Yesterday we launched a new project at Demos called Open Left, which aims to renew the thinking and ideas of the Left. We want it to be an open conversation so please do take part.
Britain is a fundamentally better place than it was in 1997 and Labour has lots to be proud of over the last 12 years. But with less than a year until the next election it’s important that we step back and reassess what we stand for and what sort of society we want Britain to be at the start of the 21st century.
If we’re honest, we sometimes haven’t been confident enough to be explicit about our goals and to argue for them passionately in public. And at times all parts of the family of the Left has been guilty of highlighting areas of difference rather than focusing on the many things we hold in common. It’s also right that we update our policy thinking for today’s world.
This is why we’re starting Open Left by going back to first principles and asking what it means to be on the Left today. You can read the views of a number of high profile left wing figures, including Jon Cruddas, Billy Bragg, Polly Toynbee and Peter Hyman, at www.openleft.co.uk. We’ll be collecting all the answers together to inform the direction of the project, so we’d love you to come to the site and give your own perspective.
My own view is that there are three central distinctions between Left and Right. First, the Right tolerates inequalities that the Left hates. I’m on the Left because I worry about inequalities of capability - some people have it very easy in our society, others far too hard. The goal of policy should be to correct these inequalities in power. This is partly but not only about redistribution of income.
Second, I believe that governments succeed more often than they fail. People on the Right are more sceptical of government’s effectiveness. The Right also worry that more government crowds out society, whereas we think that government helps communities be more active and individuals more powerful.
Third, I’m utopian. People on the Left tend to have a vision of what society could be like, and believe it’s the role of democracy to try to make that a reality. People on the Right are more likely to value the status quo, believing it represents the tested wisdom of previous generations.
I want Britain to be an open society, where people are free to choose their way of life, and given an equal capacity to achieve it. But simply leaving individuals alone or allowing them to act without impediment will not be enough. That leaves only the powerful with freedom and the risk that their power becomes multiplied at the expense of the powerless. Real freedom and power for everyone requires collective action and institutions – to challenge unfair distributions of power, wealth, chances, knowledge and choices. And this action needs to be expressed and legitimised through an effective democracy.
I essentially believe that the Left has the right goals, but too often had the wrong method. We let ourselves think that government worked best when it was publicly-owned and centrally-run. My experience is that government normally works better when the individual has the power, whether to choose between parties in elections, or between providers in public services. The world is too complicated for most of its problems to be solved from the centre.
So, I would be in favour of having profit-making companies running state schools – as long as it increased equality of capability. But I worry about parents having to pretend to be religious to get their child in to a good faith school – because it means treating children unequally according to their parents’ religion.
What makes me most angry about Britain today is that some children’s chances in life are restricted by their circumstances of birth. That’s why I would say the change that would do most to transform our society for the better would be ending child poverty and every child being well taught.
When I consider the future of the British Left I think we should take inspiration from the Swedish social democrats. They combined pragmatism and idealism over a long period to shift the political reality in their country, entrenching social democracy as both morally right and electorally irreversible.
This is what I think, but I don’t pretend to have all the answers. I’ll be online between 11am and noon this morning to respond to your comments in a live webchat – and I really hope you will go to www.openleft.co.uk and tell us what being on the Left means to you.
James Purnell MP is Director of Open Left.
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Purnell seems to be trying to set himself up as some kind of Platonic Philosopher-King, waiting to ascend to the throne of power by mutating the Labour Party until it becomes an instrument or institution that exists to serve him personally, rather than submitting himself humbly to serve the Party's true declared objectives, goals and aims. The thing is, James, very few of us care one scintilla any more what you think about anything, politics least of all. Please go away.
Hardly anybody has a good word for you these days...
... but I have...
... TWAT!
As I said, whatever David Cameron can do I can do as well, not least with words!
During the Victorian era moralists were fond of selectively quoting the Bible to explain away injustice. So someone like Purnell might have said: "Deuteronomy 15:11 advises us that '... the poor will never cease to be in the land' so why should we try to help them? Motivate them to excel by denying them our help. It is God's ordinance." Of course he'd deliberately omit the rest of the Biblical quote, namely, "... therefore I command you, saying, 'You shall freely open your hand to your brother, to your needy and poor in your land.'"
