedy and tragedy very well. As anyone watching the 2019 death of Toadie’s wife Sonya will attest to, it delivers occasionally deeply poignant stuff. And so, while it may be curtains on Channel 5, there should still be a place for it on British television. If nothing else, because flight attendant-turned-Trumpian-business mogul Paul Robinson has gotten out of <a href="https://www.huffpost.com/archive/au/entry/neighbours-storylines-crazy-most-memorable_au_5e7302e2c5b6f5b7c53e23c0">worse scrapes</a> than this.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/176598/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Carr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The types of people who gathered daily to watch Neighbours are the same who backed Tony Blair in 1997.Richard Carr, Lecturer in History and Politics, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1212832019-07-31T14:06:16Z2019-07-31T14:06:16ZHow Joe Biden (and a plagiarism row) helped Neil Kinnock lay the ground for UK’s New Labour<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286456/original/file-20190731-186801-f339ti.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Joe Biden: running for president again.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/download/success?u=http%3A%2F%2Fdownload.shutterstock.com%2Fgatekeeper%2FW3siZSI6MTU2NDYwNjAzNiwiYyI6Il9waG90b19zZXNzaW9uX2lkIiwiZGMiOiJpZGxfMTQxNzU3NzA5OSIsImsiOiJwaG90by8xNDE3NTc3MDk5L21lZGl1bS5qcGciLCJtIjoxLCJkIjoic2h1dHRlcnN0b2NrLW1lZGlhIn0sIi9rQzBqNkE3YXRid1F5azE0bUltS3B4L3V3SSJd%2Fshutterstock_1417577099.jpg&pi=33421636&m=1417577099&src=w1C5bGx0dGCjB3T1hCLrtQ-1-13">Shutterstock</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><a href="https://joebiden.com">Joe Biden</a>, who served as vice-president during the Barack Obama years, has run for the US presidency three times – in 1988, 2008 and now. And each time he announces a White House bid, commentators revisit his ill-fated 1988 run. Famously, in September 1987, the then Delaware senator withdrew from the Democratic race eventually won by Michael Dukakis, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/opinions/1988/01/06/the-education-of-joe-biden/9c5e91a0-f3a1-470b-b64e-a71bf5de3f5b/?utm_term=.4fa981815d01">admitting</a> he had been “cocky”, “immature” and “naïve” about the rigours of running for the highest office on Earth.</p>
<p>The cause for that decision is well-known: Biden had borrowed some speech lines from the then British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, but failed to reference his source enough times, leading the media to <a href="https://time.com/5636715/biden-1988-presidential-campaign/">suspect plagiarism</a>. It was a scandal, as the journalist Ezra Klein <a href="https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/6/26/18715650/joe-biden-2020-primary-democrat-senator-segregation">notes</a>, that “threatened to engulf … his career”.</p>
<p>What is less well-known, and is discussed in my forthcoming book <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/march-of-the-moderates-9781788317344/">March of the Moderates</a>, however, is what happened next.</p>
<p>In January 1988, Biden visited a cold London. Although he also had a cordial meeting with Conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, he went out of his way to request time with Kinnock – and asked that no press be present. Kinnock later <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/march-of-the-moderates-9781788317344/">recalled</a> that “in good fun, Joe took the occasion on visiting me in the House of Commons to give me a small collection of his own speeches on foreign policy”.</p>
<p>Biden had obviously meant this gesture as a joke, but “in fact, [Kinnock] took the occasion to read several of them – on arms control, [the] Star Wars [missile system], and US-Soviet relations”. The Welsh politician “found them instructive and beautifully stated”. Labour’s leader admitted that he would be looking to follow the kind of “tough-minded internationalist foreign policy” Biden had long called for.</p>
<p>During the trip to Europe, Biden had taken along his teenage son, Beau – who later tragically died of <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2019/07/31/opinions/joe-biden-2020-affordable-health-care-policy/index.html">brain cancer</a> at just 46 after serving as Delaware’s attorney general. Kinnock remembers that “his son was in his late teens, and very dismayed with his old man for standing down from the race”.</p>
<p>Kinnock had a few words with Beau and said “exactly what had happened. Joe shouldn’t be ashamed in any way, and he shouldn’t be ashamed of his father who as far as I’m concerned was a distinguished and admirable member of the US Senate – who had overcome all kinds of appalling personal difficulties”.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/286457/original/file-20190731-186805-7ih2h7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Former Labour Party leader, Neil Kinnock, in 1990.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/london-may-24-rthon-neil-kinnock-97572878?src=ETYE5TzJwlxXF6c_0hhkMA-1-4&studio=1">Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Joe Biden, Kinnock <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/march-of-the-moderates-9781788317344/">recalled</a>, expressed his clear gratitude at these comments, and a friendship was forged. The two were in contact through most of their subsequent career ups and downs and, in 1997, Biden even jovially <a href="https://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FKNNK%201%2F9%2F13">wrote</a> to tell Kinnock he was “still a hero with my wife, sister and mother”.</p>
<h2>Kinnock’s legacy</h2>
<p>This sentiment was true for many. Kinnock was a brave figure who, though never prime minister, saved his party from electoral extinction. He had begun on the radical British left (including adopting its position against Britain remaining in the European Economic Community in the original 1975 referendum), but had shed such discourse by the 1980s.</p>
<p>There was nothing unusual in this – even later moderates such as future UK prime minister Tony Blair and chancellor Gordon Brown had learned to mouth the words of the left on other issues when seeking a route into parliament. The key was to make the journey to the mainstream centre, and, as current Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn would prove, not every politician did.</p>
<p>As <a href="https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/march-of-the-moderates-9781788317344/">my book argues</a>, there would have been no New Labour, and thus no successful partnership between Tony Blair and Democrat US president Bill Clinton in the late 1990s, without Neil Kinnock – or the work of equivalent transitional figures in the US such as Dick Gephardt. Fighting the US Jesse Jacksons and the UK Tony Benns took strength in the face of such radicals’ rhetorical gifts. As such, back in 1988, Kinnock had told Biden not to “take notice of marginal zany propositions” from the more eccentric Labour MPs he might see in the British newspapers. After all, they would not provide the path back to power.</p>
<p>Thanks to the efforts of politicians like Kinnock, however, the tide was beginning to turn. By the time he met Biden, Kinnock’s American contact book stretched not only to the later vice-president, but other moderate and conservative Democrats such as Gary Hart, Sam Nunn and Pat Moynihan. Through meeting such figures and discussing ideas, the space was slowly being teased out for the type of “opportunity, responsibility and community” agenda that Bill Clinton would get over the electoral line in the 1992 presidential election. </p>
<p>There were differences between Clinton and Kinnock, of course, but the point was the latter got the electoral ball rolling. After <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/special/politics97/background/pastelec/ge97.shtml">his 1997 landslide New Labour victory</a>, Tony Blair would seek to build on the achievements of both.</p>
<p>Biden will be looking for his own victory in the coming year. There will be many twists and turns in the race for the Democratic nomination – and endless debates, rightly, over the historic record of each candidate. But it is time to put the Kinnock plagiarism episode to bed. If anything, its aftermath – renewed cooperation between Anglo-American moderates – is of greater long-term relevance than the initial furore.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/121283/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Richard Carr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>As Joe Biden runs for US president, the strange tale of how he helped shape the UK Labour party.Richard Carr, Lecturer in History and Politics, Anglia Ruskin UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/886472017-12-07T10:09:52Z2017-12-07T10:09:52ZSouth Africa’s communist party strips the ANC of its multi-class ruling party status<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/197921/original/file-20171206-896-xftwg3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">There is a fallout between alliance partners the South African Communist Party and the governing ANC.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">EPA/Kim Ludbrook</span></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>The South African Communist Party (SACP) has broken with history and challenged the governing African National Congress (ANC) in an election. The SACP’s decision to go it alone in the Metsimaholo municipality by-election marks a new low in relations within the tripartite alliance forged during the struggle against apartheid. The other alliance partner is the trade union federation Cosatu. The contest ended in a hung council, with the ANC taking 16 seats, the Democratic Alliance 11, the Economic Freedom Fighters eight and the SACP three. Politics and Society Editor Thabo Leshilo asked political scientist Professor Dirk Kotze about the development.</em></p>
<p><strong>What is the significance of this development?</strong></p>
<p>The decision to contest an election on its own clearly represents a watershed event for the SACP. It is the first tangible step towards implementation of a <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/12th_congress/resolutions.pdf">resolution</a> taken by the SACP in 2007. Then, unhappy with the ANC’s policies in government, the communists raised the issue of contesting elections themselves. It proposed doing this either within a “reconfigured alliance” or having its own candidates contest elections, after which it would come to an agreement with the ANC on how to cooperate in government.</p>
<p>The SACP’s decision to go it alone is the culmination of a fallout dating back to 1996. Then, the ANC government under President Thabo Mbeki announced a macro economic framework, known as Growth, Employment and Redistribution <a href="http://www.treasury.gov.za/publications/other/gear/chapters.pdf">(Gear)</a>, without substantial consultations with the SACP and Cosatu. Both slammed the policy as being <a href="http://www.cosatu.org.za/show.php?ID=2957">anti-communist</a> and serving the interests of business at the expense of the poor working class.</p>
<p>The SACP, and Cosatu, thought that their fortunes had turned when, with their support, Jacob Zuma was elected president of the ANC in <a href="https://mg.co.za/article/2007-12-18-zuma-is-new-anc-president">Polokwane in 2007</a>. But it wasn’t to be. Both groups have subsequently fallen out with <a href="https://businesstech.co.za/news/general/142598/how-zumas-faction-is-starting-to-unravel/">Zuma</a>. The relationship has deteriorated so badly that SACP members in KwaZulu-Natal are being assassinated over <a href="http://ewn.co.za/Topic/Moerane-Commission-of-Inquiry">municipal council positions</a>.</p>
<p><strong>Why is this so unusual?</strong></p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.cosatu.org.za/show.php?ID=2051">Tripartite Alliance</a> can be traced back to the late 1940s and the Communist Party’s subsequent underground involvement in the ANC-led <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/article/significance-congress-people-and-freedom-charter">Congress of the People in 1955</a>. The Congress Alliance adopted the <a href="http://scnc.ukzn.ac.za/doc/HIST/freedomchart/freedomch.html">Freedom Charter</a> as its blueprint for a <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-legacy-of-south-africas-freedom-charter-60-years-later-43647">democratic and prosperous South Africa</a>.</p>
<p>In the 1960s the formation of <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/topic/umkhonto-wesizwe-mk">Umkhonto we Sizwe</a>, the armed wing formed by ANC and SACP members, was arguably the most concrete articulation of the ANC-SACP alliance. </p>
<p>In the decades that followed the SACP played a key role in facilitating the support of the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc for the ANC and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/organisations/south-african-congress-trade-unions-sactu">South African Congress of Trade Unions</a>. The communists also shaped the ANC’s philosophy around national liberation as the <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=1850">“national democratic revolution”</a> and view of apartheid as <a href="http://www.anc.org.za/content/apartheid-south-africa-colonialism-special-type">“colonialism of a special type”</a>.</p>
<p>This influence on the ANC was personified by the likes of leading communists <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/moses-m-kotane">Moses Kotane</a>, <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/moses-mabhida">Moses Mabhida</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/dr-yusuf-mohamed-dadoo">Dr Yusuf Dadoo</a>. The SACP viewed the alliance as a <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=6249">popular front</a> uniting the working class and progressive forces in the struggle for freedom. </p>
<p>The SACP is unique in Africa because very few communist parties survived after independence. Most of them were either <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-communism-appears-to-be-gaining-favour-in-south-africa-45063">banned or integrated</a> into nationalist liberation movement governments. </p>
<p>The party’s independent participation in the Metsimaholo by-election takes it back to the period before 1950 when communists such as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/09/southafrica.pressandpublishing">Brian Bunting</a> and <a href="http://www.sahistory.org.za/people/sam-kahn">Sam Kahn</a> represented the then <a href="https://www.nelsonmandela.org/omalley/index.php/site/q/03lv03445/04lv03446/05lv03462.htm">Communist Party of South Africa</a> in Parliament. </p>
<p>But after that, and after the party was banned, the SACP’s revolutionary theory of <a href="http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?ID=2638">armed struggle and insurrection</a> excluded an electoral approach. </p>
<p>Once the first inclusive elections were planned in South Africa, the SACP deferred to the ANC as the leader of the national democratic revolution to pursue an electoral approach. </p>
<p><strong>What is the significance for South Africa?</strong></p>
<p>Firstly, no one can continue to argue that the Tripartite Alliance is still a coherent political front bringing together a working class union movement (Cosatu), working class party (SACP) and a multi-class governing party (ANC). </p>
<p>What this means is that the ANC’s social democratic character in terms of a partnership with working class organisations has come to an end. The ANC will now have to reconfigure its own identity as a social democratic party, similar to former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s reconfiguration of <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-10518842">“New Labour”</a>. </p>
<p>Secondly, the SACP’s decision serves as an official recording of the radical changes the ANC’s identity has undergone in terms of how it defines its own interests or constituencies. It’s finally stating that its core interests and those of the ANC’s are in the process of parting ways. In socialist parlance, the ANC’s and SACP’s class interests have reached a crossroads. </p>
<p>This follows on the earlier decision by Cosatu’s largest affiliate the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa to part ways with the federation and to establish the <a href="http://ewn.co.za/2016/01/19/Numsa-United-Front-structures-registered-to-contest-local-elections">United Front</a> as its own political vehicle. It’s still unclear whether this this will result in a new left political movement. But, all the socio-economic conditions - <a href="https://issafrica.org/research/papers/economics-governance-and-instability-in-south-africa">such as high inequality, unemployment</a>, <a href="http://www.statssa.gov.za/?p=10334">poverty </a> and <a href="https://theconversation.com/south-african-protesters-echo-a-global-cry-democracy-isnt-making-peoples-lives-better-77639">social discontent</a> - provide fertile ground for just such a movement.</p>
<p><strong>What are the electoral prospects of the SACP?</strong></p>
<p>The SACP is not in a position to mobilise substantial support in the near future. The left is contested terrain and prone to fragmentation. This is partly the result of personality clashes and ideological hair-splitting. </p>
<p>It could possibly join forces with the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa which, for the last 30 years, has debated the ideal of a workers’ party. This would only be viable if the SACP combined its party programme with the social democratic (social welfare) needs of a rural, non-socialist populace. This would imply making ideological compromises, which is not uncommon for the SACP. It would also require it to establish a real party political infrastructure.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/88647/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Dirk Kotze does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The South African Communist Party’s decision to compete in an election against its alliance partner the ANC is a watershed moment for them, with important implications for the country.Dirk Kotze, Professor in Political Science, University of South AfricaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/767572017-04-28T14:19:34Z2017-04-28T14:19:34Z20 years after his defeat, it’s time to give John Major a break<p>Few would say that John Major was among the most distinguished of prime ministers, sandwiched as he was between the much more dramatic premierships and dominant personalities of Margaret Thatcher and Tony Blair. His time in Downing Street ended 20 years ago, when Major suffered a <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/2/newsid_2480000/2480505.stm">crushing electoral defeat</a> at the hands of Blair’s New Labour.</p>
