Radical swerve or safe harbour- Labour’s two false choices

What a joy it was to listen to the range of very good speeches in favour of all the candidates at Hackney South CLP last night. All applauded all, it was comradely, passionate and good-natured. Essentially, it was everything good…

A history of Labour oblivion

Labour is the real conservative party. Whenever two Labour people get together to talk about politics, within about three sentences history takes over. It is almost impossible to make any political argument without justifying it in historical terms. And this is the root of the…

Why I didn’t jump ship during the Labour Leadership Election

And so the Labour Leadership race is finally coming to an end after what has felt like months of bitter, malicious infighting within the party. Our aim now is to convince the electorate that we are above all of this and we…

Have a lot of sympathy for this. I think it would be a mistake to trash the system entirely. The issues seem to me to be:

1. MPs’ nominations should have acted like the US ‘money primary’, but they didn’t. Much as Brits like to malign the amount of money in American politics, the fact is that it does provide an important…

The real outsiders and insiders, and the leadership debate:

The current state of Labour’s. leadership election is not what I had expected, to say the least.

Many voters in the election would not associate themselves with UKIP, the SNP, or populist parties. But…

The country comes first- or ‘why I am backing Liz Kendall for Leader’

Churches in Nuneaton aren’t the first place to look for inspiration. And it seemed so tonight as the Labour leadership debate meandered around, failing to ignite. Most members of the public seemed to be…