Purnell IS the pus in the Labour Party's suppurating abscesses.
Call in a quack to lance that boil!
I hate to point this out but Ruskin couldn't get it up! His poor sex-starved wife Effie Gray eventually left him to find sexual satisfaction, love and happiness in the arms of Ruskin's much more virile protégé John Millais.
It is ridiculous for people like Peter Thomson, above, to start going all Purnellian on us and yammering on about "equal opportunity and responsibility" when equal opportunity exists only as a concept for millions of men and women. It is also silly and unsophisticated to give ridiculous instances of successful people, like Jimmy Read, who have defied the odds to succeed materially to facilely illustrate the point. Are you seriously suggesting, Mr. Thomson, that we could all be millionaire businessmen, no matter what our background, or where we live, if we only work hard and apply ourselves? Conversely, are you implying that if men and women are unsuccessful materially they tacitly deserve to suffer their fate for not being enterprising enough to attain self-sufficiency and prosperity as per their wealthy contemporaries?
When over three million people are likely to be unemployed by next spring this kind argument seems reminiscent of the sad and familiar "Blame the Victim" psychological strategy used throughout the world, by the school bully right up to the Nazi inspired Holocaust in wartime Germany. You see to justify doing cruel, unfair and unjust things to a minority in some society it is a very common tactic for the government or ruling classes to demonise that minority by means of black propaganda before acting against them. This behaviour is a necessary conceit to prevent a regime from looking vicious and unenlightened while acting viciously and inhumanely: before you can crack down on a minority you need to persuade the rest of the population that the people you intend to mete out harsh treatment to actually deserve such sanctions and punishment. For example, New Labour and the Tories have been trying to infect citizens in the UK with the idea that the unemployed are unemployed by choice, for a variety of disreputable reasons, e.g., laziness, welfare dependency, preference for a life on benefits or refusal to take up a plethora of "opportunities" that are offered to them by a caring government and that will secure for their recipients a bright and beautiful future. If the public buy into this lie the government can then strip these unfortunates of welfare benefits and cast them into penury because, after all, they deserve everything they get for not toeing the line and we needn't feel sympathy for them or feel guilty about their homelessness and destitution because, of course, they brought it on themselves. Their misery is their responsibility, not ours.
To me this stinks, especially when coming from the Labour Party. If we start blaming the innocent and the helpless for their helplessness then we are nothing.
This is a much more invidious and shameful impotence than that suffered by poor John Ruskin. Shame on us all if we line up tamely like automatons to volunteer for it. The ideas of the poisonous and pernicious Purnell should be resisted.
Ha, ha, ha.
Purnell couldn't direct p*ss into a bucket!
Abolition of the 10p tax band leaving between one half million to one million of the poorest of the working poor less well off financially (and all because Gordon, in his arrogance, wanted to "pull a rabbit out of the hat" and pose as a tax cutter in his last budget as Chancellor); the introduction of punitive workfare into the country, initially dismissed as "unworkable and unaffordable" by Brown (until he found there might be a few votes in it for him) where the long-term unemployed receive longer sentences of "community service" than petty criminals do in lieu of custodial sentences; the failure to build any council or much social housing over the last twelve years despite pledging to do so as a matter of urgency in Labour's 1997 manifesto with homelessness more than doubling under his watch and council house waiting lists bloated beyond the four million mark; the shameless and cowardly cloning of Tory policies and initiatives as the standard way to defuse them, e.g., raising the inheritance tax threshold five days after George Osborne announced his original policy at the Tory Party conference and was lauded for it by the media; the disgusting attempt to extend detention without trial to forty two days, for no good reason, merely to look tough and discomfort the Tories; the announcement and tiresome reannouncements, over and over, of the same tired policies and monies each time pretending that they are new initiatives with new investment; repeating the ridiculous mantra "no more boom and bust" when we always had a boom, a credit boom and a housing boom, that both ended in tears, the only way they could...
... I could go on... and on... and on.
