BRITAIN’S ‘TAKE BACK CONTROL’ DEJA VU

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politico.eu, 11 January 2023

“New Labour was about more than just Blair, and his direct personal influence on Starmer today is hard to pin down. Starmer says the two talk, but the former leader has played no public role in his operation beyond a couple of brief endorsements.

“By contrast, the other key architect of 1990s New Labour, Gordon Brown — finance minister from 1997 to 2007 and prime minister from 2007 to 2010 — has become ever more prominent in both guiding Starmer and formulating policy and strategy.

The deal is that it’s not republished in full, so here it is as published.

AS TRUSS STUMBLES, LABOUR MUST DO MORE

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politico.eu, 7 October 2022

‘It’s difficult to see how Labour can win unless it recreates a version of Blair’s cross-class coalition of 1997 — which means attracting many recent Tory voters who are unmoved by the threat of climate change and not much concerned about poverty, but are worried by threats to their own well-being.

‘Today, those threats eclipse those of 1997, including not only the underfunded National Health Service, overcrowded schools and rising crime — familiar themes from 25 years ago — but also surging inflation, a likely recession and the prospects of a housing price crash. This presents a great opportunity for Labour, but it’s also a formidable challenge.’

The deal is that it’s not republished in full, so here it is as published.

GEORGE ORWELL AND THE LEFT: BUT WHAT SORT OF DEMOCRATIC SOCIALIST WAS HE?

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Paul Anderson, George Orwell Studies, vol 2 no 1, 2017

George Orwell at work in the 1940s

No political writer of the 20th century has been subject to more analysis, controversy and speculation than George Orwell – and for good reason.

Many see Orwell as the greatest political writer in the English language of the past 200 years, a consummate stylist, always direct and provocative, and many of his big concerns have continuing resonance even though he died nearly 70 years ago.

He wrote a lot, and in a multitude of genres: fiction, criticism, reportage, poetry, polemical essays and columns. His conception of what is political was breathtakingly broad, he changed his mind over time (and in public), and there are innumerable tensions and contradictions in his life and work. Since his death in 1950, partisans of every political tendency, apart from fascists and Stalinist communists, have tried to claim Orwell as one of their own.

Continue reading →

DON’T ASK ME – I DON’T KNOW

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Theresa May ponders Brexit in Brussels

Paul Anderson, Fleximize, 19 July 2017

With parliament shutting up shop for the summer holidays and the Brexit negotiations formally started, the dust is beginning to settle after Britain’s bizarre general election – but only a fool would pretend to know what happens next.

What was extraordinary about the election was that nearly everyone expected it to turn out differently. All but a couple of opinion polls, every columnist in the national newspapers, every TV pundit – and the word on the street from canvassers from all parties – pointed to a giant victory for Theresa May’s Tories and humiliation for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour, campaigning on what everyone said was the most leftwing manifesto since 1983. Continue reading →

MAJOR AND THE LABOUR PARTY

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Paul Anderson, in Kevin Hickson and Ben Williams (eds), John Major: An Unsuccessful Prime Minister? (Biteback, 2017)

John Major’s governments of 1990-97 are not often discussed in terms of their impact on Labour – except insofar as Major’s travails with his party from summer 1992, particularly over Europe, provided the backdrop against which first John Smith and then Tony Blair built commanding opinion-poll leads for Labour, culminating in Blair’s general election victory of May 1997.

Even two decades after that triumph, protagonists, commentators and historians typically assign only a minor role to Major in the making of New Labour. As in the dog days of his administration and in Blair’s first years in office, he is still considered primarily as the inept grey man who happened to be at the helm of the doomed Tory ship as Labour rode a tide of popular enthusiasm to win an inevitable landslide. Continue reading →

BREXIT TAKES LABOUR TO THE BRINK

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Paul Anderson, New York Times, 28 June 2016

London – British voters’ rejection of European Union membership in last week’s referendum has set in motion the biggest political crisis Britain has faced since the second world war. The surprise is that the real storm has hit not the ruling Conservative party, but the opposition Labour party.

The immediate fallout was expected to be worst for the Tory leader, David Cameron, who had promised the referendum to pacify Eurosceptic rebels in his ranks. Having in effect staked his job as prime minister on winning for the Remain campaign, Cameron announced his resignation. In parliament on Monday, he conceded that a general election might soon follow a party leadership contest. Continue reading →

DEAD CATS DON’T BOUNCE

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The new conclusion to Moscow Gold? The Soviet Union and the British Left by Paul Anderson and Kevin Davey. Published by Little Atoms, 28 December 2015

By the end of the 1990s, to most observers of the British left, the Leninist era seemed to have come to an end. The Socialist Workers Party, quasi-Trotskyist and owner of a competent offset press in east London, still had some life about it, but not a lot.

The Scottish Socialist Party – essentially the renegade Glasgow office of the Trotskyist Militant Tendency, which had been expelled by Labour in the late 1980s and early 1990s, with SWP and independent barnacles hanging on – had some support in urban western Scotland. And the hardline Communist Party of Britain, the main Stalinist splinter from the ‘official’ Communist Party of Great Britain (which had given up the ghost in 1991, 70 years after its launch with a giant subvention from Moscow), was still influential in a few trade unions. The CPB still had a daily paper, the Morning Star, though hardly anyone read it any more. Continue reading →

IN DEFENCE OF BERNARD CRICK

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Paul Anderson, from Richard Keeble (ed), George Orwell Now! (Peter Lang, 2015)

George Orwell’s politics have always been contentious. In his lifetime, he was a notable intellectual contrarian whose antipathy to received wisdom of all kinds made him admirers and enemies across the political spectrum – and since his death the argument about where he stood politically has been vigorous. It shows no sign of ending soon. Of course, the polemics ebb and flow according to events in the real world and publishers’ schedules, and there has been little in the past quarter-century to match the vituperation of the cold-war battle for Orwell. Continue reading →

FREE SPEECH IN BEIJING

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Little Atoms, 7 April 2015

 The Beijing Bookworm literary festival offers a chance to explore the limits to criticism in the People’s Republic, writes Paul Anderson

I’m just back in Britain from a whistle-stop tour of China, where I was speaking at the Bookworm Literary Festival, a fortnight-long talkfest organised by the leading independent English-language bookshop in China. I went with Anna Chen, who was one of the headline stars of the show – and it was one of the most stimulating foreign trips I’ve ever made. Continue reading →