A Free Left Blog

My relationship with the Labour Party isn’t a loving, happy one. I sometimes say, half-jokingly, that joining the party (or rather rejoining, in 2010) has nearly made me into a Tory. It hasn’t, and won’t. But nevertheless it’s been true for me that while from the outside I could see that all is perhaps not well, from the inside the picture that more intelligent Tories and others paint of Labour sometimes seems painfully accurate. The centralism; the pointless, nit-picking bureaucracy; the lack of feeling for individual responsibility; the reflex instinct to control people rather than let them be free: all are largely true about Labour’s culture and organisation. When you find yourself agreeing more with what some opponents say than what your own lot do, you’re in a bit of trouble. Into that personal context has come The Collins Review into Labour Party Reform , a report prepared by the former Labour General Secretary (Lord) Ray Collins following consultations after the...

Green Party leader Natalie Bennett’s appearance on the Andrew Marr Show on BBC1 this morning told us all we need to know about why the Greens will never break through as a major force in British politics. Taking that valued seat on the Marr show sofa after a torrid few months of weather that have brought climate change to the centre of the political agenda, what did she choose to talk about? Presented with the morning’s papers, with its acres of weather- and climate-related coverage, the first story she chose to focus on was about...Congolese migrants getting tortured on return to their country and the implications for British immigration policy. A decent issue in and of itself – but, with apologies to the migrants themselves, not Issue Number One, Two or Three for the Great British Public. So, second opportunity... What was issue number two that was exercising her this morning? Answer: the ‘Bedroom Tax’, in which council tenants are being charged for any spare bedrooms in the...

The word identity entails a mathematical formula of one thing being identical to another, as in x = y . Jump over to the conception of human identity and you have something different though. In describing our ‘personal identity’, we might come up with any number of things that define ourselves: from our basic physical characteristics to social identifiers like the religious and political groups we belong to, class (middle class/working class?), ethnicity, maybe profession... Hence I may say I ‘am’ a middle class, white, male, agnostic journalist, a member of the Labour Party, with a critical view of mainstream liberal-left politics. This probably does about as good a job at describing me as you can do in a sentence, but of course it misses out so much that it is nowhere near reaching ‘identity’ with me. That sentence and me are nowhere near that x and y relationship which an actual identity would entail. But then I could go on for years detailing different aspects of myse...

Ed Miliband made quite a scene at Prime Minister’s Questions this week, goading David Cameron for the lack of women in his Shadow Cabinet and among Conservatives in the House of Commons Cutting abruptly from a few cursory questions about the dreadful flooding in south western England, Miliband gleefully laid into Cameron for his all-male Government front bench, which was lacking Theresa May and other female Cabinet members – in contrast to his own front bench, which had been filled up with women. He said: “I do have to say a picture tells a thousand words... look at the all male front bench laid before us. “You said you want to represent the whole country. I guess they didn't let women into the Bullingdon Club either, so there we go.... “Do you think it is your fault the Conservative Party has a problem with women?” As ‘Yah-Boo’ Westminster politics go, it was pretty effective. But it was also important for what it said about the Labour Party’s evolving po...