Brown's reputation as a Chancellor and a Prime Minister will undoubtedly be reassessed and, insofar as I can see, not favourably. The pain, Peter, is yet to begin. Brown has cushioned us from it temporarily by inordinate borrowing believing that it will help him do better in next year's general election. It won't. We, all of us, are about to hurt in a way few of us have felt previously and for years under whichever Party forms the next government.
'ruined this country for the last twelve years' is a lazy and inane comment and you should not, repeat not, be agreeing with it.
Zimbabwe is a 'ruined country.'
By contrast, in this green and pleasant land of ours, millions of people will be going to work tomorrow by train, car, bus and underground and a good few will be just walking their way there.
If you are unfortunate enough to have an accident of any kind, a fine ambulance service, fire service and doctors and nurses at the hospital will give their all to attend to you.
The vast majority of the people will enjoy an adequate amount of nutritional food tomorrow ; essential utilities (water, gas, electricity) will be almost unfailingly delivered to 26 million households and a multitude of businesses.
If you need some gasoline or diesel tomorrow, I am sure you won't find the pumps dry. You will be able, if that's what you want, even to be able to buy some bottled water on your way home.
This is not an indication of a 'ruined country.' Please employ some sense of perspective.
Gordon Brown has been subject to vilification and false accusations on a scale unprecedented, as I have observed politics for the last 40 years. I would say that the last Labour Prime Minister to be subject to the same degree of vitriolic abuse that I read elsewhere was Harold Wilson - and, with reflection, we are all better off for Harold's achievments.
Then of course there is the matter of his "grocery bills" that we pay for, and "cleaning" bills for a London flat that hadn't seen a Hoover let alone a cleaner.....
A nasty, avaricious, grubby self-serving little twerp who thinks he is a lot more clever than he actuall is.
But we shouldn't be TOO hard on the poor lad: there he was in May announcing his "engagement" to Ms Lucy Davies, he resigns in June and by the end of that month Ms Davies was described as his "ex-fiance".
Poor Jim - unlucky in love, but at least he has his sideburns to keep him warm....
And that's coming from someone on the left.
Didn't I tell you to get back under your rock, Purnell?
Gertcha! Before I make a broth out of your foetid green bones!
How floral! I'm cool and the gang with that, Ralph.
(Did you know that King Baldwin the forth of Jerusalem was a leper! Just joking!)
Besides, you've missed the jape. The "simian" thing was directed at a person praising James Purnell called Northern Monkey! Get the joke now? Ah! That's it! Has the penny dropped? Of course it has. I wasn't trying to be rude but trying to be witty. Do try to keep up my friend.
Why don't you (and those that think like you) apply your energies to ridding the nation of Brown? Now, Brown: there's a real, live, walking-talking catastrophe if there ever was one, and he, unlike Purnell - who has actually done nothing whatsoever but talk - has ruined this country for the past 12 years.
Oh no I don't let them off of the hook so easily. There is one thing I dislike in politics, it's corruption. This guy chose the wrong Party to slime into, it's going to seriously cost him when I am finished.
He will go down in history, not as a revolutionary thinker (who stole the ideas of others) but as a nothing, a mediocraty, because that is all he is with his feeble attempt at opportunism which is just bad timing and a lack of understanding of Labour Party Rules. I am more wary of some parish councillors I have met than the nothing that is Purnell.
How do you like being named Raphanus.
If I were you I wouldn't waste your words on morally bereft political Calibans like James Purnell, unless of course the words you employ are four letters long, refer to organs of reproduction, elimination or excreta!
Dear James,
I am a Labour member and activist.
I have two main questions for you and I shall be direct.
1) I listened to the interview on Newsnight, I listened very carefully on your premise for collecting ideas. Are you therefore using the Labour Membership and anyone who can be considered "Left" to advance yourself, and build a policy set based upon a framework you have devised with the "capacity" thoery? (Many MP's have taken ideas from members who have then left the party when the Mp took all the credit.)
2) You mentioned that the ideas are based upon "morality". Do you think "accountability", "duty" and "responsibility" are part of morality? If so do you consider yourself "qualified" to understand the difference between immoraility and morality. No offense but your record here isn't exactly glowing. I can think of many people outside Parliament who have a much stronger record than you do on this matter.
