Tom Griffin (London, OK): OK's Guy Aitchison reports on last night's Comment is Free/Soundings debate, After New Labour over at CIF:
Madeleine Bunting, in the chair, did her best to make everyone feel an Obama moment. But Cruddas struck a note of scepticism. The financial crisis fills him with "foreboding" rather than "confidence", he said, as history shows it is nearly always the right that gains in tough times as voters turn to a "sour politics of identity" in search of a quick fix. Recent attempts to compare Gordon Brown with Roosevelt ignore the fact there is no ready-made framework for the party to turn to, although Cruddas says progressive taxation, a radical social housing plan, a new regulatory regime, a Green New Deal and scrapping Trident and ID cards to fund a "new military covenant" and more police all provide "illustrative examples" of whose side the party should be on.
Guy notes Jeremy Gilbert's critique of the 'Fabian fallacy' that the Government can fix everything from Whitehall without broader alliances. There may be a common thread here with some of the themes from the preceding debate on the Conservatives. Neither the market not the state can deliver without a strong civil society.
There was much talk of 'Labour values', which prompted a withering intervention from Laurie Penny, picking up on a generational divide which she highlights over at Liberal Conspiracy:
At last night’s event, Harriet Harman lauded New Labour as ‘a delivery mechanism for Labour values’ – but the 18-26 year old cohort no longer has a clear idea of what those values are.
The party is still, as Harman noted, ‘driven by our experience of what it was like to live under a Tory government whose values we abhorred,’ but with what Chuka Umunna identified as Labour’s failure to ‘deal a blow to the Thatcherite consensus’, my generation can only point to New Labour when the cruelties of neo-liberalism begin to bite.