<p>The cabinet and parliamentary Conservative party had become so divided that Major felt compelled to resign the leadership two years earlier in 1995. While he was then <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/06/opinion/mr-major-wins-for-now.html">re-elected</a> as leader, the divisions were deep, making defeat in 1997 almost inevitable.</p>
<p>In our book on <a href="https://www.bitebackpublishing.com/books/an-unsuccessful-prime-minister">Major</a>, we seek to offer a more balanced perspective. </p>
<p>All prime ministers operate within a context which can provide both opportunities and difficulties, and those who look weak often face the most difficult contexts. Such was the case with Major.</p>
<p>The nature of Major’s accession to power created much of the difficulty. Thatcher had not lost an election. She had even (technically) won the leadership contest against Michael Heseltine in <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/20/newsid_4318000/4318718.stm">1990</a>, just not by enough votes to win under the party’s rules. The subsequent cabinet coup led to her decision to <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/november/22/newsid_2549000/2549189.stm">stand down</a>.</p>
<p>Unable to identify a true believer to take over, she settled on Major, who she felt was the closest to it. He soon proved to be his own man and Thatcher felt unable to relinquish power, becoming a constant thorn in his side. She described herself as his <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/416695.stm">backseat driver</a>.</p>
<h2>Early challenges in office</h2>
<p>For the first two years in Downing Street, Major lacked a personal mandate. Then came 1992, the defining year of his premiership. In May, he won the Tories an unprecedented fourth term of office, largely as a result of his own campaigning tactics – most famously, his decision to stand on a <a href="https://www.channel4.com/news/by/michael-crick/blogs/politicians-follow-john-majors-soapbox">soapbox</a> in Luton to campaign.</p>
<p>Then, in September 1992, the UK was forced out of Europe’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/business/1992/sep/17/emu.theeuro">Exchange Rate Mechanism (ERM)</a> for failing to meet its requirements. Major had been the chancellor who had taken Britain into the ERM, despite Thatcher’s caution towards the policy. Its failure was therefore his failure. The Tories had won the election largely on the grounds that the electorate believed that they, and not Labour, could be trusted to manage the economy. Now, their reputation for economic competence was <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/2d7751c0-7977-11d9-89c5-00000e2511c8.html?ft_site=falcon&desktop=true">shattered</a>.</p>
<p>The polls immediately changed and Labour – now under the leadership of John Smith – moved ahead. That lead was only boosted by the election of Tony Blair upon Smith’s death in 1994. Rarely has one event proven so decisive. Ironically, the economy picked up once Britain was out of the ERM but Major never got the credit.</p>
<h2>Beginnings of Brexit</h2>
<p>Under normal circumstances, the majority of 21 achieved in 1992 would have been sufficient for a full parliamentary term, but these were not normal times. In the final stages of Thatcher’s premiership, the Conservatives had become much more eurosceptic – and the ERM debacle only encouraged Major’s opponents within the party to believe that the European project was doomed.</p>
<p>Major had been negotiating the Maastricht Treaty, and had got opt-outs on the single currency and <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/treaty-tightrope-the-social-chapter-what-it-is-and-why-conservatives-hate-it-1486124.html">social chapter</a>. He believed this would be enough to win over the doubters on his backbenches. Yet he failed to anticipate the level of opposition, whipped up by Thatcher and her key aide Norman Tebbit in the House of Lords. For months, the saga dragged on and the parliamentary majority was non-existent on this issue. Eventually, as Major intended, the Maastricht Treaty was <a href="http://www.upi.com/Archives/1993/05/20/Maastricht-bill-passes-Commons/8654737870400/">ratified by parliament</a> in 1993 – but only once he had lost much of his political capital.</p>
<p>The overriding objective of Major’s premiership was to keep his bitterly divided party together. Despite all of the challenges, this was achieved.</p>
<h2>Unsung successes</h2>
<p>There were numerous other policy developments. The hated community charge (<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/margaret-thatcher/9980361/Margaret-Thatcher-Refusal-to-back-down-on-poll-tax-that-cost-the-leader-dear.html">poll tax</a>) was quickly abolished. Privatisation continued, most controversially and least successfully British Rail. Key reforms were introduced in the NHS and education, and <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/1996/207/contents/made">jobseekers’ allowance</a> was created in 1996. Perhaps the most popular domestic policy measure was the National Lottery, with millions raised for good causes in sport and the arts. Although Blair was to take most of the credit for the Northern Ireland peace process, John Major had done most of the heavy lifting and deserved more recognition.</p>
<p>Conscious that likely electoral defeat was looming, in 1997 Major pledged to save, as he saw it, the Union. New Labour advocated devolution for Scotland and Wales, believing it would halt the rise of nationalism. Major argued that it was a <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/major-hits-at-devolution-danger-1388883.html">dangerous</a> policy that would only fuel nationalist sentiment.</p>
<p>He may well still be proven correct on this issue, especially in Scotland where a second independence referendum looms.</p>
<p>Once the result was declared, Major said that he was off to watch cricket at the Oval. He has remained dignified since leaving Downing Street. To say he is a successful ex-prime minister would seem like a backhanded compliment, but <a href="https://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/3930/britains_post-war_prime_ministers_ranked_by_politics_experts">compared</a> to how Heath treated Thatcher or how she treated Major, or the very low regard in which Blair is now held by many, this is quite an achievement in its own right.</p>
<p>Many of the contributors to our <a href="https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/launch-party-john-major-an-unsuccessful-prime-minister-tickets-34065237041">book</a> conclude that Major was an honourable and decent man who served his country with good intentions. Perhaps this is not too bad an epitaph.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76757/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Kevin Hickson is a Labour Party member, Crewe Town Councillor and member of the Fabian Society.
</span></em></p><p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ben Williams is a member of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), the Higher Education Academy and the Labour Party. </span></em></p>The Conservative PM is often seen as a failure, but the odds were stacked against him from the start.Kevin Hickson, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of LiverpoolBen Williams, Tutor in Politics and Political Theory, University of SalfordLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/768842017-04-28T14:15:40Z2017-04-28T14:15:40ZNew Labour 20 years on: assessing the legacy of the Tony Blair years<p>On the 20th anniversary of one of Labour’s greatest victories, party members are, to say the least, conflicted about the governments made possible by the election held on May 1 1997. The virtues of Labour’s longest uninterrupted period in office, based on an unprecedented three back-to-back victories (two of which produced its biggest ever House of Commons majorities) are not exactly being shouted from the rooftops.</p>
<p>For Jeremy Corbyn, 1997 is the stuff of nightmares: and those members who re-elected him leader in 2016 clearly agree. To them, the election is a morality tale, a political version of the Faustian legend. It represents the moment Tony Blair sold Labour’s socialist soul for the sake of a few votes. “Blairite”, to them, is a term of abuse, and Corbyn the ultimate anti-Blairite – a figure who remained true to his principles during the dark days of New Labour.</p>
<p>For these few hundred thousand Labour members, it is the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the failure to completely reverse two decades of Thatcherism that most rankles. Until the term is decontaminated, any figure tarred by the Blairite brush will never lead the party. But for millions of voters, David Cameron’s spurious accusation that Labour was responsible for the austerity following the 2008 financial crisis, because it <a href="http://conservativehome.blogs.com/torydiary/2008/11/labour-has-maxe.html">“maxed out”</a> the national credit card, resonates the most. And until Labour can successfully challenge that perception, it will find it hard to win another general election.</p>
<h2>Without a trace?</h2>
<p>For a government that supposedly won office thanks to its ability to spin any message to its advantage, the one that began in 1997 has a paradoxically poor reputation. Yet, when its achievements are soberly assessed it does not look so bad. Labour went into the election committed to five key pledges: to tackle crime, improve public services, maintain the top rate of tax and reduce youth unemployment. When appraised by Channel 4 News in 2007 these pledges were found to have been largely achieved. Similarly, Polly Toynbee and David Walker’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/oct/02/verdict-polly-toynbee-david-walker">2010 audit</a> concluded that, as the party’s campaign song promised, under Labour things really did get better for most Britons.</p>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/gi5j7jjhm4M?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
<figcaption><span class="caption">Labour’s 1997 campaign.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The disparity between Labour’s record and its reputation motivated me to <a href="http://www.phm.org.uk/news/new-dawn-20-years-since-the-1997-general-election/">curate an exhibition</a> at the People’s History Museum to give visitors the chance to think about the reasons for the creation of New Labour, the alternatives open to the party, the nature of the 1997 campaign and of its consequences. One exhibition is however not going to transform how everybody thinks: what historians refer to as “cultural memory” is constituted by diverse influences. But we do need to start thinking more clearly about this important moment in Britain’s democratic history.</p>
<p>Certainly the government elected in 1997 has left little by which it might be remembered. Unlike Clement Attlee’s 1945 administration, the one led by Blair has left no obvious institutional mark. There is no equivalent of the National Health Service. Even Harold Wilson’s troubled governments of the 1960s built the Open University. Blair did, albeit reluctantly, introduce devolution to Scotland and Wales. But given the measure was meant to kill off support for independence, this cannot be said to have been a roaring success – and those who have most benefited from devolution seem least willing to thank him for it.</p>
<p>Nor did the government lay down a distinct policy agenda with long-term consequences. If Attlee is associated with nationalisation and Margaret Thatcher with privatisation, Blair’s Third Way was accused of being too statist by the right and overly obsessed with the market by the left. Labour in power did pursue policies no Conservative government would have – notably the reduction in child poverty and the Sure Start programme for disadvantaged pre-schoolers. But after 2010 Conservative austerity put paid to them. Similarly, improvements in health and education have now been reversed.</p>
<p>Nor did Labour bring about a lasting value change. As measured by the British Social Attitudes survey, between 1997 and 2010, sentiment about taxation and redistribution actually <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/dec/13/social-survey-thatcherite-britain">became more right-wing</a>. In contrast Blair did restore trust in politics in the wake of Conservative difficulties over <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/sleaze-the-list-1592762.html">sleaze</a>. As <a href="https://www.instituteforgovernment.org.uk/blog/public-trust-public-servants-%E2%80%93-six-graphs">measured by Ipsos MORI</a>, trust in politicians rose from 15% in 1997 to 23% two years later. But this did not last beyond the 2008 expenses scandal.</p>
<h2>People in the dark</h2>
<p>The government elected in 1997 benefited Britain, but the changes it engineered were tentative and temporary: Blair did not radically transform, but modestly improved. Thanks to Conservative austerity, you’d be forgiven for thinking that 1997 never happened. So if you want to properly understand the impact of the election, the devil is deep in the detail – one place where many in Blair’s own party do not wish to look.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=671&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/167186/original/file-20170428-12979-1tbntgg.gif?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=843&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">That poster.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/shinymcshine/3587174034/in/photolist-6sZcSb-ai4NUo-fBf3NB-acNsF-fBf3cc-fBf1Yc-8VYa39-obzj9w-8CLzc4-8W8Y88-8WpZ6f-aeA68a-c4bT13-8ppwDB-o2EFGs-dSokLP-dwLhxB-dwLhLi-iX1dG-8W92sB-5TSUDc-dwLhEn-k1JsJ-fBuoxh-5Ys3W1-fBf5sR-fBuksJ-fBum2A-cGv9qm-efkMA9-fBf1DZ-8FFMgM-6jfVuG-SqrYcB-SnpwXk-CDmn5t-jB4scf-AW6MM7-AXhQfD-A1poQe-AjjXvG-A1g8SA-sVekii-AmD4Ug-AXhG24-s9teyX-yo5YZa-sAzAXv-tGYnyd-sxhukz">Dolores Luxedo</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/">CC BY-NC-SA</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Although he won the 1994 Labour leadership contest with 57% of votes, most members had serious misgivings about Tony Blair. The left-wing shadow cabinet minister Claire Short even publicly attacked her leader and his allies as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/1996/aug/08/labour.uk">“people in the dark”</a>, prepared to obtain power at any price. So impressed was the Conservative party they put Short’s comments on their infamous 1996 Demon Eyes poster, which showed Blair as the Devil. Meant to raise doubts in wavering Tory voters’ minds the Labour leader would say anything to win their support, it is an image which now grips the imagination of those probably taking the party to one of its biggest ever election defeats. </p>
<p>If the anti-Blair gets his anti-1997, we will have to wait and see if that forces Labour members to change their minds about what happened on May 1 20 years ago.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/76884/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Fielding is a member of the Labour Party.</span></em></p>Things could only get better. Or could they?Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/720212017-01-27T16:58:13Z2017-01-27T16:58:13ZTam Dalyell never held office, but he was Margaret Thatcher’s sternest critic<p>That he was singular – from the name onwards – and also a great parliamentary character are both true, but they do not get one very far in appreciating Tam Dalyell. They lend themselves to lampooning a person of profound seriousness, yet easily parodied. </p>
<p>It’s hard to situate him in a broader historical or political context. He was simply “Tam” – just as his most renowned intervention in the House of Commons, often after a flatulent or self-satisfied ministerial statement, was simply “Why?”</p>
<p>Few parliamentarians who came nowhere near holding office – Dalyell soared to shadow minister of science under Michael Foot in 1980 – have had such a profile. <a href="http://spartacus-educational.com/PRboothby.htm">Bob Boothby</a> comes to mind; and others such as <a href="http://thedabbler.co.uk/2014/03/sir-gerald-nabarro-mp-the-abominable-showman/">Gerald Nabarro</a> and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/news/2000/jun/01/guardianobituaries.obituaries">Andrew Faulds</a>, though they belong on the other side of that thin line separating character and caricature. </p>
<h2>Man of principle</h2>
<p>One can comfortably situate Dalyell in the Labour Party as both a Scot and a product of public school (Eton) and Oxbridge (Cambridge). But once again he was notable here: many leading Labour figures have been one, but few both. It somehow followed that Dalyell stood out, after his election in 1962, as an MP preoccupied with idiosyncratic causes. </p>
<p>In 1967 he saved the wildlife on Aldabra, an Indian Ocean atoll, by preventing the building of an RAF base. In 1968 he leaked information about Porton Down chemical warfare laboratory to a newspaper, causing classic scenes of parliamentary uproar. It would not be the last time.</p>
<p>It was that indefatigability that counted against Dalyell in terms of a wider press and public (not that he minded). The former Labour MP <a href="http://www.chrismullinexmp.com">Chris Mullin</a> had similar interests, but leavened his devotion with a self-deprecating humour; Dalyell’s often apparently one-man campaigns made his name but rendered him too easily as an eccentric whose predictable protestations were easy to discount.</p>
<p>Dalyell was and remained the most prominent anti-devolutionary Scot. In the late 1970s, his opposition to his government’s part-principled, part-desperate legislative courting of nationalist support in the Commons was based on a straightforward political principle which Enoch Powell ensured should become known after Dalyell’s constituency: the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2012/jan/17/what-is-west-lothian-question">West Lothian Question</a>. It essentially asks why MPs from devolved regions have the same voting rights in the Commons as English MPs now that English MPs are excluded from voting on devolved issues. </p>
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<p>As with many of Dalyell’s questions, for those in power it was a question they’d really rather weren’t asked. Certainly the then prime minister James Callaghan, whose administration fell in part through the consequences of Dalyell’s exertions, wished he hadn’t. Forty years on, despite <a href="https://constitution-unit.com/2016/11/28/one-year-of-evel-evaluating-english-votes-for-english-laws-in-the-house-of-commons/">some interest in the subject</a>, it still hasn’t been answered.</p>
<h2>Stalking Thatcher</h2>
<p>Dalyell’s concerns were with <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1208880.Misrule">Misrule</a>, as he called his 1987 book: “the personal behaviour on public matters of one particular party leader and prime minister. It is about her truthfulness to people, press and parliament. And on being ‘personal’ in this matter I offer no apology”. </p>
