Safety First: The Making of New Labour by Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann (Granta, £9.99)
Written from a ‘critical libertarian left perspective’, Safety First will not, I suspect, get Paul Anderson and Nyta Mann invited to many Downing Street cocktail parties. Theirs is a voice from outside the conventional Labour spectrum and, in this stimulating and informative account of the so-called Blair Revolution and the first one hundred days of the ‘New Labour’ government, they treat the official version of the party’s recent history with healthy scepticism. Combining sharp analysis with a robust narrative of political events, they show that serious, heterodox thinking – the legacy of independently minded radicals such as George Orwell and Raymond Williams – has survived the broad left’s disintegration into ‘new’ revisionists, ‘old’ reactionaries and the persistently extremist fringe. Continue reading