Amartya Sen Articles

David Miliband has delivered an important message to the left. His speech at the LSE this week provided an honest and frank assessment of why the European left are locked out to a centre-right consensus dominating the continent.

Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford do an admirable, if risky, thing. They try to define, or at least describe, English identity to help Labour reconnect with the English. Their argument goes like this: capitalism dispossesses the working class. Value is reduced to the price of land and labour. It denies the common value of public ownership of communal assets, and the self-worth associated with employment. New Labour joined global capitalist forces that undermine local identity, where every high street has a McDonald’s. This, they say, is the problem with England. Labour did not ‘fight for an England which belongs to the English’, and so it lost there.