Posts Tagged ‘ambition’

Jack Lesgrin’s week: Labour’s big beasts on manoeuvres

18/05/2021, 03:45:43 PM

by Jack Lesgrin

Even Labourites could support paying former PMs for this…

Last week Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, independently of one another, entered the fray. Labour supporters normally condemn former PMs benefitting financially from the knowledge they gained in office. But how about Tony and Gordon joining together to provide a masterclass to Labour frontbenchers on how to frame a narrative, develop relevant policies to appeal to a winning coalition of voters, and communicate the above? Surely Labour members would happily contribute to the kitty so that everyone’s a winner!

New New Labour?

Tony Blair was on manoeuvres at the end of the week. His New Statesman article identified the urgent need for new thinking and action, given the dire straits Labour is in. Blair is usually very cautious in his interventions as regards the future of the Labour Party. He resiled from direct calls for Corbyn’s resignation and was careful not to be seen to be backing leadership challengers. He was also under or not even on the radar amid the rather lackadaisical and ultimately doomed discussions between ‘players’ from the Blair years and those who backed the Independent Group (TIG)/Change UK, and other attempts at creating a new political force such as United For Change, whose early briefing meetings were impressive, yet which faded quickly.

Although many prefer to comfort themselves with the caricature of Blair as all style, no substance, he has always been as good at the act of politicking and governing as at the art of communication. The tone of his recent writing, and indeed that of other big hitters of his era such as Peter Mandelson, show that (t)he(y) perhaps can no longer resist the lure of active participation.

Lord Andrew Adonis seems to think so, with his almost hourly tweets that it’s “Time for Blair”. It’s one of those down the (re-opened) pub conversations that goes: “I didn’t like what he did on Iraq, but I bet he would wipe the floor with Johnson in a general election.” Like so much pub talk, there is truth in the bluntness. Hitherto, the received wisdom was that Blair was too toxic, that Labour wouldn’t elect him leader again, that this kind of thing ‘just doesn’t happen’ and that he wouldn’t want it anyway.

Taking these in turn: 1) he won a 66-seat majority in 2005, despite the alleged toxicity of Iraq; 2) while this is probably true, his statement last week that Labour “needs total deconstruction and reconstruction” shows his keenness for radical change; 3) as noted in this column, Boris Johnson has shown repeatedly that conventions do not apply anymore; and 4) see 2)!

Northern Rocky (more…)

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Where is Liam Byrne headed?

09/11/2015, 05:20:56 PM

by Jonathan Todd

Liam Byrne is nothing if not industrious. After a hotly contested by-election, a minister five minutes after becoming an MP. The hard work continued on the opposition front bench, even if he felt too Blairite to be in vogue during the Miliband years. When he might have been expected to back the more Blairite Liz Kendall, he enthusiastically supported Yvette Cooper.

Cooper outperformed Kendall but Byrne’s candidate was left to eat Corbyn’s dust, as a much changed party from the one that Byrne was first elected to represent was created. Back then Byrne was the poster boy for Blair’s ability to win by-elections in the face of impassioned campaigning by parties, the Liberal Democrats and Respect, opposed to the Iraq war. Now Labour has a leader who can seem to be willing Blair toward the Hague.

No defeat or indignity, it appears, deters Byrne. The grafting just persists. He wants to make the best of Corbyn, as he made the best of Blair, Brown and Miliband. But not from the frontbench. No longer does he defend the leadership on all fronts. A big olive branch was, nonetheless, offered in his recent Policy Network speech.

This conciliation was Tony Crosland shaped. In the 1950s, a civil war waged between Bevanites and Gaitskellites. Europe and nuclear deterrence loomed large. As, oddly enough, they did during the convulsions of the 1980s. And they do again now. There must be something about these issues that brings them to renewed prominence at times of heightened Labour flux.

Crosland’s The Future of Socialism sought to cut through these differences by appealing to a shared commitment to equality. What divided Bevanites and Gaitskellites was merely the means; the end of equality united them, argued Crosland.

“I love Jeremy’s passion for tackling inequality,” Byrne insisted at Policy Network. “He is not a Trot. I am not a Tory. We are both Labour.” Reaching beyond the differences, like Crosland sixty years ago, to find the common conviction.

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Labour should use the language of social justice and ambition to connect with voters

30/05/2014, 12:51:29 PM

by Glenn Edwards

It’s less than a year till the general election and there’s been a lot of talk about Labour alienating itself from business interests and lurching too far to the left. But even if Labour hasn’t been effective in courting corporate leaders this doesn’t mean that it is anti-ambition. Current policies actually seem to have a lot in common with Tony Blair’s once cherished idea of combining social justice with ambition, even if they differ from the ‘third way’ in practice. We just need to start thinking about ambition in a much broader light and therein could lie a key part of the Party’s message over the next year.

Labour is pursuing a political approach that views everyone as potential success stories and not just winners or losers, as people pursuing their own human development and not just static stereotypes and as having a stake in this economy rather than just being compensated for their loss. We need a country that doesn’t wield clout in the world simply through a privileged elite in London but on the backs of a vast army of clever and confident people. Labour’s aim to redirect the economy towards high-skill jobs and create a world-class workforce is a policy example par excellence.

There is a feeling that many politicians, particularly on the right, are pandering to the short term interests of a wealthy few at the expense of the long term prosperity of the nation. In no clearer way is this expressed than the political divide over the treatment of the banks. Labour’s policy of taxing banker’s bonuses in order to create jobs for the long term unemployed isn’t a tax on ambition, it’s a tax on greed. It’s a sensible way of bringing back confidence and self esteem to those who lost it so long ago whilst simultaneously helping expand business.

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