Chartist

As I leave the NEC, the political landscape is more confusing than ever. I am not sure where the party is going, or even where it should go, so it is the right time to pass on to new generations. Since I was first elected in 2000, my basic principles have stayed constant while the party changed around me. Back then I was part of the “left-wing” grassroots alliance, but party managers gradually realised that I could be sensible and even allowed me to chair the NEC.

Manchester housing– can Burnham’s local model work nationally? (Photo: Colin Park) Andy Burnham has had a very busy first few weeks as Prime Minister. Parliament is in recess, but that has not stopped Burnham from announcing a new policy proposal a day. Here I will briefly comment on three policy areas, where the announcements appear both radical and progressive, but for which implementation raises complex issues. Firstly, the devolution of power and funding to Mayors.

This book focuses on Labour Party policy on housing between 1945 and 1964, the six years of government and the 13 years of opposition. The book seeks to relate policy development to the development of the party’s ideology, which makes the study different from earlier works. Child does not focus on the development of top-down policy – Aneurin Bevan gets surprisingly few mentions, and there is little reference to policies passed at Labour Party conferences.

Those of us on the left have suffered far too many defeats in our lifetimes. Democratic socialists in their sixties and beyond can remember the victory of Thatcher in 1979, which brought down the curtain on the post-war consensus and plunged Labourism into a deep crisis. The Thatcher victory was followed by the high water of the Labour Left when Tony Benn was pipped at the post by Dennis Healey for Labour’s Deputy Leadership in 1981.

Foreign Secretary Ed Miliband attending ASEAN conference (Credit: gov.uk) Foreign policy is clearly not the first priority of the Burnham government. The new PM did not refer to it in his acceptance speeches and in the early weeks, the only acknowledgement that the world outside the UK existed came in the form of a mea culpa on Palestine.

Jewish Bloc for Palestine protesters in London - Credit: Robin Arnfield With the two-state solution a distant dream and growing violence in the West Bank, a new Arab-Jewish Israeli party aims for Palestinians to get a real voice in the Knesset. The question is: will Netanyahu’s government win the October election and continue the “forever war” with Gaza, or is there a prospect of a peace settlement with the Palestinians that could lead to a two-state solution?

George Forster needed rescuing from history. A singular liberal thinker created by nature and nurture, and a Prussian supporter of the French Revolution, he died in Paris in January 1794, according to the French Monitor, of the long-term effects of scurvy and “domestic sorrows”. Disappointed by its savage turn to the guillotine as the answer to political disagreement, he never disavowed its necessity as the most important revolution of all time.

Karl Polanyi, an early critic of market-dominated society - Credit: Wikimedia Commons Andy Burnham’s leadership acceptance speech declared his government would reverse “40 years of neoliberal politics and economics”. Because these had “centralised political power and privatised economic power”. Instead, he claimed, his government will put “control” back into democratic institutions and local communities.

Andy Burnham’s promise to rebalance political and economic power gives real hope to working people and trade unions alike. From its commitment to greater public control of utilities to the focus on reindustrialisation, his new administration has grasped the need for fundamental change. The TUC and our 47 unions want to work with the PM and ministers to make good on these promises. As the PM understands only too well, the government must address some huge challenges – and fast.

This is an important book as well as a very readable study. Forster is a history lecturer at the University of York and a member of the History Workshop editorial collective. The book is a study of the impact of the Paris Commune of 1871 on British radicals. While much has been written on the European republican refugees in England after 1848, there is less material on the post-Commune refugees.