A Free Left Blog

To ‘depoliticise’ something means to take the politics out of it. It is a strange and paradoxical term when you think about it, because to take politics out of something is a political act, and to be non-political is political. After all, power doesn’t disappear when a group of people decide they don’t want it or remove it from others through ‘depoliticising’. It goes elsewhere. In practice, depoliticisation means taking a sort of politics out of something, a type of politics – probably a kind that advocates of the process don’t much like – democratic politics for example. The term has received something of an airing recently in British public debate, and one guess for by whom ... ... That’s right (or wrong): the ‘Big Six’ energy companies. Step forward Mr Tony Cocker, chief executive of Eon UK : “ It would be really helpful to depoliticise this debate [on energy] ,” Mr Cocker told MPs on 29 th October. You bet it would ... all those pesky politicians, c...

I was fortunate to get an invite to a talk by Labour’s Policy Review Coordinator Jon Cruddas yesterday evening hosted by the Civitas think tank in Westminster. Cruddas made a typically interesting and enigmatic speech, on the theme of ‘ One Nation Labour:   work, family and place ’ (transcript here ), outlining how the Policy Review is unfolding around these themes and exploring them in some detail. I won’t go into much of that detail here (click the link above to read the speech); instead I want to focus briefly on the “organisational renewal” within Labour that Cruddas spoke about in glowing terms. This is the attempt, led by the American community organiser Arnie Graf , for Labour to become more connected within communities, engaging with voters more on their terms and with less focus on “harvesting their votes” using Voter ID data (which puts you into categories and defines you without campaigners even needing to meet you).(For some of Graf’s own thoughts, cli...