<p>He accused Margaret Thatcher of serial dishonesties. There was the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/2/newsid_2480000/2480241.stm">sinking of the Belgrano</a> during the Falklands crisis (1982), in which he held that the Royal Navy had been ordered to sink the Argentinian cruiser to scuttle an incipient peace process. There was the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/9/newsid_2516000/2516187.stm">Westland affair</a> in 1986, when Dalyell harried Thatcher over undermining her secretary of state for defence – Michael Heseltine – more effectively than did his party leader Neil Kinnock. </p>
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<p>On Libya (1986), Dalyell vociferously doubted the stated reasons for Britain accommodating US president <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/april/15/newsid_3975000/3975455.stm">Ronald Reagan’s air strikes</a> against Colonel Gaddafi. He defended the BBC against <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/culture/bbc-and-gov/zircon">attempts by</a> the government to prevent broadcast of a documentary about the spy satellite Zircon (1986-7). He also defended the former intelligence officer <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-peter-wright-1617351.html">Peter Wright</a> after the government tried to prevent publication of his Spycatcher memoirs about his years in intelligence. For Dalyell, <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1208880.Misrule">Thatcher was</a> “a bounder, a liar, a deceiver, a cheat and a crook”.</p>
<p>A constant presence in broadcasting studios and the Commons – expulsions permitting – Dalyell’s tirelessness deserves, at the very least, several footnotes in the history of 1980s Britain. No critic of Thatcher was so assiduous. It was more revealing of her than of him that she omitted mention of him in <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Downing_Street_years.html?id=Ar0Yvc3-ukAC">her memoirs</a>.</p>
<p>Dalyell’s time in parliament spanned Labour’s years of power in the 1960s and 70s, the internecine impotence of the 1980s, and the morning glory of New Labour in the 1990s. An inveterate critic of his final prime minister, he was happy to <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1451960/I-have-changed-my-mind-on-Blair-hes-worse-than-I-thought.html">declare</a> Tony Blair the worst he had known. Standing down in 2005, Dalyell happily missing the disintegration of the last Labour government.</p>
<p>Dalyell wrote a good biography of his Labour Party mentor <a href="http://www.lrb.co.uk/v11/n20/ian-aitken/tam-dick-and-harold">Dick Crossman</a>. He was a regular obituarist for The Independent, seemingly accounting for every parliamentarian who died in the last 30 years. </p>
<p>Lugubrious of manner, distinctive of accent and with a bone-dry wit (his 2011 autobiography was entitled <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12778862-the-importance-of-being-awkward">The Importance of Being Awkward</a>). For all that he evokes a bygone age of licensed eccentricity where unbiddable private members challenged the Treasury bench, Tam Dalyell wasn’t really a “type” at all.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/72021/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martin Farr does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The unique parliamentarian who coined the West Lothian question.Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary British History, Newcastle UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/659942016-09-27T09:05:26Z2016-09-27T09:05:26ZMomentum’s first conference season will test its ability to turn protest into power<p>The British Labour Party’s annual conference in Liverpool finds it at a political and ideological crossroads. Yet a <a href="http://labourlist.org/2016/08/momentum-organise-political-festival-alongside-labour-party-conference/">conference</a> happening at the same time in the same city could be just as historically significant. The event – <a href="http://theworldtransformed.org/">The World Transformed</a> – is being organised by Momentum, the campaign group formed in 2015 to support newly elected leader Jeremy Corbyn. </p>
<p>Momentum claims its event <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/aug/18/momentum-jeremy-corbyn-john-mcdonnell-labour-party-conference-rival">is not a rival</a> to the Labour conference but the fact that it is happening at the same time clearly shows what a force it has become.</p>
<p>The Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) has sought to downplay the influence of Momentum, portraying it as a collection of fringe radicals who will make the party unelectable to the more mainstream voter. It is viewed as an idealistic mirage that will come crashing down to political reality by the time the general election rolls around.</p>
<p>For its part, Momentum is trying to promote what it calls a “different type of politics”. It denounces the centrist legacy of New Labour and, as a result, <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/momentum-conference-stuffed-with-anti-labour-speakers_uk_57b5da4ce4b0c5667a0768cb">has been accused</a> of being “stuffed with anti-Labour speakers”.</p>
<p>This exposes Momentum’s precarious and ambiguous position. It is both resisting Labour and seeking to dramatically reshape it from the inside. It remains to be seen if this leftist challenge can move beyond movement politics to become a credible progressive opposition or government.</p>
<h2>Team Corbyn</h2>
<p>Like Corbyn, Momentum is simultaneously committed to Labour while fundamentally opposing many of its recent policies and beliefs. It is thus both on the outside looking in while trying to help lead the party.</p>
<p>Its popular appeal largely stems from being against the existing status quo. However, its larger goal is to use this <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/elections/2015/10/meet-momentum-next-step-transformation-our-politics">anti-establishment platform</a> to create its own progressive establishment.</p>
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<p>The aim is not <a href="https://www.politicshome.com/news/uk/political-parties/labour-party/news/77165/momentum-chief-says-winning-elections-matters">just to win elections</a> against the Conservatives – it’s to take on the entire economic and political oligarchy – the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/sep/18/momentum-activists-labour-jeremy-corbyn-feature">powerful corporations and the politicians</a> that supposedly control both parties.</p>
<h2>Building a new New Labour</h2>
<p>Corbyn’s re-election signals a profound departure from the party’s recent past. If his initial victory could be chalked up to a mere protest vote, another landslide triumph shows the PLP that there is an increasing public appetite for a progressive alternative.</p>
<p>On top of their stark ideological differences, Momentum objects to the entire politics of the PLP. Yet while it so often rails against New Labour, Momentum’s rhetoric often echoes the very sentiments that originally made Tony Blair so popular in the first place. Both trumpet the need to remake the party and break free from the orthodoxies of the past. Each claimed they were giving voice to alienated voters who felt ignored by mainstream politics.</p>
<p>Blairism grew in direct response to the perceived failures of Old Labour. The enduring influence of the party’s socialist roots was seen as a political albatross and economically backward looking. What was urgently needed, it was argued, was a party in tune to the concerns of the time, with real answers for contemporary problems.</p>
<p>Momentum must make a similar case now. It has to show that New Labour’s third way no longer makes sense in a post-crisis world. It has to offer a better way to address the devastating consequences of financial excess and the looming global threat of climate change. It has to show that New Labour’s big nation foreign policy should be updated to reflect a multilateral world that demands development and diplomacy rather than free trade and Western militarism.</p>
<h2>From movement to power</h2>
<p>The mere existence of Momentum’s separate conference in Liverpool has already sparked controversy. Its detractors claim that it is just the latest example of disloyalty. Its organisers counter that it is a fringe event meant to complement, not challenge, the official Labour party conference.</p>
<p>However, if Momentum wants to ever become more than part of the fringe, it can learn important political lessons from its much derided predecessors of Thatcherism and New Labour. Doing so does not imply ideological compromise or a capitulation. Rather it is a recognition that political success depends on turning today’s revolution into tomorrow’s normal.</p>
<p>Momentum has to move beyond protest mentality to forge a popular image of its leftist politics as pragmatic and responsive. It has to show convincingly that the PLP and Tories are irresponsible and not to be trusted with the economy and international affairs. It means reaching out to other groups such as the Greens and the SNP as part of a united progressive front that can competently solve the real problems of the British public through public investment and a modernised welfare state. The challenge is to highlight the electoral advantages of a progressive platform not just its ideological correctness.</p>
<p>The <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-31426488">rise of UKIP</a> and the result of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jul/07/angry-remain-voter-working-class-division-britain">EU referendum</a> show that the political landscape is rapidly evolving. The disaffected and angry voter is increasingly gaining prominence as a political force. The Middle England that was so central to New Labour’s victory has moved on. Decades of rising inequality and political elitism has made it hungry for genuine change.</p>
<p>The future belongs to the party that can best and most productively channel this rage. Prime Minister Theresa May has already sought to do just that through linking her Conservative values to a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/16/theresa-may-doctrine-grammar-schools">populist commitment</a> to addressing chronic social and economic ills. Momentum must take the lead in helping the Labour Party do the same, through a message of anti-austerity, anti-racism, social democracy and the prospect of a more democratic political establishment.</p>
<p>Momentum is undeniably a political phenomenon. It has attracted hundreds of thousands of new voters with claims to be practising a “different type of politics”. Now it is time to see if it can turn a movement into real power for good.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65994/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Peter Bloom does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters are holding a parallel event to the official Labour summit. Can these protestors ever come in from the fringe?Peter Bloom, Senior Lecturer in Organisation Studies, Department of People and Organisation, The Open UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/486172015-10-05T16:14:22Z2015-10-05T16:14:22ZAdonis completes journey from Blair’s right hand to Osborne’s ‘common ground’<p>It’s extremely unfair of the Corbynistas in the Labour Party to accuse Andrew Adonis of being a Judas figure after his announcement that he’ll be moving to the Lords crossbenches. The Blairite peer’s <a href="http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/2015/10/andrew-adonis-resignation-from-labour-is-a-coup-for-the-tories-but-at-what-cost/">decision to resign the Labour Party whip</a> and lead a National Infrastructure Commission for George Osborne is entirely consistent with his previous political behaviour. </p>
<p>While he might not be a household name, Adonis’s influence on British politics over the past 20 years has been immense. His ideas <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?hl=en&lr=&id=KfatAwAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT5&dq=adonis+future+of+education&ots=7zO2QjPW0c&sig=ni6S60c3lTEIVt1rXlOmax-azZY#v=onepage&q=adonis%20future%20of%20education&f=false">about the future of British education</a> are still hugely influential today, especially in the academies system, while <a href="http://www.yourbritain.org.uk/uploads/editor/files/Adonis_Review.pdf">he started a debate on British transport infrastructure</a> that was long overdue. </p>
<p>It’s interesting to note that he’s managed to achieve this without gaining the same level of popular recognition of Jonathan Powell, for example, or Alistair Campbell. But you could argue that this is one of the keys to his success – while others have climbed the greasy pole and then fallen from grace, Adonis has remained consistently as a supporting actor, solidifying his position as part of the establishment along with his reputation as “a safe pair of hands”.</p>
<p>His position on the centre-left of British politics was partly shaped by his father, an immigrant and trade unionist of Greek-Cypriot background. But the young Adonis also read history at Oxford, where he demonstrated the ability to befriend people from a variety of different backgrounds and political allegiances. Later he worked as a journalist at both the Observer and Financial Times. </p>
<h2>Party hopping</h2>
<p>Having served as an SDP then Lib Dem councillor, Adonis was selected as a Liberal Democrat at a time when the party was arguably more left than Labour. He then switched to Labour where his political ideas and philosophy melded perfectly with the New Labour project that Blair, Brown and Mandelson were trying to construct. His role at the heart of British politics (although not necessarily always playing a central role) for more than a decade makes it easy to forget that he’s never been elected to any of the positions he’s held.</p>
<p>His job from Blair’s first election victory in 1997 as a member of the Number 10 policy unit (rising to had of the unit in 2001) was to try to provide a coherence of thought and intellectual rigour that the party at that time arguably lacked. Apart from throwing around buzz words like “the Third Way”, Labour had start to dispense with much of the ideology that had previously defined them, a process that would eventually lead to them becoming hallowed out. The unit acted as a vital source of policy as well as providing a way of sifting through the mountains of ideas supplied by other Labour-linked policy think-tanks.</p>
<p>Adonis’s elevation to the peerage – and then his government jobs, including minister of education and secretary for transport, allowed him to put these ideas into practice more easily. This was aided by the fact that he didn’t have to worry about re-election so could afford to offend. It also helped that he had Blair’s ear.</p>
<p>Under Gordon Brown, Adonis played an important part in convincing Blairite MPs that their viewpoint wasn’t being marginalised – and also to prop up the idea that this was a “<a href="https://www.ucl.ac.uk/constitution-unit/publications/tabs/unit-publications/151-cover.pdf">government of all the talents</a>” (as some dubbed it) whether inside or outside the House of Commons. The overarching theme of his life and career, then, is a focus on policy and the willingness to work with people from both ends of the political spectrum to help promote and implement it. </p>
<p>Perhaps the lasting legacy from his Labour government days will be the school academies system that was admired by many in the Conservative Party, including Michael Gove. Some, although not all, threads of Conservative thinking about education can be <a href="http://www.policyexchange.org.uk/media-centre/blogs/category/item/michael-gove-returns-to-plan-a-for-adonis">traced back to Adonis</a> and his work in this area.</p>
<h2>Centre ground</h2>
<p>So this latest move is arguably a continuation of previous roles. It’s symbolic in the sense that the Conservative Party is trying to shift itself politically to appeal to many floating former New Labour voters. </p>
<p>Adonis’s decision is a sign that the Conservatives are trying to reach out to disaffected MPs and claim the centre ground. What’s more, by the sound of things he will be playing a very similar role as he did under Blair, providing evidence-based policy to a government that has on occasion seemed bereft of ideas and more driven by marketing than political conviction.</p>
<p>He now has to walk a tricky line between retaining his Labour Party convictions while delivering policy solutions for the Conservative government. Whether he can square this circle remains to be seen.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48617/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>It’s unfair to call Lord Adonis a political ‘Judas’. He’s a policy specialist who has always aimed for the centre ground.Matthew Mokhefi-Ashton, Lecturer in Politics and International Relations, Nottingham Trent UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/483502015-09-29T14:23:40Z2015-09-29T14:23:40ZCorbyn does PR – he just does it differently<p>Conventional wisdom has it that a lack of guile contributed to Jeremy Corbyn’s shock triumph in the Labour leadership election. He won because he was <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/Jeremy_Corbyn/11875325/Corbyn-could-put-an-end-to-the-era-of-spin.html">the anti-spin candidate</a>. </p>
<p>But having been smeared, derided and traduced by the press since winning the election, Corbyn was urged ahead of his party conference speech to get “professional” – in other words time to get spinning or be lost. </p>
<p>But maybe a glance at how PR itself has changed will reveal that what Corbyn is doing has its own merit. It’s not clear that a more “professional” approach, where this is taken simply to mean returning to media relations as usual – of the kind used by Number 10 in the Blair era – would increase the amount of favourable coverage he gets. </p>
<p>Although Corbyn’s speeches might benefit from more rehearsal, it’s also important to think about where Corbyn has been strong. How he has achieved the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/sep/12/jeremy-corbyn-wins-labour-party-leadership-election">the biggest-ever mandate</a> for a Labour leader and massively increased party membership.</p>
