Tag Archives: anthony seldon

Brown at 10: the authoritative account – which lays into Ed Balls

When it first came out Brown at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Guy Lodge was extremely well received for its authoritative detail and the revised paperback edition maintains that standard well. With Seldon being one of the founders of the modern school of contemporary history, it is no surprise that the book follows the thorough, heavily documented approach contemporary historians strive for – with over 1 million words of interviews recorded for posterity (even if many are, for the next 30 years, withheld from public view) and extensive access to private diaries.

The huge depth of research is accompanied by …

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Book review: the Anthony Seldon solution to restoring trust in national life

Written over last summer by Professor Anthony Seldon and a mini-army of assistants, Trust is at heart both an optimistic and a pessimistic book.

Optimistic because one of Seldon’s arguments is that “trusting and being trustworthy are the sovereign human virtues we need today trust is natural: we were born trusting and the state of nature is to be trusting”. Pessimistic because his formula for restoring trust is not a simple checklists of policies but rather a harder and more fundamental shift in how individuals behave and a recipe of broad change across nearly every part of public policy.

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  • David Le Grice
    Throwing one's hands up and saying that voters always had trouble knowing what we stand for is really missing the wood for the trees. As a smaller party that's ...
  • David Sparrow
    Interesting and thoughtful article in the Guardian online, I agree now is not the time the only beneficiaries will be the Tories and Labour but Ed does need to ...
  • Peter Davies
    The Labour Party has been remarkably unsuccessful at excluding the middle class. They have the second most middle class membership of any major party (The Green...
  • Tristan Ward
    @ Jason Conner "But there are some very wealthy upper middle class people on this site by the looks of things and I am not one of them. " Are you suggesti...
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    @ David Raw Historically, Tristan, when the party moved to the right (2010-15) the consequence was that the number of Lib Dem M.P.’s dropped from 57 in 201...