New labour

The Telegraph’s publication of all those documents today has got everyone talking about that feud again. Here is what The Spectator’s former editor Matthew d’Ancona had to say about the Blair-Brown wars when things were hotting up in the autumn of 2006: The great New Labour civil war, Matthew d’Ancona, 6 September 2006 Two days before David Cameron was elected Conservative leader, I asked one of his closest allies what the founding principle of Cameronism would be. He pondered the question. Would it, I wondered, be something to do with quality of life, the public services, the environment, social justice, nationhood? ‘Our starting point,’ he finally replied, ‘is that the

The Labour Party is still ambling in the wilderness – sure of its destination, but uncertain of the route. Its response to last year’s general election defeat has been silence, publicly at least. In the privacy of debating chambers however, the party is charting its potential renewal. These circles murmur that ‘the state has reached its limits’; or, in other words, that Fabianism, the dominant force in the post-war Labour movement, has been tested to destruction. Philip Collins touches on this in his must-read column for the Times today (£): ‘Since the general election defeat, the only intellectual life in the party has come from blue Labour, an intriguing set

As an independent creature, the Resolution Foundation’s new Commission on Living Standards isn’t doing Ed Miliband’s work for him. But, boy, must the Labour leader be glad that they exist. At their launch event this morning, the “squeezed middle” – aka low-to-middle earners – suddenly took shape. There were graphs, such as those in James Plunkett’s post for us earlier, setting out the very real problems facing a segment of British society. And there were even definitions explaining what that segment is: 11 million adults, by the Resolution Foundation’s count, too rich to benefit from measures for the least well-off, and too poor to be entirely comfortable. This was a

The Kindly Pussycat has returned to the fray with a revised version of his memoirs. The FT’s Jim Pickard has highlighted an arresting passage about Ed Miliband’s decision to execute New Labour. ‘When Ed pronounced New Labour ‘dead’, he was not only being more categorical than was wise, but quite possibly more than he really intended. (xxi) …Even allowing for the tactical choices he had made in his bid to become leader, however, I was struck by the fact that he had given no strong clue during the campaign as to what alternative to New Labour he envisaged. He was quick to say what he was against: essentially, Tory policies

Last night, Harriet Harman launched a pre-emptive attack on the coalition’s failure to give 0.7 percent of GNI to overseas aid. Pre-emptive because the government has made no such U-turn – nor is it like to. Much as Tony Blair spoke law-and-order like the Tories, the coalition speaks aid like New Labour – just better. As a result, Labour has nowhere to turn except to warn against “strong voices” in the Tory party who would like to cut DfiD from the Budget. Next Labour will launch a protest against what a mind-reader has told them Tory politicians secretly think. Seriously, though, of course there are such sceptical voices – many

One of the more depressing sights in politics at the moment is how Andy Burnham is leading the Labour party back to its comfort zone on education. Burnham, who The Spectator once named minister to watch, seems to have jettisoned all of his Blairite reforming instincts. He now wants to draw as many dividing lines as possible and side with the vested interests and the status quo at every turn. In last night’s education debate, Barry Sheerman, who chaired the education select committee during the Labour years, pointed out that Gove’s education plans are building on the last government’s incomplete reforms. As Sheerman put it, “I am going to be

One of the greatest challenges for any minister – and, by extension, the government’s programme – is to avoid being “mandarined”. That is, smothered by officials in the manner of Yes Minister. But it can happen to even the most powerful and outwardly confident politicians. Here is how. Reputation Management. First, the politician is thrilled to find herself or himself in office and is keen not to rock the boat – lest the Prime Minister is told by the Cabinet Secretary that the minister is under-performing. Tony Blair is said to have toyed with the idea of having report cards for ministers. As a result, the minister opts to push

No need to explain why we’re looking back on the resignation of Alastair Campbell for this week’s entry from The Spectator archives. The piece itself is merciless stuff from the pen of Stephen Glover. Alastair Campbell’s redtop values have contaminated our politics, Stephen Glover, The Spectator, 6 September 2003 When I learnt of Dr Kelly’s suicide, my first thought was that he had been fatally drawn into Alastair Campbell’s world. It is what many people felt. It was a reasonable assumption that Mr Campbell or his office or someone responsible to the Prime Minister’s director of communications had deliberately put Dr Kelly’s name in the public domain – with disastrous

Mark Littlewood is Director General of the Institute of Economic Affairs and contributed an article to the recent collection Big Brother Watch: The state of civil liberties in Britain. He summarises his argument here. It’s not fanciful to argue that the formation of a Liberal-Conservative coalition government last May was helped by the fact that Lib Dem and Tory parliamentarians had worked closely together in the previous Parliament to thwart or temper some of the Labour administration’s more aggressive assaults on civil liberties. The two parties – then in opposition, now in government – seemed to find common ground in defending the rights of the individual against the increasingly shrill