<p>One of the most interesting aspects about his successful campaign for the Labour leadership was that – unwittingly or not – it revived an older practice of public relations in the UK. Because the idea that public relations is mainly about managing press headlines, or measuring media coverage is actually a relatively new one. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=383&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96637/original/image-20150929-30974-enou4q.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=482&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Alistair Campbell – Blair’s former spokesman.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/salforduniversity/16648867789/in/photolist-rncNmD-rn6oUb-rkkbmB-fWqEq-rBnesq-9aD4vP-2b7iXd-rBn9Fb-rDDHWe-4nHqCP-cd9b4J-jX61ui-9GzeZY-dn9JqV-bVLXv8-rqMYU3-rsYegH-rsZkLL-qw6fwN-rsZkdm-qwip9x-rqMYZo-rsYe4t-qwioZp-r9LpQB-rbvo4j-rt5MUa-rqMYt3-rbwdts-rt5Nka-qw6eTJ-rbCRmH-rbweef-rbvot7-rsYeJB-rsZjWj-rqMZhC-qwioPV-rqMZjm-rsYezZ-rsZkJw-qwipq4-rsYdXr-rt5N3B-rsYesp-rsYdXB-qw6f1Y-rbwe5s-qw6eyL-rsYecz">University of Salford Press Office</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<p>It is also an idea that plays into a myth that is comforting to journalists, that media opinion is the same as public opinion: that the whole complexity of the public’s relationships can be contained in the media’s representation of them. Or as Campbell put it to the Leveson enquiry with typically astute bluntness: “It’s journalists that are the real spin doctors.”</p>
<h2>1930s-style PR</h2>
<p>By contrast, Corbyn appears to see public relations as the pioneers of the profession in the UK, as an add-on to civic society not as a container for it. A local mental health charity event <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/09/13/jeremy-corbyn-andrew-marr-show-mental-health-fundraiser_n_8129766.html">was prioritised over an appearance</a> on the Andrew Marr show.</p>
<p>It’s a little-known story that the pioneers of public relations in the UK were the people who promoted the London Tube map and Routemaster buses, who invented “dial 999”, the speaking clock and the Jubilee telephone kiosk. These 1930s innovations were prompted by <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719084577">many of the same types of challenges</a> we face today: economic depression, new technology, and the unpredictable path of mass democracy.</p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/96639/original/image-20150929-31012-90azpt.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Festival of Britain designed by Abram Games, from the cover of the South Bank Exhibition Guide, 1951.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Festival_of_Britain#/media/File:Festival_of_Britain.JPG">Schetnikova Anna</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Having come to prominence during the slump, partly as a way of navigating totalitarianism, during the war these pioneers would build the V for Victory campaign, design new towns and plan the Festival of Britain. These initiatives weren’t done to increase media reach, or win the headlines (which they understood were controlled by the newspaper barons and newsreel censors) but they were about building relationships. </p>
<p>People in interwar Britain – from the poor and marginalised to the new consumer classes –were put into contact by these new media pioneers through discussions, films and even telephone debates. They took the electorate seriously. <a href="https://microsites.bournemouth.ac.uk/historyofpr/files/2010/11/Tom-Watson-IHPRC-2013-Keynote-Address4.pdf">The language</a> for making a new nation <a href="http://www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/cgi-bin/indexer?product=9780719084577">was taking shape</a>. </p>
<p>When you look at the artwork that <a href="http://www.stopwar.org.uk/index.php/shop/art-against-war-3">David Gentleman did for the Stop the War campaign</a>, which was chaired by Corbyn, or simply the sharply designed logo of his leadership campaign, you can see something of this older visual tradition of public relations in the UK. Good design and media enabled civic connectivity as a conduit for actual social and attitudinal change. </p>
<p>By contrast, an analysis <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/helen-lewis/2015/07/echo-chamber-social-media-luring-left-cosy-delusion-and-dangerous-insularity">popular with the commentariat</a> is that young Corbyn voters in the election were a regrettable product of an irresponsible age of social media. An age where people want opinions that project a personal image to the world – so-called identity politics – and which <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/24/corbyn-tribe-identity-politics-labour">signify something about their personality</a>, rather than picking sensible leaders that could win a grown-up election. </p>
<p>Ironically, this is actually quite an old put down; a curmudgeonly dismissal that tends to resurface every time the prospect of political transformation, for example the <a href="http://www.johndclare.net/Women1_ArgumentsAgainst.htm">responses to full votes for women</a> and the working class, rears its anarchic head.</p>
<p>While it wasn’t the change that the pioneers expected, it’s always struck me that it is no coincidence that the biggest economic and political shift that modern Britain has ever seen arguably came in the wake of the new practices of public relations finding their feet in the 1930s.</p>
<h2>Sneer if you want but …</h2>
<p>The 21st century may once more show the strength of the pioneers’ approach to public relations. The short-term managing of headlines is an impossible task – in a 24-hour news environment a politician will likely always look on the defensive in times of crisis (real or manufactured). Instead, political parties are forced to play a longer game while shrewd politicians begin to stock up on integrity for the inevitable moments when their judgement goes astray. The wheel has turned and approaches that were once dismissed as old hat are starting to look prescient again. Unwittingly or not, this is the approach that Corbyn has taken. </p>
<p>All of which makes it important that being “professional” at the conference in Brighton does not preclude the Labour leadership from continuing to focus on ways to coax the wide network of civic and social relationships that they can call upon (a network far wider than that of the present-day Conservatives) into the media. Bring these groups together – verbally, visually and emotionally – and unpredictable things will happen. </p>
<p>It’s worth remembering that the UK’s news media <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/mar/03/10-years-right-invaded-iraq">generally sneered</a> at the many social and political oddities of <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/2765041.stm">the “Million” march</a> coalition against the Iraq War in 2003 but it marked a watershed in British politics, let alone new Labour’s electoral fortunes, that few predicted at the time.</p>
<p>Equally, it’s worth remembering that it was at a low ebb in World War II that the “V for Victory” campaign was born. What came out of existential weakness has now by a strange trick of history come to be seen as part of an inevitable triumph. There was little that was “professional” about it.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/48350/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Scott Anthony does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Corbyn appears to see public relations as the pioneers of the profession in the UK saw it, as an add-on to civic society.Scott Anthony, Affiliated Research Scholar , University of CambridgeLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/472912015-09-11T13:09:54Z2015-09-11T13:09:54ZAs Corbyn wins, the class of 1983 looks set to reshape Labour once again<p>The 1983 general election was a watershed moment in Labour history – but not for the reason it’s usually remembered. This was inarguably post-World War II Labour’s electoral nadir, leaving the party with <a href="http://www.ukpolitical.info/1983.htm">just 209 seats</a> against 397 for Margaret Thatcher’s Conservatives.</p>
<p>But the 1983 disaster also saw the election of two MPs who went on to shape and dominate the party and the UK’s political scene for nearly two decades: Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. </p>
<p>They can hardly have imagined that their 1983 classmate Jeremy Corbyn would succeed them at the Labour helm – or that he would do so by proposing to reverse much of the work they did to transform the party.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Those were the days – if not for Labour.</span></figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Tony and Gordon</h2>
<p>It was a long road from 1983 to Labour’s <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/basics/4393323.stm">historic 1997 landslide win</a>. After Michael Foot led the party to its cataclysmic defeat, his successor Neil Kinnock began the process of modernising the party. He <a href="http://www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=191">expelled the party’s hard-left Militant faction</a> and instigated a major policy review. </p>
<p>After he lost the elections of 1987 and 1992, Kinnock was succeeded by <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/remembering-john-smith-20-years-on-what-would-his-government-have-looked-like-9357017.html">John Smith</a>, who had a dogged belief that “<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/this-is-how-labour-can-win-can-john-smith-get-to-no-10-to-do-so-he-must-woo-waverers-who-believe-the-party-is-not-for-those-who-want-to-get-on-says-giles-radice-here-he-reveals-results-from-his-own-postelection-survey-1554367.html">one last heave</a>” could get Labour into government. And when Smith <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/may/12/newsid_2550000/2550803.stm">died suddenly in 1994</a> another 1983-vintage MP, <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/biographies/commons/margaret-beckett/328">Margaret Beckett</a>, briefly stood in as leader before Tony Blair was <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/july/21/newsid_2515000/2515825.stm">elected</a>.</p>
<p>Blair and Brown’s “modernisation” wasted no time. On the face of it, their project was a far cry from the left-wing <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/8550425.stm">manifesto</a> on which Brown, Blair, Corbyn and their comrades were elected in 1983 – nationalisation of recently privatised industries, the <a href="http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/labours_alternative_economic_strategy_40_years_on">alternative economic strategy</a>, full withdrawal from what was then the <a href="http://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/evolutionofparliament/legislativescrutiny/parliament-and-europe/overview/britain-and-eec-to-single-european-act/">European Economic Community</a> and <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/october/22/newsid_2489000/2489209.stm">unilateral nuclear disarmament</a>.</p>
<p>After 1994, socialism was dropped from the lexicon, “middle Britain” became the electoral target, and the aim of equality of income was replaced by equality of opportunity. The goal was to convince the electorate that Labour was fit to form a government and run the British economy.</p>
<p>Crucially, the party’s <a href="http://www.labourcounts.com/oldclausefour.htm">Clause IV</a>, which committed it to the “common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”, was redrafted. To this day it instead commits to pursue a “community in which the power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few”. </p>
<p>And so was born New Labour.</p>
<h2>The Third Way</h2>
<p>As did Bill Clinton in the US, Blair often spoke about the “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/458626.stm">third way</a>”, a loose ideology proposing a middle route between state socialism and neoliberalism. Accordingly, New Labour shared some priorities with its 1983 manifesto: it gave the UK a national minimum wage, signed up to the European social chapter, made record state investments in health, education and infrastructure, adult education and training, and tackled social exclusion and child poverty. </p>
<p>But it also moved away from the tax-and-spend model by dealing with low pay through <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3198211.stm">working and child tax credits</a>, and proposed <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/uk_politics/2002/blair_years/1959867.stm">significant constitutional reforms</a>. </p>
<p>While New Labour sought to ameliorate the excesses of capitalism when in office, its leaders had little intention of transforming the structure of society, and at a fundamental level they subscribed to the neoliberal agenda ushered in during the Thatcher years. </p>
<p>Private companies were allowed to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2000/nov/19/socialcare.policy">bid for contracts</a> in the National Health Service, “<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/education/2010/may/26/what-is-an-academy">academy</a>” schools were introduced, and “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7923093.stm">top-up fees</a>” were imposed for undergraduates. Low inflation was prioritised above full employment, and the financial sector liberalised; the gap between rich and poor <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8481534.stm">continued to grow</a>, and the <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3526917.stm">restrictions placed on trade unions</a> by the Conservatives were kept in place. </p>
<p>Even the Keynesian response to the financial crash in 2008, when Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling pumped money into financial institutions to save them, was arguably less a quasi-socialist big-government intervention and more a last-ditch attempt to save the capitalist banking system.</p>
<h2>Morons and throwbacks</h2>
<p>In his 1997 book <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XdKFQgAACAAJ&dq=%22Fifty+Years+On%22+hattersley&hl=en&sa=X&redir_esc=y">Fifty Years On</a>, party veteran Roy Hattersley wrote that “the ideas which had inspired a century of democratic socialists were ruthlessly discredited” as “the prophets of New Labour” took over an “established political party and re-created it in their own image”. </p>
<p>His point still rings true; even after five years of Ed Miliband, Blair and Brown’s thinking still holds sway over key issues including foreign policy, taxation, the role of private enterprise, state ownership, public housing, civil liberties and nuclear disarmament.</p>
<p>Under Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party could start returning to a familiar model: the nationalisation of public utilities, tax-and-spend, defence retrenchment, unilateral nuclear disarmament.</p>
<p>The 1983 election did cement a firm orthodoxy in the party’s thinking: to go into a general election on an avowedly socialist platform, it holds, is a recipe for disaster. But whether he leads the party to disaster or success, Corbyn’s just the latest of Labour’s precious few 1983 incomers to radically transform his party.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/47291/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jasper Miles is affiliated with the Labour Party and has been a Member since 2010. </span></em></p>Elected in the party’s biggest ever wipeout, Labour’s 1983 intake of MPs could be about to notch up its third party leader.Jasper Miles, PhD Candidate, Department of Politics, University of LiverpoolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/460972015-09-01T17:54:59Z2015-09-01T17:54:59ZWhere do the Labour leader contenders stand on immigration?<p>Two stories have dominated the British news agenda this summer – the migration crisis in Europe and the Labour leadership contest. With the vote on the latter fast approaching, it’s worth considering where the candidates stand on the former. </p>
<p>The jury is still out on why Labour failed to appeal to enough of the electorate in the 2015 election. What is certain is that it lost voters to UKIP (as well as the SNP). Again, there are probably many reasons why many traditional Labour voters plumped for UKIP but one of them is plainly that Labour failed to convince this cohort that it had a sound immigration policy. </p>
<p>With public concerns over immigration consistently rising, and neither Labour nor the Tories <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/news/2015/04/15/health-tops-immigration-second-most-important-issu/">“winning”</a> the debate, it’s becoming clear that no centrist party knows which way to turn.</p>
<p>So what are the candidates in the Labour leadership election offering by way of immigration policies? Can they do better than Ed Miliband?</p>
<h2>Jeremy Corbyn</h2>
<p>Immigration is not among the <a href="http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/priorities/">11 key policies</a> that front runner Jeremy Corbyn “is standing to deliver”.</p>
<p>In the upcoming EU referendum, free movement will necessarily be a big issue. Corbyn’s position on the UK’s continuing participation in the Union after negotiations is precarious. He sees a need for more trade union involvement and argues that the UK must demand reasonable levels of working rights to seal the deal. But this will not be on the table as David Cameron seeks to <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/26c75976-4fc5-11e5-8642-453585f2cfcd.html">negotiate</a> new terms for the UK.</p>
<p>Corbyn’s support for trade unionism means he is naturally concerned about wages for low skilled work being undercut by immigration. This is similar to Miliband’s views so we might expect Corbyn to propose something akin to Labour’s election promise to tackle the <a href="http://www.labour.org.uk/manifesto/immigration">exploitation of migrant workers</a>.</p>
<p>Nonetheless Corbyn has said that the debate on immigration has been <a href="http://jeremycorbyn.org.uk/articles/m-star-the-poisoned-debate-on-immigration/">“poisoned”</a>, and has criticised his party’s weak defence on the issue. He has campaigned on behalf of asylum seekers, and emphasises the important role that <a href="http://www.labour.org.uk/blog/entry/watch-labour-leadership-hustings">mosques</a> have played in supporting refugees. But this all means he sits awkwardly between being suspicious of internationalism while championing migration and multiculturalism. </p>
<h2>Yvette Cooper</h2>
<p>As the former shadow home secretary, Yvette Cooper has more to say on immigration. Her policies are, unsurprisingly, not dissimilar to those touted by Labour in its 2015 campaign.</p>
<p>In her ministerial role, Cooper did a lot of apologising for Labour’s “mistakes” on immigration, and has <a href="http://press.labour.org.uk/post/102953239474/yvette-cooper-speech-labours-approach-to">parroted</a> the need to address the real concerns people have on immigration.</p>
<p>She has said in the past that Labour would call for the EU to provide <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30091574">dedicated funding</a> to help regions cope when their populations rise as a result of immigration. It’s a novel idea but how it would operate in practice remains to be seen. </p>
