Tom Griffin (London, OK): Today's Daily Mail brings us Peter Oborne's take on the emerging theme of a government of national unity: Of course, the Prime Minister does not envisage an alliance with David Cameron's Tories. However, he is seriously toying with the idea of bringing the Liberal Democrats into a possible coalition. Private discussions  -  all, of course, totally deniable  -  are taking place secretly. Against this fascinating background, I can reveal that special favours are being offered to the Liberal Democrats. First, there are signs of a deal being thrashed out between Downing Street and the LibDems over the appointment of the next Commons Speaker.  Read the rest of this post...

Stuart Weir (Cambridge, Democratic Audit): Gordon Brown may have rediscovered Keynes and his nerve, but the politics of his government remain rooted in what has always been old-fashioned as well as neo-liberal about New Labour.  There is a tendency in commentary to attribute this to Lord Mandelson’s re-birth; he may or may not be the Darth Vader of old – let’s wait and see –  and some have seen a turning towards what we can loosely call “the public”, but he clearly reinforces Brown’s own impatience with anything that stands in the way of “growth”. There is also a pervasive sense that the government has lost the traditional values that Blair used always to assert remained at the heart of New Labour – by which I mean a sense of communion with “ordinary people”, and especially the working and workless poor.  Brown’s abolition of the 10p tax rate shook many people’s belief in his government’s commitment to social justice and it has clearly not been restored, despite his insistence that his bold economic response to recession is designed to protect ordinary people’s lives and jobs.    Read the rest of this post...

Matthew Oliver (London, Unlock Democracy): The results of Unlock Democracy’s recent survey should act as a wake-up call to those members of the Labour movement who believe that the issue of party funding can be kicked into the long grass.  The survey, commissioned by The Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, finds that the Labour party risks a future Conservative government, possibly supported by Liberal Democrats and other parties, destroying the existing Labour-Union link if it fails to introduce meaningful reforms to the party funding system in this session of Parliament.   Sir Hayden Phillips wrote in 2007 that party finance reform was “within our reach but not in our immediate grasp". If Labour does not take action soon on these issues, these results show that they well find that the Conservative Party has snatched the opportunity from them and done with it what they will.  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): John Osmond brings us news of the debate in the Senedd that launched the Institute of Welsh Affairs' new book, Politics in 21st Century Wales. He suggests that, given some of the players involved, the event may turn out to be a preview of the coalition negotiations that follow the next Assembly election: Of course, First Minister Rhodri Morgan won’t be among them after 2011, since he has announced his impending retirement from politics – “he has indicated a wish to stand down as First Minister well before the elections” (according to his biographical note in Politics in 21st Century Wales). However, he prompted the speculation by suggesting in his contribution to the book that Labour should countenance proportional representation in local elections in order to allow a coalition deal to be negotiated with the Liberal Democrats. It was Plaid Cymru’s Adam Price who suggested somewhat mischievously that this was tantamount to Rhodri revealing ‘a bit of ankle’ to the Lib Dems.  

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): What's a more motivating force, fear or hope? Across the pond Obama has inspired a generation, re-inspired another and put 9 million people on the electoral register. Here a halving of the Labour Partys majority has been represented as a historic victory. Here it was politics as usual, and bitter negative politics at that. Labour have successfuly played on peoples fears of economic collapse. But can Britain be held together by fear? Where is a credible positive agenda emerging from London? It's not going to be the Olympics or the sight of a UK football team emerging at Hampden comprising 11 Englishmen. There is no doubt that Labour ran a very successful campaign, but that's not why they won. The SNP ran a great campaign but chose a candidate that made them the incumbent (Peter Grant is the Head of the SNP Council), but that's not why they lost. There are three reasons why Labour won.  Read the rest of this post...

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.  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): After last month's look at the Tories, the way forward for the Labour Party is the subject of the latest in the Comment is Free/Soundings series of debates, Who Owns the Progressive Future? Jon Cruddas, Harriet Harman, Jeremy Gilbert,  and Chuka Umunna join the Guardian's Madeleine Bunting at London's King's Place this evening to discuss politics After New Labour. Cruddas set out his prescription ahead of the debate in a Comment is Free piece with Soundings editor Jonathan Rutherford: The relationship between market and state is being redrawn. Nowhere is this more needed than in housing. This is where the battle lines are being drawn up. The left must create a democratic and accountable state capable of strategic intervention in the domestic economy and creating global alliances. A new settlement means a progressive tax system, a restructured financial economy and a Green New Deal. Ahead lie the perils of global warming and peak oil. But now let us give homes to people, and with them the hope of a better life.

