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Lessons for leaders

By Jim Sweetman / @jimbo9848 There is something disquieting about the speed with which political memoirs arrive including those which, like Tony Blair’s, are not ghost-written by someone else. In ‘A Journey’ there is even a tagged on section about the coalition and its values which says nothing for the value of hindsight and for taking a long-term view of recent history. Instead, the process is more like the medieval precursor to execution which involved cutting the criminal open and spilling...
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Back to our roots to move Labour forward to power

By William Bain The most positive development of the leadership election has been the renewed involvement and ownership of our party democracy by the membership. Supporters have become members, members have become activists, activists have taken part in hustings and in the various campaigns with great energy and enthusiasm. Like many of my colleagues, over the summer, I have held social and discussion events for young members and new members in my constituency who have joined Labour since our election defeat....
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Transforming the left

By Marcus Hobley / @marcushobley The Present In the post-election climate, there is a greater need than ever before for those on the left to present a coherent and well-orchestrated alternative to the coalition's state-shrinking cuts agenda. Pressure groups such as Compass will continue too play a pivotal role in presenting these arguments in the debates of the next parliament.  Our priority should be to build links with the broader left movement particularly on areas of shared ground and build on the...
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The five most influential people on the left?

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk Left Foot Forward are currently conducting a survey to determine the fifty most influential people on left, and they've asked me to suggest my top five. I've tried to avoid picking anyone who I know personally, who is a regular contributor to LabourList or who is standing for leader of the party. Of course it stands to reason that the future leader will be the most influential person on the left for years to come...
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Report from the latest NEC meeting

By Ann Black Below and attached is a slightly delayed report of the last NEC meeting. I hope that many of you have had the chance to see the leadership candidates in person or on the website, and are looking forward to the ballot in September. As usual, please feel free to circulate, and get back to me with any questions or comments. National Executive Committee, July 20th 2010 Acting leader Harriet Harman paid tribute to Dianne Hayter, who has...
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Labour's ties to the Irish community are both historic and modern

By Brian Duggan It's a truism to say that winning political parties are always the ones that best convince voters that they understand their lives and their needs. It follows though that the political parties that lose elections are often perceived as elite driven, or locked in a bubble with little in the way of real connections or understanding of the lives of those they wish to serve. Bridging that gap then, between the Westminster set and the experiences and...
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Reciprocity: potentially explosively controversial for the left

The Labour movement column By Anthony Painter Yesterday, Demos Open Left published an e-book on the future of the Labour Party in partnership with Soundings magazine. A word that keeps coming up in the contributions - including my own - is 'reciprocity.' It's a word that you will hear often in the coming years and it is potentially explosively controversial for the left. It challenges our core understanding of the way our relationships are mediated through the state. And yet,...
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Finding common ground

By Joe Coward Since Labour lost the General Election, most media attention on the party has focused on the internecine struggles of the New Labour era. New Labour’s sometimes conflicting strategies of appealing to both “core” and “swing” voters provoked strong tensions within the party with Compass and Progress emerging to represent the views of the left and right of the party. A new collection of essays produced by Soundings and the Open Left project at Demos has scoped out...
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Labour needs to obsess less about winning elections - we need a renewed Labour movement, not just a Labour government

By Jon Wilson Labour needs to return to core values and reconnect with its core supporters. To do that, it needs to develop a stronger attack on the unfettered powers of the free market. Against the acquisitive individualism of the market economy, Labour needs to stand up for those things in life that we do collectively, as a community. But it is a mistake to think that the state is the only way the community can limit capitalism rampant. Labour's...
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80% of the way there? Hardly

By Mark Ferguson / @markfergusonuk As a political party, and a movement, can we ever achieve all of our aims? Is it possible to have righted all of the wrongs we see in our society? Is it possible to have solved all of the complex rubik's cubes of public policy? Does a mythical finishing line beckon somewhere in the not too distant future? No, of course it doesn't. Progressive politics, by its very nature, is about continually examining the world...
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Organising to win -- Jon Cruddas full speech