<p>Like Corbyn, Cooper claims that the challenge is to face up to the exploitation of migrant labour by making it a crime, saying that such exploitation is modern day slavery. Yet like her former leader and her fellow contenders she maintains that EU citizens should not be allowed to claim benefits for at least two years.</p>
<h2>Andy Burnham</h2>
<p>Andy Burnham seems to have the least to say on immigration, although he’s very keen on his catchphrase <a href="http://www.andy4labour.co.uk/andy_s">“freedom to work is not the same as freedom to claim”</a>. Burnham’s statements on immigration are indistinguishable from the 2015 campaign, and in many respects, those put out by the government. </p>
<p>He warns that the EU referendum risks being lost unless there are significant changes to EU migration. And – you guessed it – he also wants to ban EU citizens from claiming welfare benefits until they have worked for two years.</p>
<p>Burnham has mentioned the possibility of EU funding to plug the gap in costs to public services in areas most affected by migration, but this seems to be an afterthought lifted from Cooper. He claims that “people have legitimate concerns about immigration”, and that Labour therefore needs “real answers to these concerns”. As a prospective leader one would think Burnham should be supplying some answers but we are yet to hear what these real solutions are.</p>
<h2>Liz Kendall</h2>
<p>According to Liz Kendall, the final Labour leader contender, the solution is to reintroduce an Australian style points-based system, as people are fed up seeing migrants <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/liz-kendall-says-she-wants-an-australianstyle-pointsbased-immigration-system-10328214.html">“scrambling on to lorries from Calais”</a>. Advocating the same policy as <a href="http://www.ukip.org/ukip_launches_immigration_policy">UKIP</a> tells you something about where Kendall sits on this issue. She claims that <a href="http://www.labour.org.uk/blog/entry/watch-labour-leadership-hustings">“terrorism and migration are global challenges”</a> and that we must “get real over controlling immigration”. </p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"596602886550851584"}"></div></p>
<p>Kendall has also <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/labour/11657740/Blairite-Labour-leadership-contender-Liz-Kendall-backs-taking-benefits-away-from-EU-migrants.html">talked about</a> taking tax credits away from new migrant workers, on top of restricting access to benefits and social housing. Despite this, she has repeatedly <a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2015/06/liz-kendall-offers-tentative-support-for-cutting-benefits-for-eu-migrants/">dodged questions</a> about whether she would support restricting benefits for EU migrants – a seemingly odd move given her fairly clear position on the issue, not to mention <a href="http://www.lizkendall.org/launching-labours-plan/">her endorsement of Miliband’s pledge</a> on this. Apparently she <a href="https://twitter.com/mhallward/status/619246623890259968">hated the mugs</a> though. </p>
<p>All things considered, there is little to separate the immigration policies of the so-called New Labourites in this leadership contest. As on so many other issues, Corbyn stands apart from the pack. But his ideological vision doesn’t lend itself to producing a coherent immigration policy either.</p>
<p>Just as the narrative about Labour causing the recession became fact, with all the contenders claiming they got it wrong on immigration there is little room for any debate. Yet with Labour’s socially conservative <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/08/labour-are-becoming-toxic-brand-warns-jon-cruddas">voters long defected to UKIP</a>, and the <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-pledges-to-control-and-reduce-immigration">Tories adopting Miliband’s policies</a> unnoticed, perhaps it is time for a change in tack.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/46097/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Erica Consterdine does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A run down of what each has to say on the top issue of the summer.Erica Consterdine, Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Immigration Politics & Policy, University of SussexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/455762015-08-11T20:34:04Z2015-08-11T20:34:04ZHas Britain’s ‘pissed off’ constituency found a leader in Jeremy Corbyn?<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90722/original/image-20150804-15152-1m4427l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The prospect of left-wing frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn becoming Labour Party leader is shaking up Britain's political establishment.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/garryknight/15024926027/in/photolist-oTGF3K-oBHKNz-om7CxS-om7TNa-oEnm5X-oc7qCR-nLHcoA">flickr/Garry Knight</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span></figcaption></figure><p><em>This article is part of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/au/topics/democracy-futures">Democracy Futures</a> series, a <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/shortcodes/images-videos/articles-democracy-futures/">joint global initiative</a> with the <a href="http://sydneydemocracynetwork.org/">Sydney Democracy Network</a>. The project aims to stimulate fresh thinking about the many challenges facing democracies in the 21st century.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>It looks <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/labour-leadership-jeremy-corbyn-set-for-landslide-firstround-victory-with-53-according-to-yougov-poll-10449236.html">increasingly likely</a> that <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labour_Party_(UK)_leadership_election,_2015">in a month’s time</a> a slightly dishevelled figure from the British Labour Party’s long-forgotten “hard left” past, MP <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-is-jeremy-corbyn-stealing-the-show-because-hes-the-only-labour-candidate-saying-anything-at-all-45120">Jeremy Corbyn</a>, will be elected its next leader. Vague amusement at the prospect has given way to <a href="https://theconversation.com/voters-have-shifted-to-the-left-but-that-doesnt-make-it-the-right-move-for-labour-45193">alarm</a> across the political spectrum.</p>
<p>Commentators sympathetic to Labour have come out almost unanimously to warn party members that such an outcome would equate to <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/10/anyone-but-jeremy-corbyn-labour-leader-alastair-campbell">political suicide</a>. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/30/jeremy-corbyn-is-the-world-ready-for-his-socks-and-sandals">The Guardian</a>, normally quite sympathetic to the kind of anti-austerity plain-speaking for which Corbyn is renowned, is full of appeals to its readership (many of them natural Labour sympathisers) to return to their senses.</p>
<p>On the political right, amusement at the direction in which the main rival to the Conservatives is heading is mixed with <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/politics/6540181/Could-Jeremy-Corbyn-be-Labours-next-leader.html">stern warnings</a> about what might happen if, heaven forbid, Corbyn was actually elected prime minister. The chattering classes are rattled.</p>
<p>So far the stakes in this curious episode have aligned along a familiar axis. The problem, it seems, is that Corbyn is an old-fashioned left-winger. He stands for the renationalisation of the rail system, reversing cuts to benefits and welfare, the abolition of university tuition fees and a re-alignment of the UK’s foreign and defence policy.</p>
<p>So far, so predictable. As the commentary insists, such an approach resulted in defeat after defeat for Labour – that is until Tony Blair brought the party to its senses.</p>
<p>Blair’s recipe was simple enough: to win, the party must fall in line with the same neoliberal approach as its Conservative rival – and virtually every mainstream political party across Europe and the advanced democracies. Corbyn rejects this inheritance, but he also rejects its political logic: that to win elections you have to show that you have understood the underpinning axiom of our times: “you cannot buck the market”. Well, he thinks you can.</p>
<h2>Rejecting what politics has become</h2>
<p>There is a constituency out there looking for more than a rather meek acceptance of the “neoliberalism-lite” that social democratic parties have been peddling for three decades. That constituency includes the fabled “hard left”. It also includes many traditionalists within the major trade unions and within the Labour Party itself, particularly in its former heartlands in Wales, Scotland and the post-industrial cities of the north. </p>
<p>Can the rise of Corbyn really be ascribed to this demographic? Perhaps, but there’s more to the story than this. Much more – especially for the young who are flocking, improbably, to Corbyn’s side.</p>
<p>What is becoming clearer is that there is a constituency willing to challenge what politics has become: shallow, pithy, televisual, tedious and disingenuous. This is a politics embodied in toothy, neatly suited, identikit middle-class men and women speaking in a kind of a corporate patois lampooned so successfully in the television show The Office. </p>
<p>It’s a world where unconvincing aspiration (“moving forwards”) and low attainment (“pushing the envelope”) kill initiative and hope for a better future.</p>
<p>A candidate like Corbyn stands apart from his colleagues – <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/31/corbyn-supporters-risk-return-to-labour-splits-of-1980s-says-burnham">Andy Burnham</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/aug/01/liz-kendall-admits-jeremy--corbyn-in-the-lead">Liz Kendall</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jul/30/scotlands-sole-labour-mp-backs-yvette-cooper-for-party-leadership">Yvette Cooper</a>. But he also stands apart in what he represents: a longing to address the myriad inequalities and injustices of the present in words that everyone can understand.</p>
<p>It is this authenticity that is so troubling at one level and so liberating at another. Corbyn is not just mouthing the words; he means it. So why all the fuss? Why not just accept Corbyn-mania for what it is: the emergence of a somewhat anachronistic figure who seems to be catching the breeze of a certain kind of resentment about the state we are in.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=262&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=262&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=262&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90570/original/image-20150803-5983-jhffsk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=329&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Jeremy Corbyn backs the UK People’s Assembly Against Austerity, which formed in 2013.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Peter Damian</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>A candidate for pissed-off Britain</h2>
<p>Context, as usual, explains a great deal. Corbyn is not alone in his desire to combat austerity. Nor is he alone in rejecting the logic of contemporary politics and the deep complicity of political elites in ever-widening inequality, destroying the inheritance of the welfare state and fetishising the market.</p>
<p>But hitherto those seeking to combat the destructive excesses of the present have been found outside the political mainstream: Greece’s <a href="http://theconversation.com/this-is-the-end-of-the-line-for-syriza-44729">Syriza</a> is a rough-and-ready coalition of relatively recent vintage; Podemos emerged out of the street occupations of <a href="http://theconversation.com/postcard-from-spain-where-now-for-the-quiet-revolution-43779">Spain’s 15M</a>; the rise of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/spains-indignados-ada-colau-elections-mayor-barcelona">Ada Colau</a>, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/12/madrid-manuela-carmena-deal-socialists-mayor">Manuela Carmena</a>, the Italian <a href="http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/55d3242a-2bb2-11e5-8613-e7aedbb7bdb7.html#axzz3hdUMCUt6">Beppe Grillo</a> and the <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/pirate-party-surges-in-polls-to-become-biggest-political-party-in-iceland-10222018.html">Icelandic Pirate Party</a> are all instances of outsiders finding ways of getting “inside”.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=399&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90572/original/image-20150803-5998-1i910i4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=501&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">According to Mirror columnist Kevin Maguire, Jeremy Corbyn’s greatest enemy comes from within Tony Blair’s New Labour.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/jeremy-corbyns-greatest-enemy-comes-6183685">The Mirror</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Here the “outside” is rapidly becoming the inside – the inside of the Labour Party, as all manner of constituencies join the stampede. All this is highly disruptive to what Labour means, or rather, what it has come to mean under <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Labour">New Labour</a>: an election fighting machine designed to “spin” itself to victory on the basis of the fantasy we have been living with since Thatcher’s victory in 1979 – that the embrace of financialised capitalism will eventually improve the lot of the least well-off.</p>
<p>The fantasy is beginning to wear thin, but Burnham, Cooper and Kendall are happy to maintain the “business as usual” line; Corbyn isn’t. They seek to build on the inheritance of New Labour; Corbyn doesn’t.</p>
<p>Corbyn is not merely the return of the repressed (“the hard left”). Something more is happening here. That something is not just about what policies should be adopted to combat austerity; it is more about what kind of politics people want.</p>
<p>Just as <a href="https://theconversation.com/manifesto-check-the-snps-top-policies-41147">Scottish National Party</a> (SNP) became a proxy for “something has to change” in the last election, so has “Corbyn”. Corbyn’s constituency is not just “the left” – it is also that broader, less-easy-to-read group that seeks a change in the who, how, where and what of politics. Spain has its <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/25/spains-indignados-ada-colau-elections-mayor-barcelona">Indignados</a>, the Italians have the <a href="http://www.neurope.eu/article/beppe-grillo-politics-%E2%80%9Cvaffanculo%E2%80%9D/">“vaffanculo”</a> bunch and now the UK has “the pissed off”.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=684&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/90727/original/image-20150804-12007-zyphwd.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=860&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Comedian and sometime political activist Russell Brand at a People’s Assembly Against Austerity rally.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/david0287/16274558456/in/photolist-qN8nes-7oLqCo-hiEKpy-8CVvxg-8KUF6Q-67nNta-pFqc2V-8Kjxzx-qqaXT4-hdq4nC-pFKcWo-bcTAX2-pTqeNs-7VJzzq-cNQTmu-39JxUo-GxcUH-8KRBDv-8KRCyp-8KRC3R-qq15rv-9yQPpJ-9yV352-677nyY-cNQTcN-6iqp9w-6imgZR-7VFjMV-7VFjNp-4oqoYc-9yV34M-9yV34D-9yQPpd-677nM3-aa7ooC-677nHd-jdJWQ4-4TG35g-8x4mx6-rchhg7-2BdUY9-4gtTSJ-rtN2Hg-ji7XKd-6739He-pJ9ty8-677obA-gVnwTj-4TG3L4-gVnwLW">flickr/D.B. Young</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>“Corbyn” resonates as an antidote to “Westminster”, to a distant elite-driven politics. It seems to speak to that otherwise homeless group who seek affinities and affiliations off the back of concerns aired by the likes of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2015/apr/29/ed-miliband-russell-brand-video-highlights">Russell Brand</a> and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/jun/09/shell-oil-greed-undeterred-by-science-climate-change-bill-mckibben-naomi-klein-annie-leonard">Naomi Klein</a>, to name two obvious figures who argue that our politics is broken and needs to be fixed, “rebooted” and re-imagined along more generous, inclusive, participatory and, yes, more democratic lines.</p>
<p>Hitherto they have had little to hang on to in the UK context beyond sporadic bouts of direct action, climate camps or Facebook “likes”. The Scots had their chance at the last election to join the “post-political” or “anti-political” throng by transforming the SNP from a nationalist party into an approximation of a tartan Podemos. Now everyone else has their chance by joining “the Corbyn insurrection”.</p>
<h2>Where does this leave Labour and politics?</h2>
<p>The discomfort of many elements of the Labour Party is plain to see. It ranges from Blair’s trenchant advice for those thinking of voting with their heart to get <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/tony-blair/11755234/Tony-Blair-if-your-heart-is-with-Corbyn-get-a-transplant.html">“a transplant”</a> to the sniffy dismissal of Corbyn’s politics by the likes of <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/23/labour-leadership-contest-jeremy-corbyn">Polly Toynbee</a> and the Guardian grandees. They are clearly perturbed at the spectacle of their sensible “modernising” party becoming a shambolic institutional approximation of Glastonbury: all noise, mud and hangovers. Is this the death of the Labour Party?</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"624089085083168769"}"></div></p>
<p>It might be – but then was not Labour already in its death throes? A once-proud party enjoying the active support of several million members has been reduced to a rump of ageing activists going through the motions “for old time’s sake”. Would it really be the worst thing to re-brand Labour as a party of a different kind: an “outsiders” (anti)party that homes the currently homeless? </p>
<p>15M produced no solace for PSOE (Spain’s social democratic party), but rather a raft of rivals who threaten to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_Spanish_general_election,_2015">eclipse it</a> in the general election. Perhaps it is better to bring the “outside” in, instead of hoping that it will go away.</p>
<p>The purpose of political parties is (usually) to win elections, and winning has been the justification for “modernising”. But does this modernisation diminish Labour’s chance to oppose and overturn the Conservatives?</p>
<p>The evidence is far from clear. The SNP <a href="https://theconversation.com/the-snp-has-blown-british-politics-apart-and-the-uk-must-now-change-if-it-is-to-survive-41507">did well</a> on a “something has to change” ticket, with the details left usefully vague beyond some nod in the direction of increased power for local assemblies and the defence of the welfare state. Spain’s mainstream parties of both left and right have had to confront new political parties with a similar message. Italy endured a political earthquake in 2013 with Grillo’s 5SM party polling the most votes.</p>