On "Capability"
The State would certainly need a heck of a lot of information on people to be able to recognise thier "Capability". Do we trust the State to not abuse this position? How do you measure creativity? Could this method be employed to trap people into not being able to advance due to the prescribed limits of their "capability".
Your ideas are disturbing and dangerous. That of course is my opinion.
Please do not take my email personally, they are legitimate and fair questions.
Lamentable twaddle considering its disreputable and discredited source. You've been reading your charged-to-expenses-freebie-Edmund-Burke-book too much Purnell you berk! Crawl back under your rock.
Not clear what principles you have to start with other than careerism, and that's not much of a living these days.
He has far too many rich friends in business - indeed he seems to cultivate their friendship (David Abrahams, David Freud) and of course, to help boost his MP's miserly salary of £64K he has crawled his way into Demos, where he is no doubt paid well.
The few MPs of both parties who have tried the gimmick of trying to live on welfare benefits have given up within a week.
I would like to insist that before people like Pur-nell and his Tory pal Freud start dismantling the welfare state they ought to be made to live for at least a month on JSA or ESA. No "expenses" and no Pur-nell we will NOT pay your grocery bills or "cleaning" bills. People getting £64 a week have to buy their own food, why not this pampered little rich brat?
But the trouble is it's not just about the leader, it's the whole PLP that people are angry with. Brown is just the figurehead, it's people like Purnell who hasn't a left-wing bone in his body but like the rest of New Labout is currently hijacking the term for his own political gain. I know this is New Labour but do really need Newspeak as well? To be left wing means not voting for ID cards, not voting for illegal wars, not voting for tuition fees and not reforming the welfare state so that the really disadvantaged suffer because of some ideological rubbish Purnell has imported from America. Throwing sops to women and minorities does not make you a left wing party.
What it comes down to in the end is that people aren't stupid but that is the way New Labour is treating us - how dare a right-wing git like Purnell lecture ME about being left-wing?
But then having said that, my own church has a very liberal tradition, has people doing a lot of outreach work who don't push an agenda on kids at all, cheerfully baptised our daughter with a gay godfather and his partner present (Guy if you're reading be warned I am armed, Buddha[-permitting, with a small percussive instrument.)
that report is such a waste of time; all it looks like is NL commissioning a report on its own failure, with no memorable or interesting ideas for remedying it.
Plus at this point in time, I'm not sure the number one irritation for those alienated core voters is, "...but if I retrain and do a law degree - will I have a realistic chance of the bar?"
The Christians I met at this school, especially with their intrusive questioning, were a different breed, less tolerant and more judgemental.
Buddha of course would turn your sharpened flying tambourine into a garland of Lotus flowers.
Like you, I'm a pragmatist and feel perfectly comfortable with free market involvement in education and health providing we get the outcomes we desire. It's pleasing that the Labour party today generally adopts this tone, rather than the reactionary, statist dogma of 1980s Labour.
However, as you yourself point out, this current government has not been remotely bold enough in setting out our vision for society, or indeed achieving such a vision. The House of Lords is still unelected, faith schools can still discriminate on the basis of religion, public transport has hardly been revolutionised, and our agenda on schools and hospitals has been muddled: not brave enough to fully implement Blair's reforms, but not left-wing enough by keeping prescription fees and introducing tuition fees (a mistake that has cost the party dear).
But I'm sorry you can't read the reply I posted here many hours ago which was neither offensive to you personally nor particularly polemical.
Was he lying then, is he lying now, or... is he just a congenital LIAR?
Its weird, but no-one appears to be too concerned about the financial side of the Labour Party, but then that sort of explains alot when you think of the financial mess public finances are in at the moment.
James Purnell is a creature of New Labour which is a movement of moral relativism in which my lie is not a lie but rather my narrative of a personal truth.
To those used to coded expressions like 'straightforward kinda guy', 'moral compass', 'always told the truth' or 'strict Scottish values' the idea of parents and their children conniving together in a sustained untruth is scarcely remarkable.
Would you have not wanted your children at the same school as the children of Martin Luther King, Tolstoy, Wittgenstein, TS Eliot or Tony Benn then, Peter?
We're not all homophobic creationist lunatics with sandals and acoustic guitars you know, honest.
