Not long after I moved to Hackney, I witnessed an armed robbery. From a range of about three feet, the fact that the robber was a crackhead was as obvious as the hammer and kitchen knife he was waving about.

A few years later, my partner and baby daughter were abducted outside my house. Continue reading…

Until very recently I would broadly have fallen into the category of the ‘Labour Left’.

I was never totally comfortable with attempts by sections of the left to pull away from the Labour Party, which I had been brought up since childhood to see as “my” party, and which latterly I had come to see as a vehicle via which the Labour Movement could exercise its influence in the party political field: Lenin’s classic formulation of the “bourgeois workers’ party” could not describe it better.

In spite of a brief spell as a member of the Socialist Alliance, I quickly rejoined Labour and argued tooth and nail with comrades that things hadn’t changed so very much. It is now self-evident that I was wrong.
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Peter Mandelson famously proclaimed in 1998 that New Labour was ‘intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich’. One decade later, the government’s mood is not just chilled out but positively euphoric. That’s the clear message in a speech that business and enterprise secretary John Hutton - pictured - will deliver tomorrow, anyhow:

Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country

… he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.
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Iraq has become the elephant in the room in some discussions of international relations amongst a certain section of liberal-left opinion. David Miliband opened his recent speech about democracy by saying that it had ‘clouded the debate’ about how to promote this, but the main lesson he seemed to draw from it is that future ‘interventions in other countries must be more subtle, better planned, and if possible undertaken with the agreement of multilateral institutions.’

The speech was actually more thoughtful than this extract suggests, but by failing to make it clear the exact circumstances in which the British government would use military force, the Foreign Secretary tied himself to a policy which by every measurable standard has been a complete disaster.

The invasion of Iraq was illegal.
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If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become de-ideologised.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of ‘golden mean’ to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.
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[This article is a prelude to the Fabian Society’s ‘Fabian Review’ new year editorial, published on January 3rd. It was previewed in Sunday’s Observer.]

Whose has been the greatest political fightback of all time? The championship bout of our times would be between John ‘Soapbox’ Major, who won an unwinnable election in 1992, and Bill ‘Comeback Kid’ Clinton, reduced to lame duck status by Newt Gingrich’s revolution just two years into his Presidency.

While Harold Macmillan’s ability to turn the Suez debacle into a Tory landslide has many contemporary parallels, the all-time champion of champions has to be Harry Truman, able to brandish the famous headlines ‘Dewey defeats Truman’ after his surprise Presidential victory sixty years ago.

After Gordon Brown’s Autumn horribilis, it may be little Christmas consolation to think that others have dug themselves out of considerably larger holes than he finds himself in. Labour has been buffeted by events ever since a hubristic party conference.

The result is that the Conservatives are now favourites to win the next general election. That, of course, is the threat to Brown. The fightback strategy he needs depends on realizing how he could yet turn it into his opportunity too.

As I argue in an editorial in the Fabian Review new year issue. Like Harry Truman, embracing the status of the underdog could be the key to political recovery.
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At the Social Market Foundation on Wednesday, Liberal Democrat Leadership Candidate Nick Clegg began a speech by outlining the technological context of 21st Century politics. It is a good approximation of my own view. He said:

… the innovations and technological advances that are already shaping and defining the 21st century – Google, Wikipedia, Facebook, YouTube – are about something very different: they are about creating the tools that will enable people to deliver services to each other.

The old model was about constructing the institutional hardware of the paternalistic state. The new model is about developing the democratic software of the empowered society. The old model was controlled by a professional elite. The new model is operated by ordinary people.
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This is the great paradox of our times: in our private and professional lives, we have never been more empowered.

But in our relationship with the state, we have never been so powerless. And make no mistake; it is the poorest and the most vulnerable amongst us who lose out the most.

Mr Clegg’s campaign website has the full text (in which he goes onto propose that LEAs and PCTs be directly elected), and I’ve quoted the introduction at more length at my own place, if you’re interested.

Clegg is often viewed as being on the right of his party, but this introduction looks like a left-wing analysis to me. As I tried to articulate in Graachi’s post (which discussed What Blogging Can and Can’t Achieve), the attraction of blogging and the wider digital revolution, is in its potential to redress the power imbalance, leaking power from the elites to the masses. Does Clegg’s talk of “delivering services to each other” spring from the Right’s affection for the free market and the choices of individuals, or from the Left’s long held belief that we can achieve more through collective action, than we can alone? Given the free and social nature of blogging, YouTube and the political campaigns we see online, I’m inclined towards the latter view.

There has been much discussion here on whether the Green Party can be an effective political vehicle for liberal-lefties in Britain, by David and Donald. This weekend Green party members decide whether it should ditch its system of having two principle speakers, representing each sex, in favour of a party leader system. The public overwhelmingly supports such a move, though it’s unclear whether the change will make it more electorally successful. Westminister Hour recently did a report on the issue. What do readers think, Good or bad idea? I’m somewhat in favour of change. Surely the focus should be on good policies not the structure; why be different for its own sake?
Update: Paul Linford also agrees.

I’ve never been much of a joiner. Even though I’ve worked as a writer/journalist for a few years, I only sent my form off to the NUJ last month. The Union, the Tartan Army, the Tufty Club… and, er, that’s about it. Still, I have given recent thought to joining my local Green Party - so I read Dave Osler’s recent piece: Green Party: vehicle for the British left? (and there), with interest.

Like Dave, I doubt the Greens can build a systematic left-wing alternative to Labour, now properly classified as a ‘centre-right’ not a ‘left’ party. But I do believe the popularity of mainstream greenish politics offers something. A ‘moment’, perhaps, for slipping something with a progressive flavour in with the recycling. A reasonable place to look for inspiration is Sweden.

Sweden’s Green Party have just finished 8 years as junior coalition partners in a red-green government. Top of their list of achievements was the inauguration, in January 2005, of a so-called Alternation Leave policy. Under this scheme, 12,000 Swedes have the annual opportunity to take a government subsidized sabbatical from work (similar to parental leave, but without a baby). Three main conditions apply: employer consent is required; the vacancy may only be covered by recruiting from the pool of current unemployed; you may not work while on leave, except to start a new business.
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The website of Red Pepper magazine is currently hosting a debate on whether or not the democratic left should fill out Green Party membership application forms. The opening shot is written by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, a former Labour parliamentary candidate who will contest Oxford East for the Greens at the next general election. Other contributions come from Clare Short. Jon Cruddas, Chris Smith and Neal Lawson. Here’s the case I make for being a member of New Labour, despite and not because of its track record in office:

Greetings from member L0093001 of Hackney North and Stoke Newington CLP. Yes, after devoting most of my political energies for over a decade to arguing and actively working for a new political party of the left - even writing a book making an extended case as to why such a party is essential - I last year decided to rejoin the Labour Party.
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