<p>The game is changing. Change in the basic co-ordinates of political life is underway. “Corbyn” may or may not be the answer – but it is certainly posing the question.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/45576/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Tormey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The emergence of ageing left-winger Jeremy Corbyn as the unlikely frontrunner in the Labour Party leadership contest signals that many British voters reject what politics has become.Simon Tormey, Professor of Political Theory and Head of the School of Social and Political Sciences, University of SydneyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/430792015-06-10T13:57:54Z2015-06-10T13:57:54ZLabour should forget ‘Saint’ David Miliband – he fluffed his chance<p>One of the many problems faced by Harold Wilson after he became Labour leader in 1963 was heading a team dominated by supporters of his immediate predecessor. <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/january/18/newsid_3376000/3376971.stm">Hugh Gaitskell</a> had died suddenly, leaving his political friends understandably bereft.</p>
<p>Wilson was one of Gaitskell’s most prominent opponents and, as things went from bad to worse during his 1964-70 government, arch-Gaitskellites spent their evenings wishing Saint Hugh, the Man of Principle, was alive to save Labour from disaster. It was hard for Wilson to compete with a man whose qualities became ever more superhuman after his passing.</p>
<p>In the same way, Ed Miliband’s leadership of the Labour party was dogged by the reputation of his brother David from the start. David was the candidate supported by most of the shadow cabinet when the two took each other on in the 2010 leadership race.</p>
<p>Some accused Ed of political fratricide and many more declared that Labour had chosen the wrong brother. Many predicted disaster, one apparently confirmed by the result of the 2015 election. Journalism’s most erudite Blairite John Rentoul declared that 2015 was <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/election-2015-david-miliband-could-have-won-it-for-labour-10234473.html">“an election that Labour could have won, and David Miliband could have won it”</a>. Reinforcing that view, David has recently suggested that under Ed the party took the <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/jun/10/david-miliband-labour-has-turned-the-page-backwards">wrong course</a>. </p>
<p>Such calculations are based on two assumptions. The first is that if the party had fully embraced austerity and recanted for overspending in office, Labour’s poor economic reputation would have improved. The other is that David would have been a more credible leader than Ed. </p>
<p>As I argue in <a href="http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/product/9780198748953.do">Britain Votes 2015</a>, a forthcoming book on the campaign, the two basic reasons for Labour’s defeat were its grim reputation for economic management and Ed Miliband’s terrible ratings as a potential prime minister. </p>
<p>So entrenched is public prejudice on the subject of the economy, it is unlikely anything said by any Labour leader would have helped the party dent the myth that it was responsible for the deficit.</p>
<h2>Chances missed, chances passed</h2>
<p>But would David have been a more credible potential prime minister? The first thing we should consider is David’s inability to take tough decisions. When Tony Blair resigned as leader, David, despite much encouragement, bottled his chance to stand against Gordon Brown. He probably would have lost but at least Labour might have had the chance to debate the issues while Miliband would have shown his mettle.</p>
<p>Having fluffed that chance, Miliband dithered in 2008 and 2009 while Brown’s premiership crumbled. In the end he refused to oust Brown – and Labour went down to a greater defeat in 2010 than might otherwise have been the case.</p>
<p>One reason Gaitskell aroused such hero worship was his willingness to make hard choices: he called for the revision of Clause Four in 1959 and faced-down the 1960 Labour conference’s support for unilateralism. By contrast, David Miliband tended to avoid the difficult decisions. </p>
<p>When Brown stood down as leader, David Miliband regarded the top job as his by right – and his leadership campaign assumed the character of a victory lap. But once Ed started to mount a credible challenge, David’s team descended into threats and vituperation. At some hustings David seemed one slight away from a hissy fit. Yet, had he not been so arrogant and gone out of his way to talk to more MPs, he might actually have won.</p>
<p>David’s narrow defeat to Ed understandably hurt. But what followed has only confirmed the impression of a precious and entitled politician. Realising bridges needed to be rebuilt in a divided party, Ed immediately offered David the job of shadow chancellor – but he spurned the chance.</p>
<p>When Alan Johnson resigned as shadow chancellor a few months later, David was again offered the post but declined it once more. Yet, had he accepted, David could have significantly influenced the party’s direction – a direction he now claims was wrong. Instead he resigned as an MP in 2013 to lead the <a href="http://www.rescue.org/david-miliband">International Rescue Committee</a> in New York. There he remains, a Blairite “Prince over the Water”, issuing damning judgments about a party for which he abdicated responsibility.</p>
<h2>Closing the book</h2>
<p>It is of course possible that David – a highly intelligent and talented man – could have overcome his shortcomings and become an effective leader. But would he have survived one of the most sustained campaigns of character assassination in modern British politics – the one that turned his brother Ed into a comic character?</p>
<p>As the <a href="http://ericjoyce.co.uk/2015/05/labour-must-behead-its-failed-aristocracy/">former MP Eric Joyce has written</a>, David “just isn’t very good at talking to people or expressing himself plausibly one-to-one without using silly black-box, wonk-type language”. Ed’s 2010 campaign team exploited this flaw by claiming it was their man who “speaks human”. </p>
<p>Just imagine: a less “human” Ed Miliband. For make no mistake the right-wing press would have done to David what they did to Ed, and with equally devastating results for his public image. Long before Ed had his <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/06/sun-ed-miliband-labour-mail-telegraph-election">bacon sandwich</a>, David had his banana: and they both share the same father, the one <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2435751/Red-Eds-pledge-bring-socialism-homage-Marxist-father-Ralph-Miliband-says-GEOFFREY-LEVY.html">the Daily Mail claimed “hated Britain”</a>. </p>
<p>I don’t know if David would have made a worse leader than his brother but nor do those who perpetuate the David Myth have any idea if he would have made a better one. And as Labour decides on its future direction – and leadership candidates continue to put the boot into Ed – it’s worth questioning whether it should take the unsolicited advice of Saint David or make its own decisions about the next five years.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/43079/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Fielding is a member of the Labour party.</span></em></p>Why do people continue to think the former Foreign Secretary would have made a better leader than his brother, Ed?Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/419912015-05-19T05:11:17Z2015-05-19T05:11:17ZUnite’s break with Labour: bluff, bluster and empty threats<p>Many on the Labour left are keen to point out that the party owes its existence to the trade union movement. Likewise, the unions do their best to make sure Labour doesn’t forget its heritage. Traditionally, the unions have had a great deal of say in the election of the party leader. But the current contest has ignited debate about the unions’ role in Labour’s future, after Unite union leader <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32777771">Len McCluskey said</a> that his organisation would “rethink” its relationship with the party, unless it could represent “the voice of organised labour”. </p>
<p>The curious thing about Ed Miliband’s leadership was his redefinition of Labour’s relationship with the unions. The left-leaning Miliband was propelled into office with their help, after Unite orchestrated his election over his Blairite brother, David. Miliband went on to shift Labour further to the left than it had been for years, almost as a sop to the unions. Unfortunately, the May 7 election proved that “Project Miliband” – which rejected Blairism and the centre ground – has put Labour back years. </p>
<p>Now that <a href="https://theconversation.com/milibandism-crushed-at-the-polls-but-ed-doomed-from-the-start-41525">Miliband has resigned</a>, the main imperative for the Labour party is to elect a new leader. McCluskey told the BBC’s John Pienaar that “it is essential that the correct leader emerges”. The unions would prefer a short, sharp leadership contest as that would favour Andy Burnham, their preferred candidate. But acting Labour leader Harriet Harman has scuppered that dream with a longer contest, culminating with the party conference in September. </p>
<p>It’s true that there would be little point in electing a new leader until the party has done some soul-searching and re-established itself. The leader needs something tangible to lead. But when McCluskey called for a debate about the direction in which labour needs to go, there was no doubt that he meant a shift to the left. Even so, much of McCluskey’s tirade can be seen as bluff, bluster, and empty threats. Indeed, he has already made <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/uk/len-mccluskey-backtracks-on-unite-labour-comments-1-3776085">an attempt to backtrack</a> on his comments, saying that the union has “no plans to disaffiliate from Labour”.</p>
<p>Whether they like it or not, the unions – while having an important role – have become detached from reality. David Miliband was right <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/11/david-miliband-criticises-brother-ed-labour-blairite">when he said</a> that Labour lost the election because they failed to be the party of aspiration and inclusiveness. Yet the unions still cling to yesterday’s working class rhetoric, despite having less power in the workplace, because of <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/313768/bis-14-p77-trade-union-membership-statistical-bulletin-2013.pdf">stagnant membership</a>. Likewise, they have less influence over government, because they speak yesterday’s language.</p>
<h2>One member, one vote</h2>
<p>Last year, Miliband also attempted to mitigate the unions’ influence, by changing the leadership election rules. He introduced the one member, one vote (OMOV) system, under which every member – whether an affiliate or full member – gets an equal vote. The argument was that, in the wake of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-25279685">Falkirk by-election scandal</a>, OMOV would remove the block vote, giving the unions back to their members.</p>
<p>As a result of these changes, the unions have seen their collective power swept away. But if they are able to mobilise their members, they could be back in business. The problem for the unions is that they were caught napping. So confident were they that Labour would oust the Tories from government that, with the exception of Unison, they failed to encourage individual union members to join the party. </p>
<p>If they are successful in getting union members to sign up, it could give them more influence over who leads the party than they have ever had. There are around 4m members of Labour-affiliated unions and <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/politics/article4438615.ece">roughly 221,000 other party members</a>. If the unions can get just 20% to affiliate and vote for their preferred leader, they will be calling the shots. </p>
<p>The unions may be optimistic but there will be a number of worried people in the Labour ranks. They know that a significant shift to the left could go against Labour at the polls in 2020. This is something the unions seem to be ignoring. There is no point in foisting a leader on the party who cannot win the next election. The main concern for Labour must be the prospect of losing the £11m donated by the unions last year. Without that they would find it difficult to operate, unless they can attract funding from business – and that wouldn’t go down well with the unions. </p>
<p>It could be that Miliband was right all along. The new rules could well ensure that the Labour leader is the choice of the membership, rather than that of the union leadership.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41991/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alf Crossman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Len McCluskey needs to snap back to reality, if he wants to see Labour in government.Alf Crossman, Senior Lecturer in Industrial Relations and HRM, University of SurreyLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/417982015-05-14T05:08:26Z2015-05-14T05:08:26ZWe need to talk about Tony – why Labour shouldn’t rush back to the right<p>Ed Miliband’s failure to win the 2015 election, or even to increase Labour’s share of seats, has been seized upon by the Blairite wing of the party to push its own centrist agenda. Peter Mandelson, one of the architects of New Labour, accused Miliband of making a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/may/10/miliband-made-terrible-mistake-in-ditching-new-labour-says-mandelson">“terrible mistake”</a> in abandoning Blair’s focus on aspirational John Lewis voters. </p>
<p>Chuka Umunna <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/labours-first-step-to-regaining-power-is-to-recognise-the-mistakes-we-made">claimed</a> that Labour was punished by voters for running a budget deficit before the financial crisis. Tony Blair <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/09/tony-blair-what-labour-must-do-next-election-ed-miliband">weighed in too</a>, claiming that a more “left-wing” or “Scottish” approach would not help win back the voters lost north of the border.</p>
<p>There is no doubt that Labour’s failure to win over enough voters in Middle England marginal constituencies cost it the election, and it is equally true that Tony Blair’s New Labour project was successful in this regard in the 1990s and 2000s. But a similar centrist strategy would not work again for Labour. Another look at the reasons for Labour’s defeat shows why.</p>
<h2>Financial crisis fallout</h2>
<p>There is strong evidence that Labour is still carrying the burden of being in office when the financial crisis struck, fatally damaging its hard won reputation for economic competence. <a href="https://www.ipsos-mori.com/researchpublications/researcharchive/22/Best-Party-On-Key-Issues-Managing-the-Economy.aspx?view=wide">IPSOS Mori data</a> shows that Labour held a substantial advantage over the Conservatives on economic policy throughout its period of government until 2008. </p>
<p>This advantage was lost when the financial crisis began, and has not yet been recovered: coming into the election, the Conservatives led by 41% to 23% when voters were asked which party had the best policies for the economy. Labour took the blame for the crisis, just in the same way the Conservatives <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2012/sep/13/black-wednesday-bad-day-conservatives">lost their reputation for economic competence on Black Wednesday in 1992</a>, when the pound was ejected from the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. In key constituencies, the perceived risks of a Labour government to economic stability undoubtedly shored up the Conservative vote.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=259&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81593/original/image-20150513-2491-7wybfe.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=326&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">New Labour cosied up to business.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">www.shutterstock.com</span></span>
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</figure>
<p>Lest it be forgotten, Tony Blair was prime minister in the pre-crisis period, when Labour purportedly overspent and allowed deficits to rise too high. The danger for Labour is in failing to recognise that the crisis was not caused by its supposed excessive spending when in government, but instead by the <a href="http://www.voxeu.org/article/excessive-risk-taking-banks-new-ereport">risky behaviour of the financial industry</a> – and that the New Labour strategy of cosying up to business was directly <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2011/sep/26/ed-balls-sorry-labour-failures">responsible for the failures of regulation</a> that allowed this to happen. Blair and Brown’s admiration for the wealth creators of the City of London and belief in <a href="http://johnquiggin.com/2009/01/02/refuted-economic-doctrines-1-the-efficient-markets-hypothesis/">flawed theories of efficient markets</a> were, it is now clear, the wrong policies. </p>
<p>Ed Miliband’s <a href="http://www2.labour.org.uk/leader-of-the-labour-party-ed-milibands-speech-to-the-cbi">critique</a> of Britain’s over-financialised and rentier-centric form of capitalism was intellectually far more consistent with the views of <a href="http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2014/10/adair-turner-the-consequences-of-money-manager-capitalism.html">economic policy elites</a> than anything the Blairite camp has come up with.</p>
<p>Although <a href="https://theconversation.com/uk/topics/labour-manifesto">Labour’s manifesto</a> only hinted at reforming British capitalism – with timid measures on property taxation and house-building, a rise in the minimum wage and attempts to tax super-wealthy London-based oligarchs – it did address some of the fundamental imbalances of the British economy.</p>
<h2>Failings of style not substance</h2>
<p>Miliband’s failure lay in his <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-did-labour-lose-and-where-next-for-the-party-41629">inability to communicate these ideas</a> and to combat Conservative arguments about economic management. Although his performance during the election campaign improved voter perceptions somewhat, he still lagged way behind David Cameron, who, unlike the Labour leader, is more popular than his party. The courageous decision to stand up to the right-wing press over the phone-tapping scandal did not pay off, but it is unlikely in any case that Labour would have won the endorsement of many newspapers. </p>
