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By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 In 2003, Iain Dale interviewed Michael Foot to mark the former Labour leader's 90th birthday. The interview can be listen to below, or on Iain's blog. The two talk about Michael's life, his campaign for…
The Paul Richards Column History will judge Michael Foot kindly, recalling his immense literary canon, the excoriation of the appeasers in the Conservative Party in 1940, his skill at speech-making, and his overwhelming niceness and…
By Andy Newman The main progressive political party in Britain for a hundred years has been Labour, which is distinguished from European socialist parties by its close and organic links with the trade unions. However, the core, traditional…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 * More tributes to Michael Foot, from Neil Kinncok, Tribune, Gordon Brown, Ken Livingstone and others... * William Hague knew about Lord Ashcroft's tax status for months, the Guardian reports. * Former Tory…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 UPDATE: Tribune, which Foot edited, has written: "To chronicle the life of Michael Foot, who died on Wednesday aged 96, is to embrace the canvas of 20th century British radicalism. The great cavalcade of his…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 Here's a new video highlighting some of Labour's achievements over the past thirteen years, taken from Gordon Brown's speech to Party conference last year. You can get this part of the speech written into a…
By Samir Jahan 'Progressive' is perhaps the most widely used word when it comes to talk of Labour's electoral fightback. Many supporters of the party emphasise the fact that Labour needs to prove that it is the 'progressive' party and that…
By Sunder Katwala / @nextleft James Purnell has an interesting column in The Guardian, which the paper reports here. The piece is mostly about ideas. But first the inside baseball. The statement- "I've thought a lot about my resignation…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 * JAMES PURNELL SAYS LABOUR CAN STILL WIN: "We only need to go back to the values of the early Labour movement". * PETER MANDELSON'S POSITION IN POLITICS IS UNPRECEDENTED, writes Bruce Anderson in the…
By David Carrington This week's failed coup has received a pretty angry response, partially for its poor politics and timing (burying as it did Cameron's admission that he "misdescribed" his own policy and the Prime Minister's strong…
By Alex Smith / @alexsmith1982 This afternoon, Left Foot Forward have published their Top 10 Progressive Policies of the Noughties. I would have liked, of course, to see universal free school meals added to the list - but the noted…
By Joshua Genner "The Noughties belong lock, stock and broken barrel to Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. For better or for worse, these were the political giants who dominated the first decade of this millennium." So said The Sun on Friday…
