Neal Lawson, chair of Compass and a regular face on the Guardian’s comment pages these days, fired off a firm missive on the pressure group’s website recently responding to snipes from members over the decision to back Gordon Brown for the Labour party leadership, rather than the odds-on favourite John McDonnell.
‘If Compass wanted to be the Campaign Group we would have joined the Campaign Group,’ said Lawson impatiently, warming up to his own clause IV moment. ‘Instead we come from the soft left – not the hard left.’ And just in case his point had not been rammed home hard enough, Lawson declared: ‘We descend from Robin Cook not Tony Benn’ – a frightening thought indeed.
The main gripe voiced by Compass members was that by not backing McDonnell the group had stifled debate within the Labour movement. But Lawson wasn’t having any of it. ‘We are not a debating society,’ he insisted. ‘Instead we are deciding who should lead Labour at the next election. We want to win the next election – not go down to glorious defeat. We may be the soft left – but we aren’t that soft.’
Others have noted that members were consulted when Compass pondered which deputy leadership candidate to back, although as Tanked up pointed out at the time, the management committee had clearly made up its mind to back Jon Cruddas before polling even began.
After insisting that members should get behind his former employer (‘the only candidate to lead us against the Tories’), Lawson concludes his diatribe by telling those unhappy with the decision, in Major-esqe tones, to put up or shut up: ‘If you don’t like any of this then you can vote for a different management committee. We don’t hold elections every 13 years but every year.’
In the unlikely event that Brown finds time to sit down and read a book during the coming weeks of his leadership tour, one of the tomes bulging out of his hand luggage ought to be Policy Network’s latest publication.
Public Matters: The Renewal of the Public Realm argues that while public service improvement has been one of New Labour’s greatest achievements, the party is at risk of squandering its reputation as the guardian of good public services as ‘the rhetoric of reform has not always matched reality on the ground’.
‘There has been too much policy and communications confusion, launching off into too many different directions, talking about means when we should be focusing on ends, and failing to build a movement for reform within the public services themselves,’ the book’s contributors claim.
The book includes contributions from some notable names, including Charles Clarke, John Hutton, Liam Byrne, and everybody’s favourite peer, Lord Giddens.
The man once described as ‘Blair’s favourite intellectual’ has recently been making forays into the world of stand-up comedy, entertaining audiences at a recent Progress event with jokes about George Bush and quiches. However, those hoping for more neo-con satire from this book might well end up disappointed. Giddens’ chapter in the book is soberly titled ‘Financing public services’, indicating that it isn’t likely to contain much in the way of belly laughs.