New labour

Peter Mandelson’s memoirs are out in just over a week. Despite being one of the last off the stage, Mandelson has beaten his colleagues to the first full account of the Blair Brown era. Tony Blair’s ‘The Journey’ is not out until September. Indeed, some Blair allies think that Mandelson should have had the good manners to let the former Prime Minister publish first. There’ll be some people who dismiss any Mandelson book as old news. But from what I’m hearing these memoirs could be more interesting than people are expecting. Apparently, many of Mandelson’s political friends have not heard from him recently and fear they could be painfully frank.

I was expecting drama when the Labour leadership circus called at Newsnight yesterday. Alas, the show whimpered and wheezed to a halt. A contest to determine the party’s future continues to gaze into the past. Assessing failure is essential to renewal, but the candidates are yet to offer anything substantively new.   Ed Balls and David Miliband shared one telling exchange. Balls has presented himself as the traditional candidate, and he would have you believe he speaks the language of Mrs Duffy. Gordon Brown’s hideous solecism in Rochdale revealed that he and his government were out of touch on issues such as housing and immigration. David Miliband is the centrist

Alistair Darling is about to retire to the backbenches, though he stresses (and hopes) that it’s a brief stint in obscurity. ‘I get bored,’ he tells the Guardian in an interview today. Darling is remarkable. He emerged from 13 years in cabinet and a hellish tenure as Chancellor with his reputation enhanced. There were rumours of a leadership bid, but those were fanciful. Darling was not an architect of New Labour, but he certainly laid the odd brick. Darling could not break the legacy of Blair and Brown, and reveals as much in his Guardian interview. As Shadow Chancellor, he has to defend his record as Chancellor and argue that

Obviously, the Labour party must change and make a clean break with the era of Blair and Brown. I have my doubts if any of these candidates, other than incredible Diane Abbott, can escape the politics that moulded them. None have said anything substantively new. They are not wedded to the past; they pine for it. Today, however, Ed Miliband has suggested that he would break from New Labour. He has written an article for the Mirror, arguing that he would keep the 50 percent tax rate. His analysis is: ‘There is something wrong with a society where nurses earn less in a year than bankers – whose botched deals

Ed Balls makes an interesting definitional point in his interview with The Times. He says that to him “new Labour was 1994 to 1997, us translating from being a party of opposition to a party of government, understanding that our radicalism had to be based on credible foundations, that no one would trust you on public services unless you were trusted on interest rates and inflation.” What many other people mean by New Labour is the public service reform agenda. But that didn’t really kick into gear until after 2001. Balls claims that, that was when New Labour lost its way. Balls is trying to argue that it was the

Peter Mandelson’s Machiavellian streak runs deep. Like the wily Florentine, Mandelson wants to retire to the country to farm and be close to the earth; but first, there is the small matter of a book for political princes. In this morning’s Times, Mandelson has written an exhaustive plug for his forthcoming book, The Third Man: Life at the heart of New Labour.   In the course of writing his publisher’s press release, Mandelson makes two important points: one historical and one current.   He admits his greatest mistake was to broker Blair and Brown’s deal in 1994; the soap opera that followed, Mandelson argues, would never had occurred had they fought it

Amazingly, given his penchant to procrastinate, David Miliband’s leadership bid is flying. High profile endorsements fly-in – former defence secretary and arch-Blairite John Hutton is the latest. Miliband is out on the stump, canvassing the opinions of former voters. Ed Balls, by contrast, looks tentative and there is no doubt he’s losing ground.   Iain Martin has an excellent post on the Labour leadership contenders and concludes that Miliband is not yet the complete package. I agree. Bananas aside, Miliband’s chief problem is that he expresses himself in meaningless abstractions. Think Tanks and cosmopolitans adore the terminology, voters don’t – The Big Society was A Big Flop. Miliband’s success will

After reading Seumas Milne and Timothy Garton Ash in the Guardian and then looking at the advert for the New Left Review on the back of the London Review of Books (“Good Riddance to New Labour”), I do wonder what these people want from a centre-left government. God knows I have been critical of New Labour — I’ve had a pop at its record on civil liberties, education, radical Islam, prisons. I could go on. This government has lacked imagination and it has failed to be bold enough. But between 1997 and 2008 Britain became more tolerant and more confident. Hell, it has almost became a modern European nation. It

Whatever your political leanings, it is hard to deny that the Tories won the Big Idea Competition. The Labour Party offered a series of unconnected (if occasionally innovative) initiatives. But they lacked coherence. Their manifesto had what Peter Mandelson called “Blair Plus”, but also what could be referred to as “Prescott Squared”. “What’s The Big Idea?” asked Sky’s Niall Paterson. The Tories on the other hand have a Big Idea – decentralisation. Giving power to citizens in a number of different ways. It is a concept that gives shape to the Tory manifesto, providing a ready stock of sound-bites.   But why do we need Big Ideas, as opposed to

“You got that, Britain? We. Are. The. Future. Future, future, future. The Tories are the past. We are the Future. The future that is fair for all. We are that future. For all.”  And so, more or less, went Gordon Brown’s pitch to the nation at Labour’s manifesto launch.  Except it lasted a good hour and a quarter.  And it involved a eye-wateringly fuzzy screen behind Brown’s head.  And a needless introduction from Harriet Harman.  So if you managed to tune into it all, then well done: your enthusiasm for politics knows no bounds. But Labour’s problems today weren’t so much presentational as political.  After thirteen years in power, Brown

Freeing Manchester United from the Glazers is not what I envisaged when Ed Miliband promised ‘a radical manifesto’. But the Guardian reports that a fourth Labour government will legislate so that football fans can buy their beloved clubs. Clearly Brown’s granite is plastic to the touch. I’ll reserve judgement until the manifestos are published, but, as Alex notes, the feeling is that New Labour’s zeal is exhausted. Budget initiatives on stamp duty and the retirement age originated in Tory press releases and the Queen’s Speech regurgitated policies dating back to the 2007-08 sitting. I suspect the manifesto will offer the same gristle. We should be thankful for small mercies because

Commuters won’t be alone in celebrating tonight. The High Court’s award of an injunction against the RMT’s planned Strike Action will have champagne corks popping in Downing Street. The Union movement’s sudden renaissance is both embarrassing and dangerous for the government. First, it has shifted the election spotlight back onto Labour. Before the BA strike, the Tories were driftwood – powerless to determine the direction in which they were headed. Unite’s political and social prominence exacerbated tensions within the Labour party, with divisions between New and quintessentially Old Labour becoming more stark. As Ed Howcker wrote last night, the next line in the prelude to internecine war is being written

Yesterday, David Cameron offered a punchy response to Tony Blair’s return to the frontline of British politics, saying: “It’s nice to see him make a speech he’s not being paid for”. But I reckon the more stinging rebuke might come today. Nestled in the schedule at today’s Tory ‘Big Society’ event are two video messages from a couple of the most prominent independent political figures of the Blair era. The first is Anthony Seldon, the reform-minded headmaster of Wellington College, who has written numerous books on Blair, and who has recently done some eyecatching work on the big subject of Trust. And the second is Ray Mallon, the zero-tolerance elected