Mike Small (Fife, Bella Caledonia): Last week's lost cause is this week's cause celebre. Mr Bean - virtually laughed out of office two weeks ago - is this week's giant of fiscal rectitude bestriding the world stage like a colossus of economic management. Inconvenient truths like the role New Labour played in the deregulation of goods and services, the 'liberation' of the Bank of England or support for the policy of basing your economy on spiralling housing prices, are swept aside in the glib wave of back-slapping that is sweeping the political commentariat. The media is fickle, not feral. Gleefully Jim Murphy the new Scottish Secretary mocks the SNP with reference to the 'arc of insolvency', a reference to the 'arc of prosperity' that the SNP have used to describe Iceland, Ireland and Norway. The problem with Labour's new found chutzpah is that they are treading on thin ice. The markets are faltering, the terrain unpredictable. Just as the SNP's original triumvirate of Ireland, Iceland and Norway was a too-convenient set, it equally fails as an example of why Scotland must be held to the Union. Norway is doing fine in the financial crisis, Iceland is not. The scale and impact of crisis has little or nothing to do with the size and constitutional make-up of the country involved. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): In his latest Daily Mail column, Peter Oborne takes issue with Gordon Brown's appointment of Harlow MP Bill Rammell to a senior Foreign Office post: Four years ago, as a junior minister at the FO, Rammell was personally informed by the Red Cross about the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American forces in Abu Ghraib jail. However, Rammell did nothing. Indeed, he apparently failed to pass on the information to any other member of the Government.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): It is said that Satan has an icey prick. I assume that Mephistopheles, his representative on earth has similarly chilly parts and wouldn't want to enquire further, But now that he has entered the Cabinet perhaps we can rename it the Fridge. "Let the change begin", the Prime Minister announced when he finally made it to what he thought was the top of the pole - now he has returned to his vomit, charming though it is on a good day, as you would expect. Mislead people about a mortgage, fail to achieve your trade objective as Europe's Commissioner, what better qualifications for a peerage? Some are saying that Lord M is a "big hitter". Yesterday's misser would be more accurate - out in the real world. But the worshippers of globalisation that misrule Britain have not lived there for some time.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Over at Comment is Free, Labour MP Jon Cruddas argues that the Conservatives' emphasis on fixing Britain's 'broken society' is at odds with the party's commitment to free market neo-liberalism: New Labour has not been able to exploit these contradictions due to its tone-deaf language, its one-dimensional take on Cameron and its own outdated political economy. While its centralising instincts and micromanagement of people have allowed the Conservatives to strike a chord with their criticism of state control. They have been able to portray state intervention - which has to be part of any redistributive politics - as an undesirable intrusion into people's lives. James Graham believes that Cruddas and his Compass colleagues are the coming force within the Labour Party, but that they have failed to overcome their own 'centralising instincts.' Read the rest of this post...

A city known for its football hosts a political conference

While many believe David Miliband is the only senior Labour figure young and vigourous enough to take on the Tories, his conduct as Foreign Secretary shows that he has not made the necessary break with neoliberalism.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Does Barack Obama's presidential campaign have lessons for the left in Britain? That's the question that the Fabian Society will be considering in an OurKingdom-supported debate at the Labour Party conference on Sunday.  Among the speakers will be Skills Minister David Lammy, who argued earlier this year (in a speech that is available as a podcast) that the US experience provides a model for involving a generation of young people who are socially aware but disengaged from party politics. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): It's been a remarkable couple of days. The weekend's attacks on Gordon Brown have left the Government looking weakened at the very moment when the credit crunch has taken a dramatic new turn with the demise of Lehman Brothers. Robert Peston has called it Wall Street's 'most extraordinary 24 hours since the late 1920s.' The party politics may not be the most important angle in all of this, but for what it's worth, Labour looks ever more vulnerable to critiques like this one from Janet Daley in the Telegraph: Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): This weekend's events in the Labour Party are looking more and more like an attempt at repeating the Brownite coup against Tony Blair of 2006. Following Siobhan McDonagh's resignation as a junior whip yesterday, Party vice-chair Joan Ryan and former minister  George Howarth have called for a leadership election. Significantly, Howarth is also one of 12 MPs who have demanded a change of direction in Progress Magazine, the organ of what, with apologies to Charles Clarke, is generally seen as the Blairite caucus within the party.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Iain Gray has just been announced as the new leader of the Labour Party in the Scottish Parliament, the BBC reports. Meanwhile the Greens are set to become the latest Scottish Party to change their leader, with the news that Robin Harper is to step down.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Scottish Labour Party will have a new leader by this weekend. The Scotsman suggests that Wendy Alexander's successor could quickly find themselves at odds with Westminster: In London, the government is trying to keep down wage inflation and will not provide any more money for public-sector wages. In Scotland, the party is going through a leadership campaign where two of the candidates have been backed by unions involved in the strike action. What this means is that, when Labour in Scotland does get its new leader this weekend, the party here will almost certainly be in favour of strike action while the party in England is not.

