Could this be the last Labour government? DAVID CONNOLLY looks at the Compass group’s call for electoral reform

The left wing pressure group Compass has an impressive record of campaigning on a wide range of issues, attempting, with some success, to challenge the neo-liberal agenda that shapes much of government policy. Whatever the outcome of [...]

Barry Winter examines how capitalism went from boom to bust and where it leaves us

Introduction
I begin this introduction with what may seem like a diversion. I want to take us briefly back to the horrors of the First World War in which often enthusiastic, armies of young men across Europe were sent into battle by [...]

“There is a sense of uncertainty and flux, a feeling that we’re coming to the end of an era in politics. It’s one that we’ve never much liked, yet we know what’s coming could be so much worse.”
With those unsettling words David Connolly, chair of Independent Labour Publications, opened the ILP’s weekend seminar in Scarborough [...]

One of the sad aspects of Labour’s farcical London mayoral selection contest, argues BERNARD HUGHES, is how the leadership is turning even some of its closest friends into foes.
When Glenda Jackson announced on 19 January that she would ballot her constituency party on how she should cast her second vote in the London mayoral selection, [...]

DAVID CONNOLLY wonders what happened to Tony Blair’s once passionate support for one member one vote.
In his book, The Unfinished Revolution, the new Labour strategist Philip Gould comments on the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown at the time of John Smith’s death in 1994. Of Blair he says that “it was his work [...]

DAVID CONNOLLY ponders the latest examples of new Labour style democracy.
With the best will in the world it is difficult to take Philip Gould seriously. Anyone who has read his book The Unfinished Revolution will know that his political starting point is a deeply felt hostility to the Tories. He is genuinely desperate to keep [...]

WILLIAM BROWN sifts through the remains of an e-commerce party that never was, and warns that the ill-winds of an economic downturn could soon be blowing across the Atlantic.
Maybe it was the end-of-the-century party mood, or a kind of millennium bug which affected economic forecasters, but the 1990s were awash with optimistic economic pronouncements. ‘New [...]

ANN BLACK sees the forces of conservatism flourishing behind the closed doors of the National Policy Forum.
Five years ago I attended my first conference. I haggled over benefits and human rights in compositing meetings, on equal footing with union grandees and delegates from constituencies across the country. Because of that participation, those contacts, I was [...]

GARY KENT reviews Liz Davies’ recent book on the politics inside new Labour.
Liz Davies is an embittered traitor spilling the beans on party business. Or she has done us all a service by blowing the whistle on new Labour’s “twists, turns, machinations and doublespeak” and the “paranoia and pointlessness” of the party’s ruling national executive [...]

MICHAEL MEACHER MP argues that political power is more concentrated than at any time for a century. We need a new political governance.
Do we have any influence over those who govern us? After two million marched against the war, the issue that has brought this to a head is, of course, Iraq. But it is [...]