Helen Goodman MP argues today that Labour should adopt policies that enhance liberty and equality. She says the party allowed its "bossy tendency too much free rein".
Labour MP and former pensions minister, Helen Goodman, argues today that, as it considers how to respond to the coalition government, Labour should adopt policies that enhance liberty and equality. Labour, in power, allowed its “bossy tendency too much free rein” and allowed other parties to “outflank us rhetorically and criticise our record on equality”.
In a new paper, published by Left Foot Forward, “Stuck in the middle? Should Labour lurch to the left or stay on the centre ground?“, Helen Goodman – who is supporting Ed Miliband in the leadership race – uses a liberal/authoritarian axis and an equality/inequality axes to argue that:
“There now seems to be a growing consensus (which I share) that we need to become more “liberal”…
“[We also need] more energetic policies to deliver social justice and better communications [of those policies].
In relation to civil liberties, Ms Goodman says:
“we gather that in the coalition negotiations AV and the abolition of the DNA database were offered. On reading this, many of us were left wondering why we’d had them in the manifesto anyway! …
“there is also a good case for arguing that actually the last government did allow Labour’s bossy tendency too much free rein – and not just on the big issues like ID cards – also in allowing the development, especially at local authority level of a risk minimisation culture which is self-defeating.”
On equality, Goodman asks:
“How was it that despite the fact that our policies in government and our prospectus for the future (minimum wage, tax credits) were way more distributive than those of the opposition parties (inheritance tax cuts etc.) they were able to outflank us rhetorically and criticise our record on equality?”
Download the full paper here.
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27 Responses to “Should Labour lurch left?”
Martin Burns
RT @leftfootfwd: Should Labour lurch left? Unravelling the strategic dilemma http://bit.ly/9mrCF8
Matt M
The leadership candidates need to be careful here. It is one things to constructively criticise the last government’s errors in order to learn from them, it is quite another to engage in rudderless self-flagellation. The mantra “Beyond New Labour” will I expect within the next few months cloak all sorts of wierd and wonderful ideas as to where the Labour Party should be centred, some of which will be poles apart but all of which will be united in a desire to unequivocally bury the past thirteen years. If “re-connection” and “re-engagement” are to be the new leader’s watchwords, they will certainly not be achieved by endless self-recrimination, which will have as devastating an impact as the worst sort of negative campaigning.
It is worth remembering if but for a second why the reorientation towards New Labour was so necessary, both philosophically and politically, before the Labour Party starts to wield its own destructive axe.
Billy Blofeld
“bossy tendency”
….. amongst other outrages Labour stated a war.
Ex Labour Voter - 2010
Labour become totally out of touch, undemocratic, obsessed with ineffective authoritarianism and too centralising. Far too willing to sign up to the EU and its undemocratic institutions.
Personally I would like to see the Labour Party take far more notice of the Labour Euro Safeguards Campaign instead of the Leaderships obsession with being part of a federal EU.
http://www.lesc.org.uk/
I don’t ever want to see again the grotesque spectacle of a Labour leadership joining with the EU political class to ignore the voters in democratic referendums against the peoples of Europe (Ireland, France and Holland). The failure to uphold the 2005 manifesto commitment of a promised referendum on the EU Constitution was a real low point for Labour and democracy. The backstage deals and lies to cover this up were even more degrading.
Labour is supposed to be the party of the people not the political class!
Labour also has the best MP in Parliament, Frank Field MP and I would like
to see the Labour Party start listening to Frank a lot more, particularly on the subject of immigration.
Frank’s think tank is a useful reference point.
http://www.balancedmigration.com/
Unfit for office in 2010 and rightly kicked out!
Jacquie Martin
Spot on Baskhar. What a question indeed!
New Labour lost sight of its values fairly early on resulting in a complete loss of integrity by the time it was finished.
The heirarchy spent too much time hanging out with extremely rich people. They seemed oblivious to the inequality which was happening all around them.
This LibDem group is filled with the same type of confidence tricksters as Tony Blair was. People will see that eventually.
But the Labour party need to concentrate its efforts on understanding and committing to help the large numbers of people who feel they have no hope of ever making their lives better.
Gordon Brown doubling the stamp duty threshold to 250k was a prime example of simply not understanding what is going on in the outside world. Not everyone knows someone who can lend them huge amounts of money, beyond their obvious means to repay, like Peter Mandelson did.
There’s far too many depressed people who feel worthless because politicians bang on about money and wealth all of the time and act like it’s the holy grail. Anyone who’s got nothing is worth nothing is the message.
Of course, they need to be more left. Get in touch with who they were formed to represent – the ordinary prols. Stop acting like they’re an embarrassment.