<p>There is no reason why a progressive political programme should be unpopular. The aims of shoring up the spending power of large sections of the labour force, making housing available to younger generations and getting the wealthiest to pay a higher share of the costs of government are widely shared. A more charismatic leadership would certainly have helped. But so would a coherent account of where New Labour had failed, and why the current leadership of the party would not make the same costly mistakes again.</p>
<p>For Labour to win again, it will certainly have to win some votes in Middle England. But it is equally important to win support from SNP voters in Scotland and UKIP supporters in working class parts of England. Perhaps most important of all, will be mobilising social groups with low electoral turnout but which are likely to favour centre-left policies, such as the poor and the young. Signing up to stringent and probably unnecessary spending cuts and a deferential attitude to business leaders will be of little help in achieving this. </p>
<p>The Conservatives’ economic policies have <a href="https://theconversation.com/state-of-the-nation-a-dismal-record-for-the-uk-economy-39675">failed even on their own terms</a> and have imposed unnecessary costs on large swathes of the electorate. For Labour to concede the economic argument in these circumstances makes no political sense. Instead, it needs to try harder to win the argument and persuade the voters of the value of its agenda for making capitalism both fairer and more efficient.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41798/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Jonathan Hopkin is affiliated with the Labour party.</span></em></p>The centrist strategy that worked for New Labour won’t work for the party going forward.Jonathan Hopkin, Associate Professor of Comparative Politics, London School of Economics and Political ScienceLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/416292015-05-11T11:47:56Z2015-05-11T11:47:56ZWhy did Labour lose, and where next for the party?<p>Labour’s devastating defeat in the general election was shocking in its scale, but in retrospect, the signs were there all along. The party was widely perceived to be lacking strong leadership and economic credibility, which it <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/danhodges/100211660/tony-blairs-critique-of-ed-miliband-is-harsh-but-accurate-labour-has-left-itself-on-the-wrong-side-of-every-debate/">assumed it could overcome</a> with a “35% strategy” of holding onto its core vote from 2010 and grafting on some Liberal Democrat defectors. In the event, it fell far short of even that low target. The party must now decide how to get back in the game.</p>
<p>After its defeat in 2010, Labour spent the entire summer debating the Iraq War and marketisation in the public services during its leadership contest, at a time when the country was fixated on the economic crisis and the coalition was busily pinning the blame for that crisis on the last Labour government. </p>
<p>This time round, Labour must think about voters’ concerns rather than its own preoccupations. There are three key areas where it needs to focus if it is to be in a position to win in 2020: leadership, competence and party image.</p>
<h2>Leading the way</h2>
<p>Leaders are an increasingly important consideration for voters when deciding how to vote. They need to be seen as credible, competent, trustworthy and in touch with ordinary people’s concerns. Weak leaders can severely damage a party’s prospects because voters have little faith they will be able to deliver on their promises or to deal with crises. </p>
<p>Ed Miliband consistently suffered poor approval ratings and lagged far behind David Cameron in polls of who would <a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/7rj2tjjm1c/YG-Archives-Pol-Trackers-Leaders-Perceptions-050515.pdf">make the better prime minister</a>. He was seen as “odd” by voters – not least for the way he challenged his own brother for the Labour leadership in 2010. But he was also seen as weak, and that had a devastating effect on Labour’s electoral prospects.</p>
<p>To give one example from the election campaign, the Conservatives depicted Miliband as being <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/mar/09/tory-election-poster-ed-miliband-pocket-snp-alex-salmond">in the pocket</a> of Alex Salmond and as a <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/11547853/Election-2015-Nicola-Sturgeon-is-Ed-Milibands-puppet-master-in-new-Conservative-campaign-poster.html">puppet on a string</a> held by Nicola Sturgeon, in posters warning of the dangers of a Labour minority government dependent on SNP support. The political was made personal, contrasting Miliband’s weakness with the strength of Salmond and Sturgeon. It played on existing concerns about Miliband and questioned whether he could stand up for England’s interests. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=375&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/81210/original/image-20150511-10269-m2ku5v.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=471&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<span class="caption">Ed the easily-led?</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Conservative Party</span></span>
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<p>These posters could never have worked with, say, Tony Blair in Salmond’s pocket because Blair was widely seen by voters as a strong leader, so the message would have lacked credibility. Labour can withstand these attacks in the future only if its next leader is a strong and credible figure.</p>
<h2>Need for credible policies</h2>
<p>Labour’s policies must also be seen as credible, and the party as a whole, competent. Under Miliband, Labour trailed far behind the Conservatives in <a href="https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/9drub35x7f/YG-Archives-Pol-Trackers-Issues(1)-Best-Party-on-Issue-270415.pdf">polls on economic management</a>. It never offered a convincing explanation of what it got wrong in government before 2010, and never had a credible policy to reduce the deficit.</p>
<p>The party put all its eggs in one basket by assuming that the coalition’s austerity policy would be unsuccessful and unpopular. It turned out to be neither, and so Miliband’s Labour was left without a proper economic policy. There are <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/14/david-cameron-general-election-fundamentals-favour">no examples on record</a> of a British party winning a general election despite being less trusted on the economy than its main rival and with a leader not seen as the strongest candidate to become prime minister. And the 2015 result is no exception. Labour must learn that lesson.</p>
<p>Competence goes beyond economic policy, however. On immigration, Labour <a href="https://theconversation.com/manifesto-check-labours-immigration-policies-are-led-by-public-opinion-not-evidence-40109">toughened its policy</a> under Miliband, but again, it lacked credibility. This is particularly dangerous for Labour because <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-32672010">UKIP finished second</a> in a swathe of northern Labour seats, and may launch a serious challenge in 2020. </p>
<p>Working-class voters are most concerned with immigration, and they are <a href="https://theconversation.com/farage-squares-up-to-labour-in-bid-to-broaden-ukip-vote-32245">more likely than other groups</a> to vote for UKIP. To retain their support, Labour must show that it at least understands their concerns, even if it doesn’t argue for a “fortress UK”.</p>
<h2>Keeping up appearances</h2>
<p>Party image is the third area where Labour suffered. The 2015 election demonstrated once again that it is very difficult to win from the left, and that capturing the centre-ground remains crucial to electoral success. Under Miliband, Labour was seen to shift quite sharply to the left, compared with the Blair years. It came to be seen as anti-business, pro-state intervention, close to the unions, and pro-tax-and-spend. </p>
<p>Individual policies such as capping energy prices may have been popular in isolation, but they fed into the image of a left-wing party, which ultimately proved damaging. This is not to say that New Labour should be resurrected – that brand is too tarnished. But Labour must once again be a party that understands the aspirations of working-class and middle-class voters.</p>
<p>Some have suggested following the leftist strategy of the SNP as a road to electoral success. But the SNP succeeded primarily because it made the independence question the key dividing line in Scottish politics. If Scotland becomes independent after any second referendum, Labour will be forced to confront its weaknesses in England, which is more right-leaning. If Scotland remains in the UK, Labour would have to show that it would defend Scotland’s interests at Westminster. </p>
<p>Scotland may look a lost cause for Labour after the SNP’s success, but that could change. Quebec separatists routinely dominated Canadian federal elections (held under first-past-the-post) within their province after two defeated independence referendums, usually winning two-thirds of Quebec’s 75 seats. But they eventually declined, and at <a href="http://www.parl.gc.ca/parlinfo/Compilations/ElectionsAndRidings/ResultsParty.aspx">the last Canadian federal election</a>, won just four seats after the separatist tide had ebbed.</p>
<p>If Labour is to revitalise itself in opposition, it needs to look at why it lost. Blaming a hostile media or Tory dirty tricks will be comforting, but won’t help the party move forward. “One more heave” doesn’t usually work for parties that have suffered heavy defeats. The best thing that could happen would be for a full and frank party-wide discussion of all the options for the next parliament. That debate, at least, does appear to be starting.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41629/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Tom Quinn does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Labour needs to focus on leadership, policies and image, if it’s to bounce back.Tom Quinn, Senior Lecturer, Department of Government, University of EssexLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/415702015-05-10T08:35:07Z2015-05-10T08:35:07ZIs back to the future what is best for Labour after Ed Miliband?<p>If victors get to define the reasons for their victory, then losers just get told why they’ve lost. Within hours – minutes even – of the announcement of the shock BBC exit poll at 10pm on May 7, Ed Miliband was being informed in no uncertain terms why he had done so badly by an army of observers, critics and supposed party comrades.</p>
<p>It is ridiculous to imagine that in such a short space of time anyone can properly explain why Labour’s performance was so disappointing. We still don’t know <a href="https://theconversation.com/why-the-polls-got-it-so-wrong-in-the-british-election-41530">why all the opinion polls</a> were so out of alignment with the final result. Did they consistently over-estimate Labour support in the campaign or was there a late defection to the Conservatives? These things matter.</p>
<p>But political debate rarely stops for the lack of adequate data. As a consequence, in the wake of this and every other Labour disaster at the polls, prejudice often masquerades as analysis. Most infamously, Labour’s third defeat in a row in 1959 saw party leader <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=AtYj5rI0MvUC&pg=PA67&dq=steven+fielding+gaitskell+clause+four+1959&hl=en&sa=X&ei=bMFNVdy7EMHq7Aa11IHwAw&ved=0CBQQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=steven%20fielding%20gaitskell%20clause%20four%201959&f=false">Hugh Gaitskell and his revisionist cohorts</a> in academia and the media blame its association with nationalisation. But they had long been critical of nationalisation and blatantly sought to use defeat to ditch Labour’s constitutional commitment to public ownership. It was arguable, however, that Gaitskell’s own campaign blunders had harmed his party more. But he still plunged Labour into years of bitter and harmful division.</p>
<h2>Blairites seize their chance</h2>
<p>In the same way, Miliband’s many Blairite critics have formed an orderly queue to tell us why he lost. The columnist John Rentoul <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/election-2015-david-miliband-could-have-won-it-for-labour-10234473.html">has already written</a> that 2015 “was an election that Labour could have won, and David Miliband could have won it”. </p>
<p>After beating his brother for the leadership in 2010, Rentoul and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/general-election-2015/politics-blog/11591320/Why-did-Labour-lose-this-election-It-never-tried-to-win-it.html">the Blairite blogger Dan Hodges</a>, insist Miliband should have admitted that Labour had spent too much money in office and signed up to much of the Cameron government’s austerity programme rather than opposing it.</p>
<p>Theirs is the prevailing view among many leading Labour parliamentarians, most of whom wanted David Miliband for leader. <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/08/guardian-view-labour-defeat-failure-storytelling-strategy?CMP=share_btn_tw">According to</a> Pat McFadden, the shadow Europe minister, and a figure close to Blair, defeat flowed from Ed Miliband “turning the page on New Labour” and his failure to appeal to “the aspirational family that wants to do well”. “We need”, McFadden continued, “to speak about wealth creation and not just wealth distribution.”</p>
<p><div data-react-class="Tweet" data-react-props="{"tweetId":"596941398936522752"}"></div></p>
<p>Labour’s appalling performance in Scotland and its inability to win more than a few marginal constituencies in England certainly needs explanation. But is the answer, in effect, going back to 1997 and what <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/election-2015-david-miliband-could-have-won-it-for-labour-10234473.html">Rentoul semi-ironically calls</a> “the eternal verities of the Blairite truth”?</p>
<h2>Not yet over New Labour</h2>
<p>Ed Miliband won the Labour leadership because New Labour had failed. Uncritically accepting the economics of neo-liberalism, Blair said Labour could still make Britain a fairer society. Between 1997 and 2010 there were many, if modest, gains as a result. The minimum wage, tax credits, investment in public services among other measures certainly improved the lives of some: <a href="http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/6738">relative poverty fell</a>.</p>
<p>But New Labour’s faith in the market meant it contributed to the deregulation that led to the 2008 banking crisis, one which even the former governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/dec/29/labour-government-not-responsible-crash-bank-england-governor-mervyn-king">admits was the real reason for the huge deficit</a> inherited by the Conservative-led coalition. The party was also in trouble electorally, even before the fiscal crisis. It crawled to a majority in 2005 with 35.2% of the vote – and only then after Blair promised he wouldn’t seek another term as prime minister. The seeds of the SNP surge were laid before 2010, while the alienation of many former Labour voters had long been obvious. Even <a href="http://labourlist.org/2010/07/david-milibands-keir-hardie-lecture-full-speech/">David Miliband conceded</a> that more of the same was not an option, that the party needed to renew itself.</p>
<p>It is clear that the course taken by Ed Miliband did not work. But we do not yet know for sure why. Was his attempt to move on in a leftward direction from New Labour flawed from the outset? Or did the fault lie in the uncertain means by which his strategy was communicated? Was any Labour leader fated to fail in 2015, given the flawed record of New Labour in power, one that remains fresh in the minds of many voters?</p>
<p>By the time we know the answers to these questions, a new Labour leader will have been elected and will already be taking the party in a direction likely to have been influenced by those nostalgic for Blairism. But going back to the future is not necessarily the best way to move forward.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/41570/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Fielding is a member of the Labour party</span></em></p>Ed Miliband’s many Blairite critics have formed an orderly queue to tell us why he lost.Steven Fielding, Professor of Political History, University of NottinghamLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/348212014-11-28T14:43:46Z2014-11-28T14:43:46ZWas the Gordon Brown government really that bad?<p>In the week Gordon Brown <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30167158">announced</a> he will stand down from his Westminster constituency at the May 2015 general election, two central observations come to mind. From the Brown government to its Cameron-Clegg coalition successor, there has been more continuity than change. And the failings of the Brown government were very much those of all UK governments since 1970. </p>
<p>Since the Heath government’s <a href="http://winton.ashmus.ox.ac.uk/PastSeminars/Hilary%202011/needham.pdf">1971 Competition and Credit Control Act</a> started liberalising the credit supply to the UK economy, every subsequent prime minister and chancellor, including Gordon Brown in both roles, has resorted to a British growth model based upon consumption, property and accumulating private household debt. For example, during Brown’s tenure as chancellor, over £800bn <a href="http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/boeapps/iadb/fromshowcolumns.asp?Travel=NIxSSxSCx&ShadowPage=1&SearchText=monthly+amounts+outstanding+of+total+excluding&SearchExclude=&SearchTextFields=TC&Thes=&SearchType=&Cats=&ActualResNumPerPage=21X41X61X&TotalNumResults=67&FNotes=Y&XNotes=Y&C=NZR&XNotes2=Y&ShowData.x=26&ShowData.y=4">was added</a> to UK household private debt.</p>
<h2>Trade continuity</h2>
<p>Every government <a href="http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171776_382315.pdf">has delivered</a> annual deficits on the UK’s <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/currentaccountdeficit.asp">current account</a> since 1984, and on the <a href="http://www.investopedia.com/terms/t/trade_deficit.asp">trade account</a> since 1982. In the final full year of the Brown government in 2009, the UK’s current account deficit was £41.4bn or 2.8% of GDP (compared to £72.4bn or 4.2% of GDP in 2013), and the UK’s trade deficit £28.1bn (compared to £32.1bn in 2013). The Cameron-Clegg coalition has <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/11206819/Does-the-UK-have-a-70bn-deficit-problem.html">simply delivered</a> bigger deficits.</p>