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 As I reported earlier, Jon Cruddas is signalling today that he will stand for the position of Chair of the Labour Party in a speech to Labour Friends of Searchilght's Organising to Win conference today. You can now read the full speech below: -- Thank you for inviting me to open your conference this morning. Thank you Nick and Sam for organising it and for your work in building the extraordinary movement Hope not Hate....
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Organising for Labour. Organising to win

By Sam Tarry / @samtarry ‘Community Organising’ has been a buzz phrase of the Labour leadership election campaign so far. A term in vogue ever since Obama’s victory in the states, but perhaps one often misused or misunderstood – with different models of organising in operation here in the UK, some effective in different ways and less so in others, a lot needs to be explained, especially from a Labour Party point of view.  There has been much talk about...
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A real opportunity to rebuild from the grassroots

By Helen Godwin Since the general election the membership of the Labour Party has increased by thousands, albeit from an historically low base at the end of the last government. These new members do include some disaffected Liberal Democrats but there are also a huge number of brand new members - people feeling inspired and motivated for the very first time to get involved in politics and attempt to make a difference. This surge in membership is a direct result...
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The vindication of a former Lib Dem

By Graeme Smith / @graemesmith1978 I was the Lib Dem's parliamentary candidate for Loughborough in 2005, but I left the party in 2006 for 3 reasons. 1 - During the election campaign, I found that I could not argue against the record of the Labour Party in terms of the improvements to the country since 1997. 2 - The manner in which the party dealt with Charles Kennedy's alcohol problem left a bitter taste in my mouth (not very liberal...
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Steps to rebuilding Labour: Improve living standards

By Jon Trickett MP Now that the initial process of MPs nominating leadership candidates has passed, Labour is about to embark on the more important task of involving its four million members and levy paying trade unionists in debating our future direction. The leadership debate over the coming weeks must discuss in depth the reasons why Labour lost and how we win back our former voters. To do so a serious and factual assessment is needed as to what has...
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Traditional campaigning with a modern membership

By Michael Payne John Prescott was right this week when he said the Labour Party has to ''stop complaining and get campaigning.'' With one of the most reactionary governments in decades and the Liberal Democrats tragically providing cover for their coalition partners on a series of devastating cuts to the public sector - particularly schools (BSF programme) - it is crucial that Labour starts building a movement to fight these policies, which the public never voted for. It is equally...
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Mandy's intervention

By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 All the weekend papers have reported on Peter Mandelson's new book, due out this week - perhaps unsurprisingly considering salivatory promotional ads to sell the thing, like this one for the Times' serialisation: I fear the book, for all its potential juicy insights, might shed more heat than light on Labour's leadership and renewal discussion this close to the breakdown. But with Harriet already scrambling to reassure that the book will not reopen old wounds...
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Labour's renewal: A new member, and now a new CLP secretary

By Nicky Clark / @Dontplaymepayme The unedifying spectacle of Clegg-eron smirking and power back-slapping their way through their joint press conference from the Number 10 Rose garden in the days after the formation of the coalition was nauseating. I fully expected them to grab their microphones and give us a rendition of Disney’s “A Whole New World”. I joined The Labour Party in April 2010. I'd never joined a political party before but had always been a Labour voter. This...
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History lessons

By Gina Byrne It has often been said that history repeats itself; nowhere is this more applicable than in the political arena. Take a moment to cast your mind back and remember, if you will – and indeed, can – the 1990s. Look past the incredible scientific advances which culminated in the first cloned mammal, the euphoric waves of democratisation spreading across the world, and the never-ending wonder and delights of your tamagotchi, to 1995. Labour’s special conference in the...
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Labour are still in search of the ‘Big Idea’

By Richard Darlington It’s often noted that nobody voted for a coalition government and that no one voted for the cuts in the budget. But we have to accept that 36% of the country did vote for David Cameron’s ‘Contract for Change’. I didn’t vote for it but I did get a contract from Cameron by virtue of signing up for emails from the Tory website. I also got an ’invitation to join the Government of Britain’ during the election...
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