debating progressive politics in Europe and beyond
The late Steve Jobs was certainly not an easy person to deal with and as Apple CEO a very demanding manager. But nobody can deny that his vision and instincts for clever designs and what people wanted fundamentally transformed several industries, from personal computers to the music business. As Walter Isaacson described in his biography, [...]
The expert on western European politics Peter Mair has diagnosed a ‘hollowing out’ of politics in recent decades, as parties have become less representative voices for diverse groups of the citizenry and more mediatised vehicles for members of a detached political class to insert themselves into government.[1] This is particularly clear in France, with its [...]
Socialism is what Labour governments do. So famously spoke Herbert Morrison, senior Labour cabinet member and deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1945. On one level, 65 years later, Morrison’s words look paternalistic at best and plain arrogant at worst. It was socialism done to the people. But it was a sound bite that [...]
Replete with those demon eyes, ‘New Labour, New Danger’ was the Conservative’s ill-judged attack on Tony Blair’s fresh and imposing opposition in the approach to the 1997 general election. It was ill-judged because the message that Blair had been at pains to promote since his elevation to leader in 1994 was that Labour really had [...]
’It’s the immigration, stupid’. That was in few words my response to the analysis ‘Why Labour lost the elections’. Last week I was in London at the Policy Network launch of Southern Discomfort Again, a smart pamphlet written by Giles Radice and Patrick Diamond explaining the factors why the British Labour party [...]
European social-democracy can only win elections and the preceding batlle of ideas against the Right, if it overcomes the civil war within its own ranks. It was the Battle of the Miliband Brothers in the UK which again revealed the pressures and fault lines within social-democratic parties and constituencies clearer than ever before. The symbolic irony was that the [...]
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