The End of New Labour?
The local election results, and the subsequent opinion polls, suggest that the game is up – not just for Gordon Brown, but for the Labour government. It seems unlikely now that recovery is possible. If...
View ArticleNew Labour – Not Labour
New Labour’s current travails have prompted a number of people to recall a piece I wrote for the New Statesman in 1999 – it was a review of Paul Routledge’s biography of Peter Mandelson – and to ask if...
View ArticleNot In My Name
Those, like me (and almost everyone I know in the Labour Party), who have been critical over the years of New Labour and its record in government might have expected that the passage of time would...
View ArticleThe Expense of New Labour
As the scandal of MPs’ expenses unfolds, it threatens not only to expose individual sleaze but to create a crisis of confidence that will engulf the whole of the political class and Parliament as well....
View ArticleNew Labour Betrays Its Supporters
As the Labour Party steels itself for electoral meltdown, it may seem ironic – after the global-sized catastrophes of the Iraq invasion and the worldwide recession – that it is the descent into...
View ArticleIt Has Come To This
So, it has come to this. In twelve short years, New Labour has travelled from the exultation and boundless optimism of the 1997 election victory and of a movement whose time had come to a craven...
View ArticleTragedy
One of the fascinations of politics is that it unfolds over different time scales and at different levels. At one end of the scale are the personal and short-term; at the other, the matters of policy...
View ArticleHave Faith in Our Rival Narrative
Peter Wilby (the Guardian, 5 September) argues that the manifest failure of neo-liberalism to fulfil its promises to voters now provides the Labour Party with an opportunity and a duty to move on from...
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