‘Today’s Make Work Pay reforms are a landmark in party history. This is what it means to have a Labour government’
Labour MP Mark Ferguson writes on the new employment rights bill and Labour's wider Make Work Pay agenda.
Mark Ferguson
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Thank you – and goodbye
After thousands of posts for LabourList, this is the hardest one I’ve had to write. Because this is the last post I’ll be writing as Editor of LabourList – as I’ll be moving on in the days ahead to a new role and a new challenge. It’s been…
A selection that makes – morally and democratically – very little sense
All of the focus in the party right now is on the Leadership, deputy leadership and London Mayoral contests. They provide party members with a huge opportunity to shape the future of the party and the country. But this is a rare blog about…
Things fall apart (and how to rebuild the Labour Party)
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre. The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world" - Yeats, The Second Coming It's fair to say that the Labour Party has had a…
When it comes to politicians, we may want something that doesn’t exist
So Chuka Umunna is out of the Labour leadership race only a few short days after he joined it. Exiting the race in its very earliest stages, the Shadow Business Secretary cited the "added level of pressure that comes with being a leadership…
Labour’s long leadership contest – upsides and downsides
So Labour’s new leader and deputy leader will be unveiled at a “Special Conference” on September 12th, just two weeks before the party’s annual conference in Brighton. Many different timetables had been mooted in recent days. But it was…
Unity will only get us so far
Earlier today Harriet Harman reshuffled the Shadow Cabinet deck in the wake of last week's electoral cataclysm. It wasn't a remarkable reshuffle, but it was a sensible one. Serious thoughtful people promoted to act as caretakers until the…
If the leadership contest becomes a “Blairite, Brownite, New Labour, Old Labour” slanging match, we’ll learn nothing. And we’ll all lose
It's only forty eight hours from Ed Miliband's resignation as Labour leader and the level of nonsense being talked about the Labour Party is already reaching industrial proportions. Plenty of people, it seems, are wise after the fact…
The long road back
Dear LabourList Readers, When we are wrong, we need to say so. The urge to say that the electorate were wrong is always strong in any party that has lost an election – even the drubbing that Labour has been submitted to in the past 24…
Cameron is trying to rewrite the constitution to become a Downing Street Squatter
In 2010, the Sun printed a piece attacking a man "squatting in a luxury home near the Houses of Parliament". They went on to say that the "squatter" was "refusing to budge from the Georgian townhouse in Downing Street". That man was Gordon…
“Your struggle is my my struggle” – what Miliband’s Citizens UK speech says about how he might govern
Your fight is my fight Your struggle is my my struggle Your vision is my vision Lets put working people first Lets change the country together 22 simple words. 5 short sentences. But it says a whole lot about Ed Miliband and the way this…
Meet the person who could arguably have the biggest job in government in just a few days
It’s fair to say that housing policy is one of my policy passions. I don’t normally get worked up over the intricacies of policy debates, but I know what I like – as long as it involves building more houses. So recently I headed out on the…