Purnell & co = vacuous waffle
So myself and my wife were confronted with the choice. Did we go to church a few times, and get a vicar to sign us off? Then we both realised - we were about to send our five year old son to a school where the parents of the children were either active Christians, or active hypocrites.
My son, and then his younger sister, went to another school which turned out to have a fantastic new headmaster. All the parents before who had dissed it wanted to get their own kids in after a couple of years. Then, at the age of nine, my son was finally offered at place at the Church School. We didn't take it up. I only regret I didn't write to them and tell them why...
Since the C of E is the state church, and it's properties are basically collective, I still think their admittance criteria are wrong.
No, Mr Pur-nell - you are not. What you are is a self-deluded, pompous right-wing prig, a spoilt little rich kid indulging your fantasies, about being "radical" and "left".
You are part of the problem, not the solution as to why so many people who REALLY are Left wing and labour supporting have left the party. Because you are really the echo of Iain Duncan Smith - the pomp, the paternalism and condescention towards "the poor", the talking down to them.
I would never vote any longer for a Labour party that had you as an M.P. let alone a minister (sure we all know that you SAY you don't want to return to front line politics, but then you SAY an awful lot of things that have to be taken with a pinch of salt (how's the ex "fiance'"?.
And now you are "Director" no less, of Open left, and no doubt screwing er, I mean earning of that groney from Demos, why not pay back some of that grocery money and "cleaning" money and second home allowance money you had out of us. i don't know - these benefit cheats!
It is understandable that Purnell is in denial. He was a beneficiary of an "internship" as an advisor in Number 10 merely because he was a member of an exclusive social network, former graduates of Oxbridge. Like many beneficiaries of social advance produced as a result of Labour's creation of the welfare state, Purnell is happy to propose equality of capability as long as this does not disturb any benefits that has accrued to him and others like him - the new middle class.
Hopefully there will be follow through from the Milburn report. The Government should focus on those areas that it can directly change such as the civil service, public services and government. It should start by looking at special advisors with the objective of a more socially diverse intake resulting in less people like Purnell and his former Red Menace FC team mates who are all happily in positions of power and influence in government or the quangocracy (Ofcom)which appears from this jaundiced commentator viewpoint to have very little to do with principle let alone talent.
'Equality of capability'
Mr Purnell, who has launched a three-year Open Left project with thinktank Demos to examine what it means to be left wing, went on to urge Labour Party members to recognise their shared values.
"I think what we need to do is renew ourselves and I think that goes through idealism. I think it goes through going back to our basic principles and articulating them for today."
He argued there was a real consensus around the idea of "equality of capability", which would require a radical redistribution of income and power enabling people of all backgrounds to fulfil their potential.
My fear is we are going backwards not forwards
Lord Hattersley
"It is a hugely radical idea, but it is one that unites the left."
This was the Labour Party's common cause, he said.
But Lord Hattersley said Mr Purnell's ideas for the party's renewal looked "dangerously like going back to what got us into trouble in the first place, which is Blairism".
"That's overreliance on the markets, that's the withdrawal of the state from providing directly public services, and that's a belief that people should be given more choice when very often the choice is going to benefit those who already have too much and is going to do very little for those who have too little."
"My fear is we are going backwards not forwards," he added.
On Saturday, Mr Purnell said he had lost faith in Mr Brown as leader six months before he resigned.
Mr Purnell told the Guardian he had been considering resigning since December because he no longer believed Mr Brown could win the next election.
Latest Poll also shows that Left Wingers at the BBC outnumber anyone else by 11 to 1.
It is a prime example of New Labour's Thatcherite industrial policy creating a wasteland of poverty.
Nothing more represents that failure than the fall in social mobility over the past 12 years and the growth of the neo-fascism in traditional Labour supporting areas.
Political machinations by Brown and Darling to bring down HBOS to weaken Salmond and the SNP in Scotland triggers a worldwide collapse in confidence in the banks.
Swing to the SNP in Scotland of 8% with Scottish Labour vote share just 3% more than the Tories.
