election 2010 Articles

All the talk is of ‘winning the south’, but Lewis Baston presents the topline findings from his and Bob Blizzard’s report on why eastern England is a non-negotiable goal for Labour ahead of a dedicated event on this next month.

Labour No to AV director Joan Ryan responds to YouGov president Peter Kellner’s article in the last edition of Progress

John Major once waxed lyrical about Britain as a ‘country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and … old maids bicycling to Holy Communion through the morning mist.’

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.