Tom Griffin (London, OK):In the wake of Charles Clarke's attack on Gordon Brown last week, the weekend commentary evinced a widespread view that the Labour party is paralysed, doomed under Gordon Brown, but incapable of getting rid of him. In the latest edition of Tribune, Labour MP Peter Kilfoyle underlines the difficulties: The actual constitutional mechanisms covering prime ministerial resignations are unclear. What if Brown is forced out in favour of candidate A; goes to the Palace, but recommends candidate B as his successor? Worse still, what if the ex-Prime Minister believed the only way to pre-empt a messy succession campaign for the party in government was to recommend a dissolution of Parliament to the Queen? These are pertinent questions because, unlike the Tories, Labour does not have a clear and efficient way of removing its leader. Our current system was designed precisely to deter a challenge to an incumbent. On the other hand, it had assumed an election when there was a vacancy. The unelected succession of Gordon Brown to replace Tony Blair ran counter to that assumption and weakens Brown’s position.  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Charles Clarke may not have won much overt support for his attack on Gordon Brown this week, but his thesis that the future of the Labour Party cannot be understood in terms of Blairite and Brownite cliques seems to have won more general assent. At Comment is Free, the Fabian Society's Sunder Katwala has pointed out that many of Clarke's own policy prescriptions don't fit the Blair/Brown New Labour template. In another piece on the Fabians' new Next Left blog (also at Liberal Conspiracy), Katwala suggests the same is true of many younger members of the Cabinet: the generation of 40 and 30-somethings in the Labour Party have no interest at all in carrying the personal allegiances of 1997 around for the next twenty years. Which is lucky – as I doubt Ed Miliband wants to lead a rival army to take on his brother. If there is one thing a ‘Next Left’ is about, it has to be about coming up with new answers, not thinking the work was done a generation ago.  

Gareth Young (Lewes, CEP): The Scottish Claim of Right of 1988 was signed by all the Scottish Labour MPs, with the exception of Tam Dalyell.  In 1997, with the advent of the Labour Government of the UK, one third of that initial cabinet (8 out of 24) had signed that claim and were thus pivotal in influencing the Labour UK Government, which issued the white paper, the Scotland Devolution Bill 1998. The Scottish Claim of Right acknowledged that the Scottish people have the sovereign right to decide the form of government best suited to their needs.  That 'form of government' must include independence as well as devolution, yet those cabinet members do not seem in any great hurry to hold a referendum on independence. When they signed the Claim quite possibly it never occurred to them that the Scottish people might decide to get rid of them altogether. They should be reminded of it at every opportunity.  Rather than display a willingness to hold a referendum on independence, apart from Wendy Alexander's short-lived "Bring it on!", the Unionists claim instead that because there is a Unionist majority in the Scottish Parliament, the people of Scotland have "voted for the Union". It is just possible that the SNP may gain a majority of the Scottish Westminister seats at the next General Election, and if so that will mean, according to Unionist logic, that the people of Scotland have voted for independence. I'm sure they will try wriggle out of that. The Scottish Claim of Right was a principled recognition of the sovereign right of the people.  It is hypocritical of Gordon Brown, and others who signed that Claim of Right, to now deny that same sovereign right to the people of England, especially as recognition of the Scottish sovereign right has moved power away from Westminster in a way that has damaged English voters.