The main Labour voting areas of Scotland showing up in every social survey as the most deprived, shortest life expectancy, highest crime rates, most illegitimate births per head, highest unemployment, most school leavers without any formal educational qualifications, highest level of illiteracy and innumeracy. That is the 50 year legacy of Labour's left wing policies in Scotland. The people Labour claim to be assisting are as worse off as ever they were through incessant superficial social engineering, poorly thought through and poorly enacted.
The Labour Party of Keir Hardy and John McLean was about equal opportunity and the responsibility of the individual to take on those opportunities. It was about compassion and support for those who could not take the opportunity, not feather bedding those who would not take the opportunity. Jimmy Reid, of Clydeside work in fame, epitomises socialism as espoused by the original Labour Party. A self made man, 16 year old school leaver, who took the opportunity provided by Ruskin College to improve his education which in turn benefited his co-workers.
The Labour left has gone so PC it has forgotten what is raison d'etre is - to support the workers and not the skivers. In Scotland, the SNP have filled this gap in a positive way and are reaping the rewards in vote share.
In England the Labour vote is leaking away to the Tories by default rather than for any positive reason, as the real difference between Labour and the Tories at Westminster is marginal at best.
Until the left dump their negative social engineering platform and remember what the original Labour Party of Hardy and McLean was about - levelling up, not down - the party is heading for a very long time on the fringes.
I imagine there will be a lot of crossing the floor and lots of people suddenly 'realising' what they stand for, for the shower we have at the moment power is more important than principles and as they have all learnt to walk on their hind legs there's very little between Labour and the Tories.
Why shou;d all this talent rot on the opposition benches until the next generation just because we don't have the balls to change leadership?
Remember how long it was between Jim Callaghan and the succeeding Labour administration, and Jim's personal popularity was not nearly as low as Gordons?
We may have to wait for our grand-children to vote before we see power again. Why not wise up and sort it before it is too late?
I'd love to go back to more freedom, more civil liberties, only the one war, hope, optimism and the thought that things can only get better. But you're richer than 1997 and got away with tax fraud so I can see why you're pleased.
I hate to say it but if 'this' is the left then the left is dead.
It sure is for anyone who is a diversity out-reacher, council member, MP, BBC manager, quango member, NHS Trust pen-pusher, asylum seeker, benefits claimant, illegal immigrant, violent criminal, civil servant near retirement age etc etc.
You must be very proud.
Obviously your opinion of religion is up to you, but I wonder - would you have told Martin Luther King or the leaders of Polish Solidarity that they shouldn't deal in ritual superstition and myth?
That's no doubt a very modern and enlightend view but (and this isn't very New Labour, I know) there's also something a little corrosive about collective lying which might give grounds for concern.
"the faith school might be good in the first place is that they have a core of pupils from backgrounds where faith plays a part in the home."
Education should based on logic and reason, not ritual superstition and myth.
The quality of education has nothing to do with religion and all to do with the ethos and expectations created by the staff of the school.
8 people whose experience of work is based in academia/politics/political strategy/think tanks.
1 musician
1 journalist
1 recent graduate
And, sit down and be ready for a shock, one teacher from the state sector... who used to be a political strategist.
So, the same sort of people who have been running things for the last 15 years then, with someone from the TUC - who has next to no experience of private sector work - chucked in as a fig leaf. People with next to no experience of ordinary jobs and ordinary prospects. People who you know damn fine do not spend their free time with nurses, logisitics workers, call centre operators, managers or people trying to run small businesses. Of course strategists are needed, but couldn't they have had a MIX?
In politics you have to look at what people do, not what they say. What Mr Purnell and Demos have done is failed to ask the opinion of any of the people they claim to represent.
As for the cynically-identified potential vote-winner of attacking faith schools; I wonder if it have ever crossed the mind of Mr Purnell or the others who attack them in a knee-jerk way that one reason the faith school might be good in the first place is that they have a core of pupils from backgrounds where faith plays a part in the home.
Not from where I'm sitting, it isn't. Even as someone who has done well on the equalities front (SOR, CP's etc) it isn't.
We're returning to a highly-stratified society, where there's no visible compassion for those at the bottom of the heap, and those on top are increasingly believing they have an unchallengeable right to massively over-paid jobs as long as they want them, and massive pensions thereafter. The sham of the control mechanisms that are largely operated by like-minded people ("institutional shareholders" or this government) helps ensure this.
