In the autumn of 1996, Tony Blair and the New Labour bandwagon arrived in Blackpool for the final party conference before the election. A sense of euphoria was starting to take hold: as they hit 57% in the polls, it …
Starmer needs Corbyn’s secret weapon
The barriers are going up for the Labour party conference. Not just to protect, of course, but to exclude. The National Executive Committee is considering a rule that would threaten party members with expulsion if they campaign for rival candidates …
The white heat of Britain’s decline
A nation lost in what one American commentator described as “an orgy of self-criticism”; an exhausted Tory government out of ideas; an endemic sense of decline. This might describe the Britain of today, but it also describes the Britain of …
Keir Starmer will never rejoin the EU
With Keir Starmer all but measuring the drapes in No 10, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that his pledge to renegotiate Britain’s treaty with the EU has set Westminster aflutter. The reality, however, is less exciting: Starmer’s promise is little …
Keir Starmer still doesn’t get Brexit
France has been swept up in a mood of cross-Channel rapprochement. As the country hosts the Rugby World Cup, its minister of sport has shown a special solicitude towards English visitors, hoping to atone for the mistreatment of English football …
What does Angela Rayner really want?
Listening to Angela Rayner this week has felt like real-time evidence for Karl Marx’s quip about the past weighing “like a nightmare on the brains of the living”. Even before she had addressed the TUC conference, Rayner was fending off …
The dark arts of Starmer’s reshuffle
New uniforms, new haircuts and new shoes at the ready, many children went back to school this week (to the ones that aren’t about to crumble around their heads, that is). It was, too, the return of “Hogwarts” — many …
Will Starmer be Britain’s Merkel?
A smell of death is now seeping out of Westminster, choking the atmosphere of the nation, poisoning everything it touches. With each new crisis, the smell only gets stronger and the reaction from the public more visceral. Where there was …
Comrade Starmer has never had class
Has Keir Starmer traded in his barrister’s wig for a hammer and sickle? He certainly seems keen for voters to think so, with his repeated pledges to smash “the class ceiling”. The “project” of Labour, Comrade Starmer believes, is to …
Inside Tony Blair Inc.
I
At the end of every week, Tony Blair receives his “box” to review over the weekend. It is no longer the tatty, old red briefcase of a Prime Minister, but a virtual one accessible from his laptop wherever he …
How the Tories can survive the wilderness
It may be difficult to believe, but when John Major’s tired and sleazy administration suffered a shattering defeat at the hands of Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997, many Tories weren’t all that worried. Beneath the hype, they believed Blair …
Keir Starmer is no Blair
When men make history, Karl Marx observed, it is not under circumstances of their own choosing, but rather under circumstances given and inherited from the past. History is the one thing we cannot escape; the great epochal force which creates …
How Keir Starmer betrayed the North East
For decades, the North East was home to the right sort of Left. Durham, Tyneside — these are places rich in labour history and heraldry, ancient seedbeds of a working-class trade unionism which predates the Labour Party itself. But, though …
Starmer should beware a Left-wing insurgency
Have Labour’s strategists achieved the impossible? Not only is the party 20 points ahead and in with a shot of winning four by-elections, but, perhaps even more impressively, its leader finally appears to be shrugging off his custardy sheen of …
Wes Streeting is a man for all factions
Well, comrades, nearly a quarter of the way into the century, how’s it going for socialism? Oh dear. Our humourless, uncharismatic party leader has decided to launch a purge, apparently. Anyone defying the official line will be expelled. Voices of …