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Guardian brings us news of the latest edition of Progress magazine, in which Skills Minister David Lammy makes Labour's latest attempt to develop a line of attack against David Cameron: The truth is that the Tories' change in language has touched a nerve, reflecting a big gap in our own political narrative. Yet beneath Cameron's rhetoric lies the basic philosophy that failed Britain in the past. The Tories demand responsibility without offering support; they appeal for fraternity without any real belief in equality; they have finally noticed 'society,' but remain implacably hostile to the state. Over at Comment is Free, David Marquand suggests that the Tory leader won't be so easily pinned down Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): If The Scotsman is to be believed, Gordon Brown is set to take the advice of Iain MacWhirter rather than Martin Kettle over the fortcoming by-election in his Fife backyard: A final decision has not yet been taken, but it is understood Labour leaders favour either Thursday, 30 October or Thursday, 6 November for the contest. The November date is the favourite simply because it comes only a day after the expected result of the American presidential election, and if Labour was to lose, party managers believe the bad news would be partly buried by the US coverage.  Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): OK's summer limerick competition (details here) has reached the halfway mark. There still a week to go until August 30th for anyone who wants to trying their hand at bringing out the latent poetry in Liam Byrne's prose. Here are some of the best entries so far: Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): The Scottish press is full of speculation this weekend that former First Minister Henry McLeish has been sounded out for the Labour candidacy in the Glenrothes by-election.  The Sunday Times reports: Senior party figures are alarmed that Henry McLeish, the former first minister who resigned in disgrace in 2001, has emerged as a frontrunner for the vacant Glenrothes seat, following the death of John MacDougall, the Labour MP, last week. Some local activists and members of the British government believe McLeish may be the party’s only hope because he is a popular figure locally, having represented the area as an MP and MSP.  Read the rest of this post...

Anthony Barnett (London, OK): Following my post about the fabulous call to modernity, fraternity and Britishness by Borders and Immigration Minister Liam Byrne, we are launching OK's summer limerick competition. The limerick must begin with: "I met an eloquent lady in Edgbaston." and end with: "if we only put our minds to it." As I report, Byrne writes about how he met "an exceptionally eloquent lady from Edgebaston" who convinced him that all we needed to to so sort out Britain for the best is to: "put our minds to it". The Minister describes how he was immediately convinced. The winner will get a free copy of The Athenian Option. Competition closes Saturday, 30th August.

Geoffrey Bindman (London, BIHR): The interesting OurKingdom debate on Labour After Brown risks becoming too remote from actual policy needs as it discusses general strategy. Of course, government needs to be fairer and extend justice in a way that supports individuals while building shared values. If this is what David Miliband and Sunder Katwala mean by combining social democracy with liberalism, who could disagree? Except that it runs the danger of phrase-making. What I am looking for is a much more principled approach to endorsing the need for public values that explicitly face down the marketisation of government that has been the tragic hallmark of New Labour. After a lifetime of support, I have witnessed this process at first hand, as the legacy of 1945 is systematically undone. What is happening is wrong. We need the new generation to identify that it is wrong and pledge to reverse it. Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): For the first time since the advent of devolution, the Scottish Labour Party is going through a competitive leadership contest, and it's proving to be an invigorating debate. In an incisive analysis in the Sunday Times, former First Minister Henry McLeish argued that the party's Holyrood leader needs greater powers: The current leadership debate in Scotland has given Labour a unique chance to address five key areas: the need for the party in Scotland to have much greater autonomy; the need for the Scottish Labour leader to have more power and a wider authority; the need for a radically reformed and flexible Union fit for the new purposes of the 21st Century; the need, to embrace a coherent, modern post-devolution strategy for the constitutional future of our country; and the need for Labour in Scotland to reconnect with its base with a new narrative of what it stands for in this new era.   Read the rest of this post...

Tom Griffin (London, OK): Sunny Hundal suggested last month that the debate about the direction of the Labour Party could be cast as a confrontation between two party pressure groups, the Blairite Progress and the centre-left Compass. If that's true, then Friday's Guardian exchange between Progress director Robert Philpot and Compass chair Neal Lawson may be a useful guide to the parameters of the argument. Read the rest of this post...

David Marquand (Oxford, oD author): I notice some respondents to my comment on Glasgow East have queried my statement that the UK was the first modern state. On reflection, I think I was wrong. The Netherlands was the first, I now believe. As to when the UK achieved that status, I think you can make a good case for saying England and Scotland both became modern states in 1688/9 when they drove the Stuart dynasty from the throne. But I still think the United Kingdom as such, rather than Scotland and England separately, really became modern at the time of the Hanoverian succession - a succession determined by Parliament, remember, not by descent. Perhaps the best date would be 1715, when the first Jacobite rebellion was defeated. Or perhaps you might prefer 1746 when Bonnie Prince Charlie was finally routed. Of course another possible line of argument is that the UK is still not a modern state, since sovereignty is still not firmly located in the people. Read the rest of this post...