We are also, in a very real sense, getting into a wholly new situation where the worker-clones and dole-scum are seen as the property of the state - to be monitored at every turn. The wilful abolition of individual liberties has been a marked characteristic of this government. ID cards, contact point, detention without trial, complicity in torture and extraordinary rendition ... This is an abandonment of the principles of equality, and and absolute and disgraceful betrayal of the principles on which the Party was founded, and it's hard to separate the rumbling of discontent from the grassroots from the sound of the Rochdale Pioneers spinning in their graves.
I fully agree about the need for a revised and coherent view of what it means to be "on the Left" today. But pretending the past decade has had any similarity to anything "Left" is not a good place to start.
Three sentances, nothing said. With language like this how can you possibly think that you have anything to add to any debate.
'If you we're honest' you wouldnt hide behind waffle like this and you would have tried to change things when you had the chance; i.e. working in the cabinet, instead of flouncing out for what you thought was going to be your political advantage.
You need to get out of the echo chamber you live in, people at labour list, progress and the like might blow smoke up your ass but it's clear from the responses that your article at the Guardian got that absolutely nobody on the ground is fooled by your sudden conversation to the left.
"What makes me most angry about Britain today" is how you helped created a climate in which the unemployed and disabled are treated like scum. If you stand for election again, I'll actually go and help the conservative party in your Constituency and try and get you turned out on your ear because if this is the first step in trying for the leadership in a few years you need to be stopped dead.
Really? Have you seen the latest unemployment figures? Have you seen the size of the national debt? Do you seriously believe social mobility and aspiration have really improved? Social justice? Where is the social justice in losing your job and losing your home?
I want Britain to be an open society, where people are free to choose their way of life, and given an equal capacity to achieve it. But simply leaving individuals alone or allowing them to act without impediment will not be enough. That leaves only the powerful with freedom and the risk that their power becomes multiplied at the expense of the powerless. Real freedom and power for everyone requires collective action and institutions.
Do you actually know what individual freedom is? It is not the State discriminating against some people and encourage others. 'Equal' is not an interventionist based concept that ties the hands of some but pushes others.
Freedom is about concepts like meritocracy, choice, transparency & empowerment. Your idea of 'freedom' is contradictory for a start and later a semantic train crash at best' and a psychic iron cage at worst.
to challenge unfair distributions of power, wealth, chances, knowledge and choice
Define 'unfair'? Unfair to the disenfranchised but to those that worked hard, played by the rules, is their distribution of power and life chances it has afforded them 'unfair'.
Look back at the concepts of 'freedom'. Freedom of life chances. Look at education, how can the Left even try to equate 'freedom' with a State school that lags behind the public systems in terms of outcomes. Where social mobility has declined since 1997 despite all of Labour's policies; you would think that 12 years would be long enough to reverse this trend? Labour's education policies have made things worse.
If you cannot define 'freedom', God help us if you confuse it with 'discrimination'.
What makes me most angry about Britain today is that some children’s chances in life are restricted by their circumstances of birth. That’s why I would say the change that would do most to transform our society for the better would be ending child poverty and every child being well taught.
Look at the areas where this deprivation exists, are they Tory areas of the country? Lib Dem? No, they are Labour, they have always been Labour. You would think after decades of Labour representation at local authority level that schooling would be improved; that your utopian ideals are represented?
No, these people suffer poor life expectancy, poor life outcomes because of Labour's policies not because of anyone else's. It is delusional in the extreme to think more of the same; just that little push harder will create the breakthrough.
You are pushing a dead horse uphill. Even these people feel abandoned by Labour and they are turning elsewhere for more radical.
Turn left if you want to; enjoy the views of the wilderness.
Britain is a fundamentally better place than it was in 1997 and Labour has lots to be proud of over the last 12 years.
To those wanting to join – correct this man’s thinking or look at failure.
We are not, thank goodness, all born the same. We have different capabilities. We have different levels of capabilities. No amount of money spent on public school fees can turn an upper class twit into a fellow of All Souls. And no amount of taxpayers' money can turn a lower class twit into one either.
That just about says it all for Purnell's 'first principles'. Just more of the same New Labour waffle.