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Paul Richards

Paul RichardsPaul Richards writes a column for LabourList every Thursday and a column for Progress every Friday. He has previously written for the Mirror, Times, Guardian, New Statesman and Tribune.
 
Paul joined the Labour Party in 1986 in Salford. He has been a member of Labour party staff, an MP's researcher, a Labour parliamentary candidate in 1997 and 2001, a local council candidate in 1994 and 1998, chair of Labour Students, chair of the Fabian Society, a special adviser to two Cabinet ministers, and a branch chair for over ten years. He has attended every party annual conference since 1990, worked at Walworth Road during the 1992 election, and volunteered at over 20 by-elections. His public speaking training courses for Labour members have raised over £5,000 since 2004. He has written two books, and several political pamphlets, and was editor of Tony Blair In His Own Words.
 
Paul is married with two chidren, and lives on the south coast. 

Posted on Jun 16, 2009 at 04:58pm

Contributor's latest posts

Down with the kids

2:04 pm, Thu 11th Mar 2010
Down with the kids The Paul Richards Column * UPDATE: At the end of the first paragraph of this piece, it is stated that John Harris of the Guardian "orbited" around Militant in the 1980s. We have now published a retraction of this, which is not right, and an apology to John for the error. John in fact was a staunch and active opponent of Militant. Political parties have always had an uneasy relationship with their young members. The naivety and exuberance of youth can easily combine into a cocktail of extremism and embarrassment for party leaders keen to appear sensible and centrist. There...
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With the death of Michael Foot, we also mourn the loss of a different type of Labour Party

11:33 am, Thu 4th Mar 2010
With the death of Michael Foot, we also mourn the loss of a different type of Labour Party The Paul Richards Column History will judge Michael Foot kindly, recalling his immense literary canon, the excoriation of the appeasers in the Conservative Party in 1940, his skill at speech-making, and his overwhelming niceness and decency. Barbara Castle, with whom Foot had a romantic but unconsummated relationship, called him "rational, radical and eminently reasonable" which stands as good an epitaph as any on this sad day. As with all public figures who make a mark young, and live a long life, much of his career belongs to a different age. There is, I believe, only one remaining man alive elected...
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Vote Cameron, get "tougher than Thatcher" Tories - we can't say we haven't been warned

11:44 am, Thu 25th Feb 2010
Vote Cameron, get "tougher than Thatcher" Tories - we can't say we haven't been warned The Paul Richards Column For the third day in a row the YouGov daily opinion poll tracker suggests that the Conservative lead over Labour is six points. Being behind the Tories is a disaster when we should be ahead this close to an election. Six point Tory leads are no reason to celebrate. But the narrowing of the Tory lead gives us cause for cautious optimism. For a party that was flat on its back a few months ago, this is a step in the right direction. In the past six months, even in the period since Christmas, three forces...
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Tory proposals are designed to fatally wound Labour by 2015

10:21 am, Thu 18th Feb 2010
Tory proposals are designed to fatally wound Labour by 2015 The Paul Richards Column I have this friend. For the sake of the story, let us call her Jo. She has a conviction that at the very top of politics, there is no such thing as happenstance or coincidence. Every move is a calculation, there’s a motive behind every utterance, and no one just does stuff. It’s all part of a plan. In short: there are no cock-ups, only conspiracies. For Jo, the pleasure of politics is in working out who’s playing who, and why. The scary thing is that most of the time, she’s right. Not every conspiracy works,...
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Cameron's angry bullying shows his own party is rattled on policy

10:05 am, Thu 11th Feb 2010
Cameron's angry bullying shows his own party is rattled on policy The Paul Richards column Winston Churchill was one of the biggest personalities of the twentieth century. He embraced public relations to project his image with a theatrical variety of costumes, , hats and props, from the ever-present Romeo y Juliettes to a Thompson machine-gun. In public he gave speeches which will be remembered alongside those of Cicero. In private he drank enough brandy to drown a regiment, and dazzled and infuriated everyone around him. The party he led was monumentally defeated in 1945 by one led by a taciturn little chap with a neat moustache, poor at public speaking, and...
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Anti-semitism is alive and well in Britain - how Labour should fight it

2:30 pm, Wed 10th Feb 2010
Anti-semitism is alive and well in Britain - how Labour should fight it By Paul Richards The casual anti-Jewishness of most of British society, prevalent before the war, and found everywhere from the royal family to TS Eliot to George Orwell, has largely disappeared. Instead, like a virulent bacillus, hatred of Jews finds new hosts: amongst Islamist hate-mongers, the ultra-left and neo-fascists on the streets, and in the upper echelons of academia and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. When Rowan Laxton, a senior official at the FCO screamed ‘fucking Jews' whilst watching news reports from southern Israel at the London Business School gym, was it really a ‘moment of madness' as he claimed...
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I've never met a MP who was either corrupt or greedy, and yet the witch hunt goes on

7:52 pm, Thu 4th Feb 2010
I've never met a MP who was either corrupt or greedy, and yet the witch hunt goes on The Paul Richards column There is a simple explanation for the endemic trousering of cash by MPs through the various allowances and expenses schemes which have come to light like the woodlice under rotting timber. It is the one which our ancestors believed when they stood and cheered the burning down of the old House of Commons in October 1834, or nodded approvingly when they read William Morris’s News From Nowhere in 1891 with its depiction of Westminster Hall as a ‘storage place for manure’, or laughed along to the lines in WS Gilbert’s libretto of Iolanthe, which suggest MPs...
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Ashcroft's poster saturation will not be enough to catapult his Melchester Rovers into victory

10:33 am, Thu 28th Jan 2010
Ashcroft's poster saturation will not be enough to catapult his Melchester Rovers into victory The Paul Richards column Three things are becoming clearer with each passing day about the Tories’ election strategy. The first is that they intend to go into the election free from the usual burdens of a detailed policy programme. Cameron’s strategists have correctly surmised that most people are appalled and repelled by Conservative policy, and so it is best not to mention it. When it does slip from under the cloak, Conservative policy tends to disintegrate under scrutiny, like an ancient scroll which turns to dust when you touch it. When they launched their ‘health manifesto’ on January 4th, it...
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Tight finances and a changing role in the world: what prospects for the strategic defence review?

12:41 pm, Thu 21st Jan 2010
Tight finances and a changing role in the world: what prospects for the strategic defence review? The Paul Richards Column If you think the Cabinet is a crucible of intrigue and schemes, it is nothing compared to the bosses of Britain’s armed services. The service chiefs make ministers look like amateurs when it comes to spinning and plotting. Like the permanent secretaries running government departments, the men in charge of the army, navy and air force got there by more than just being good at their jobs. They are also masters at politics. Since Bob Ainsworth announced the second strategic defence review since Labour was elected in 1997, the lobbying has begun in earnest. The First...
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Labour’s manifesto must speak to the challenge of the age

9:51 am, Thu 14th Jan 2010
Labour’s manifesto must speak to the challenge of the age The Paul Richards column There are times when a manifesto answers the questions of the age, when political prose transcends the page and captures the popular imagination. The Liberals managed it 1906, Labour in 1945, and the Tories in 1979. In each case, the manifesto was more than a collection of policies; it set a new course in politics. A successful manifesto need not contain detailed prescriptions. The Tory manifesto of 1979 was not a detailed blueprint of the privatisations that followed, any more than Labour’s 1997 manifesto outlined the distribution of wealth and opportunity that took place in the...
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