<p>No UK government since 1970 has succeeded in re-balancing the economy towards an alternative growth model based upon exports, private business investment and manufacturing. In 2009 the Brown government presided over an annual deficit on the UK’s trade in goods of £83.6bn, compared to an annual deficit of £110.2bn in 2013. George Osborne’s failure to re-balance the economy has simply been greater than Brown’s, both as chancellor and prime minister.</p>
<h2>City slackening</h2>
<p>The signature event of the Brown government, the financial crisis of 2007-2008, was a direct consequence of the light-touch, risk-based approach to financial regulation adopted by Gordon Brown and Ed Balls during their decade at the treasury. </p>
<p>They followed this approach despite the fact that in December 1998, Brown <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/special_report/1998/10/98/imf/184918.stm">had identified</a> the need for wholesale reform of financial markets and to rediscover public purpose in the global economy. He had <a href="http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2007/NEW0711A.htm">also chaired</a> one of the key committees at the International Monetary Fund for nearly eight years, but never used this position to challenge the neo-liberal orthodoxy during his tenure as chancellor or prime minister. </p>
<p>He may have been in office, but Brown did not use the political power at his disposal when given the opportunity. In this regard he was simply occupying the common ground <a href="http://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-and-events/sir-keith-joseph-and-the-market-economy">first laid down</a> by Margaret Thatcher and Sir Keith Joseph in the mid-1970s. In its austerity agenda, the Cameron-Clegg government has also occupied this common ground.</p>
<p>Brown’s subsequent account of the crisis, <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/books/2010/dec/12/beyond-the-crash-gordon-brown-robert-skidelsky">Beyond the Crash: Beyond The First Crisis of Globalisation</a>, documents his personal realisation that had he been bolder and trusted his own intellectual judgement and political instincts to push for a much more radical response to the crisis, he could have gone down in political history not only as one of the greatest peacetime prime ministers but as a statesman of major global significance and reputation.</p>
<p>Instead, Brown and his chancellor, Alistair Darling, superintended a bailout for failing banks, whose <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/sep/12/reality-check-banking-bailout">total value</a> reached £1.162tn at its peak. By the end of March 2014 that figure had fallen dramatically, but <a href="http://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Departmental-Overview-the-performance-of-HM-Treasury-2013-14.pdf">still amounted to</a> £123bn. The Brown government also presided over the Bank of England <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-15198789">giving £375bn</a> of cheap credit to the banks through the policy of quantitative easing.</p>
<p>No other sector of the UK economy had ever received such levels of support in peacetime. However, the Brown government’s strategic decision to privilege banking over all other sectors of the UK economy, and to subordinate its wider British modernisation agenda to the defence of the interests of the City of London, was simply in accordance with the priorities of every UK government since 1945. </p>
<h2>Foreign fidelity</h2>
<p>In its foreign policy choices, the Brown government displayed the same unshakeable Atlanticism, pronounced Eurosceptism, and <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/12/mps-back-law-foreign-aid-percentage-national-income">commitment to</a> increasing international aid to 0.7% of gross national income, as its coalition successor. </p>
<p>It also had to deal with the toxic legacy of the Blair government’s ill-advised interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Where <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7787103.stm">Brown announced</a> in December 2008 the end of UK combat operations in Iraq by the May 31 2009, in July 2011 Cameron <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2011/jul/06/afghanistan-troop-withdrawal-david-cameron">announced</a> the reduction of UK troops in Afghanistan, and <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-29476244">subsequently</a> the end of combat operations by November 28 2014.</p>
<p>Tony Blair as prime minister aspired and failed to put the UK at the heart of Europe, not least because of Brown’s implacable opposition to UK participation in European political and monetary integration. Once prime minister himself, Brown found himself isolated in Europe, as symbolised by <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1572414/Brown-absent-as-Miliband-signs-EU-treaty.html">his absence</a> from the official signing of the Lisbon Treaty. David Cameron has subsequently found himself equally isolated at European summits.</p>
<h2>Domestiv policy</h2>
<p>In domestic policy terms, the impact of devolution meant that the Brown government’s capacity to reform public services was confined to England, where Brown had no personal democratic mandate to intervene.</p>
<p>In both health and education, Brown continued the Blair governments’ pattern of top-down reorganisation of hospitals and schools, and the increasing use of private sector finance and organisations to deliver services. This pattern of provision has continued under the Cameron-Clegg government through <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9034884/Andrew-Lansley-criticism-of-NHS-reforms-is-out-of-date-and-unfair.html">Andrew Lansley’s</a> top-down further reorganisation of the NHS in England, and <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/07/goves-academies-programme-epitomises-his-incompetence-and-failure">Michael Gove’s</a> expansion of New Labour’s academy schools programme.</p>
<h2>Judgement day</h2>
<p>The <a href="http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/find-information-by-subject/elections-and-referendums/past-elections-and-referendums/uk-general-elections/2010-uk-general-election-results">electorate’s verdict</a> on the Brown government was clear but harsh. The Labour Party won only 29% of the vote, its worst performance at a general election since 1983, when both Brown and Blair had first been elected at Westminster. But what is often forgotten (at least south of the border) is that Scotland and England delivered a very different verdict. In England Labour won only 191 seats and 28.1% of the vote, losing 87 seats and 7.4% of the vote, whereas in Scotland it actually increased its share of the vote by 3.1% to 42.0% and won an extra seat to take its total to 42. </p>
<p>This says a great deal both about Gordon Brown the politician, and the priorities, performance and legacy of his government. A product of the highly distinctive internal political culture of the Labour Party in Scotland, as Brown’s impassioned <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/17/gordon-brown-final-scottish-referendum-speech-forces-of-hell-alex-salmond-snp">eve-of-referendum speech</a> in Glasgow attested, he was almost most comfortable and effective speaking to a Scots audience and when affirming his commitment to Scotland’s national interests, the importance of Britishness, and Scotland’s place within the British union. </p>
<p>It was always built on a view of the UK in terms of nations and regions, where Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland would be the nations, and England would be divided into regions. For a thousand years of its history, political and cultural identity in England has been to nation, county and locality. It has never been built on regions. </p>
<p>Like the title of his recent book, <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/my-scotland-our-britain-by-gordon-brown-book-review-homage-to-home-country-reveals-more-of-the-man-than-the-manifesto-9549050.html">My Scotland, Our Britain</a>, and his post-referendum agenda for further devolution to Scotland and broader constitutional reform, Brown’s vision has offered no place for or political recognition for England as a nation. For the future of the union, it is a fatal flaw. Gordon Brown has never understood or accepted that the people of England will never accept a constitutional settlement which divides England against itself.</p>
<p>Brown will be remembered as the most successful peacetime Labour chancellor who also kept the UK out of the fatally flawed single European currency. As prime minister, he will be remembered for having rescued several major UK banks, but at vast cost to UK taxpayers. He is also likely to be assured a place in British political history as the last prime minister of the UK to have represented a Scottish constituency.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34821/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Simon Lee does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>In the week Gordon Brown announced he will stand down from his Westminster constituency at the May 2015 general election, two central observations come to mind. From the Brown government to its Cameron-Clegg…Simon Lee, Senior Lecturer in Politics, University of HullLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/346732014-11-25T13:52:13Z2014-11-25T13:52:13ZGordon Brown: political giant and wasted talent at the same time<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65477/original/image-20141125-4258-o73iym.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Brown was undoubtedly a big beast, but could have been so much more</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/downingstreet/2553823344/in/photolist-4TF1GY-a5Aee5-57USjA-7Yx3aS-4D4yw5-52ESzM-51dMDd-4D4xKY-52VU6e-4D4wsA-4D4wQJ-4WgLaT-71EbqE-2q2dfe-4CZhgM-57QYfg-4ouS3V-4CZjpe-51a19i-4CZiva-7iVEYN-52N3QY-7Xg8vp-519Rcv-6asE4m-52PBJL-4GbcWN-7YLEhZ-52XMJx-4G2eM3-5hZLMY-4FG67z-52K7h7-5ktFuu-81raKp-52Ko6z-4Z6Chz-4UEsaS-51hdzW-7mSB1L-4ZaG1u-Ywdk9-7iVF2S-6bRQ9J-7mSAZG-7Eftsu-7E9zq2-7EftsA-5D7iVp-7SWJ2Z">10 Downing Street</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/">CC BY-SA</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Gordon Brown will <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-30167158">retire from</a> the Commons viewed on the one hand as a giant of Scottish Labour who spent 13 years at the pinnacle of frontline UK politics as chancellor and prime minister: the son of the clergy who stayed true to his roots; champion of the egalitarian tradition. Yet to his detractors, he was the Labour chancellor primarily responsible for overseeing the City of London’s financial recklessness that brought the UK economy to its knees and resulted in the austere times in which we now live. </p>
<p>Whatever your view of Brown, we must acknowledge that in the past two decades he is probably the only politician who can claim to have consistently been there when key decisions that have shaped the landscape of UK politics have been made. The “Brown effect” has been very visible throughout. </p>
<p>In 1994 he made the decision to step aside and allow Tony Blair a free run at the leadership in that <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8511905.stm">infamous meet</a> in the Granita restaurant. For a decade as chancellor he dominated the UK domestic policy agenda. For three years he then served as prime minister. Even after the 2010 general election it looked possible for a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2010/may/11/labour-liberal-democrats-coalition-recriminations">brief period</a> that he may seize victory from defeat with a coalition deal with the Liberal Democrats. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65476/original/image-20141125-4225-rg2pw1.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Brown ascends.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/zoonabar/640650876/in/photolist-YBvbL-7GXtQS-7cN78q-78XNYg-763UiA-76R7MK-7KGMA9-7PPC5d-7jFnsF-7jKftN-7jFnog-7jKgo1-7PLEXV-7HBygd-7f86ei-7j2PaG-7HBygb-7Pt3UV-7Q1tKm-72a7T6-72a7S6-75g8fa-72a7QR-7bmX3m-6Z5N8K-6Zw1Aj-7bi9Lg-7f7SMd-cyj2gC-792Diq-7NgPYe-7iVKkN-7mTTDs-7xvt4V-6Z9NJ9-7xzhhm-7xzhkC-6Zw1A9-7NgMFH-64KikT-7KZEK5-7mTTDA-7yfoFe-75Snqk-7HBygf-7HBygh-eWEHn1-7GXtQJ-7bi9HP-75n5B9">Chris Brown</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This year’s Scottish referendum campaign then saw his resurrection as possibly the most effective defender of the union. Late in the campaign, amid polls showing a potential Yes vote for Scottish independence and panic among the Westminster political class, it was he who got each of the main UK parties to sign up to the now <a href="http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron-ed-miliband-nick-4265992">infamous “Vow”</a> promising further devolution. </p>
<p>It is no exaggeration to say that the current agenda of devolved politics in the UK has effectively been set by Gordon Brown, even as a mere opposition backbencher. Between 1994 and 2014 he can lay claim to have been UK’s most consistently influential politician. </p>
<p>Yet there is something of a “what if?” about Gordon Brown’s career in politics too. What if he had chosen to contest the Labour leadership election in 1994? What if he <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/election-what-election-why-brown-lost-his-bottle-394416.html">had called</a> a snap general election in late 2007 when the Labour party was promoting his PM credentials with a Saatchi & Saatchi advert designed to capture his strength, solidity and conviction: “Not Flash, Just Gordon”?</p>
<p>Even as he bows out the question is <a href="https://theconversation.com/launching-a-pro-independence-newspaper-takes-guts-even-in-scotland-34636">increasingly being asked</a>, what if the Smith Commission delivers a devolution settlement that the Scottish electorate does not view as consistent with the Brown-inspired “Vow”? Does that mean that by stepping down he is reneging on his promise to see it delivered?</p>
<p>Brown is lauded by Scottish Labour, though it is a party that – as the writer Gerry Hassan <a href="http://www.gerryhassan.com/tag/sunday-times/">has pointed out</a> – tends to view itself with some romance. Positive assessments would point to his perceived strong handling of the global financial meltdown. The economist Paul Krugman <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/13/opinion/13krugman.html">wrote in 2008</a>, for instance, that Brown (and his chancellor Alistair Darling) “defined the character of the worldwide financial rescue effort.”</p>
<p>Supporters would argue that in his decade as chancellor, he consistently sought to incrementally improve the lot of the working poor. There is certainly <a href="http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/6738">substantial evidence</a> of falling poverty during his era in government. The irony today, of course, is that many of the gains of that era have unravelled as child poverty <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/jun/06/child-pensioner-poverty-reductions-labour">has started to move</a> in the wrong direction again. </p>
<p><strong>Relative poverty rates 1996-2010</strong></p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=336&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65470/original/image-20141125-4250-1uj5kq8.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=422&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption"></span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.ifs.org.uk/publications/6738">Institute for Fiscal Studies</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A more negative assessment is likely to contain reference to <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/psychologically-flawed-that-doesnt-come-close-1895819.html">character flaws</a> that inhibited his leadership credentials, his <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/dec/12/labour-regulations-city-rbs-collapse">weak regulation</a> of the City, the <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100018367/revealed-why-gordon-brown-sold-britains-gold-at-a-knock-down-price/">sell-off of the nation’s gold reserves</a> at the bottom of the market, and of course his electoral defeat in 2010. “Flawed, failed, finished” was the <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/election-2010/7693596/General-Election-2010-Gordon-Brown-Flawed-failed-finished..html">Telegraph’s conclusion</a> at the time. </p>
<p>In the space of three years he went from being lauded as the UK’s most successful chancellor of the exchequer who had declared the “<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/458871.stm">end of boom and bust</a>” and “the beginning of a <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2008/oct/19/gordonbrown-davidcameron-economic-policy">new Golden Age</a>” to presiding over a country in a debilitating credit crunch amid Labour in-fighting, a breakdown in relations with many colleagues <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/gordon-brown/8740064/Gordon-Brown-was-close-to-firing-Alistair-Darling-on-five-occasions.html">including his chancellor</a>, and ultimately a failure to dissuade the electorate against the <a href="http://www.michaelmeacher.info/weblog/2014/02/labour-really-must-refute-constant-tory-canard-that-labours-profligate-spending-caused-the-recession/">Tory/Lib Dem mantra</a> that Labour allowed it all to go wrong. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=300&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/65474/original/image-20141125-4250-1kug92x.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=377&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Tory mud that (just about) stuck.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/conservatives/4469613830/in/photolist-7NXWtq-7NTYzF-7NTY7c-7NXVwA-7NTZ5k-7NTXDX-7NXVZs-a4qZLy-XLitE-a3VvjB-a3VvK6-a3Yki9-a3YnV7-a3VwCV-a3Vx78-a3Ym9Q-a3Ymzj-a3Yjkd-a3Vt7M-a3YkHY-66dDJV-6XG1HU-679YTY-7RiUeM-7RhBeM-7RmZq9-7Q1xuq-7f8Wwd-75Snqv-7gm3XB-7iRRM8-7GdjuG-69U5Um-72jkug-7Hn2nd-7cN7bh-64KiiR-64PA5q-7Hn2kA-7G9Dst-6Z9VmM-eY4B6W-7RhBfM-6aH5Fz-7iL6Mo-7cUjaf-7KCSS2-eWEHtY-7NfnQt-7BRZgJ">Conservatives</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
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<p>In sum, there is no credible argument against Gordon Brown having been a giant of UK frontline politics. There is a considerable one over his legacy, however. Undoubtedly Brown did “make a difference” in some ways. But the sense of missed opportunity and ultimate failure will always hang over what he achieved.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/34673/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Neil McGarvey does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Gordon Brown will retire from the Commons viewed on the one hand as a giant of Scottish Labour who spent 13 years at the pinnacle of frontline UK politics as chancellor and prime minister: the son of the…Neil McGarvey, Politics Lecturer, University of Strathclyde Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.