Tag Archives: james purnell

Ed Maxfield

Opinion: Reassessing New Labour

By Ed Maxfield | Mon 31st October 2011 - 3:54 pm

It is worth buying Reassessing New Labour just to read James Purnell’s short preface. New Labour’s would-be philosopher king pretty much disappeared from view after Labour chose the wrong Miliband as leader. Purnell’s piece highlights perfectly the challenge Labour faces in coming to terms with its 2010 election defeat. It is brilliantly lucid in assessing why Labour lost. It is extremely limited in its analysis of how to recover. In particular it completely ignores the 500lb gorilla in the corner – the economy. I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Diamond and Kenny’s book brings together a range of contributions …

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Posted in Books and Op-eds | Also tagged , , , and | 4 Comments
NewsHound

LibLink: Nick Clegg – Poverty plus a pound isn’t enough

By NewsHound | Wed 10th November 2010 - 1:24 pm

Over in The Guardian, Nick Clegg writes,

All governments promise welfare reform. Very few deliver. In 1997 Labour promised to “cut the bills of social failure” and to “make work pay”. But during its 13 years in office the welfare bill rose by 40% to £87bn. People moving into work can still lose more than 90% of every pound they earn: a punitive tax burden on the shoulders of the poor.

The real tragedy, however, is not the cost of the welfare system. It is the price paid by the most disadvantaged, too often condemned to a life on benefits. Nearly 1.9

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged , and | 70 Comments
Stephen Tall

Where next for Lib-Lab cooperation?

By Stephen Tall | Tue 20th July 2010 - 12:35 pm

Two former Labour leadership possibles-never-contenders have talked in the past week about the future prospects for the Lib Dems and the Labour party forming a coalition at some point in the future. Their differing stances say a lot about the current state of British politics. But what they say about the future?

First up, John Denham, the shadow Communities and Local Government Secretary, who made plain his anger at the Lib Dems last week, according to a report in The Independent:

Labour would demand the resignation of Nick Clegg before doing a deal with the Liberal Democrats in a future hung

…

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Posted in Op-eds | Also tagged | 85 Comments
Stephen Tall

What Nick told Gordon (according to Peter) when asking him to quit: “Please understand I have no personal animosity whatsoever.”

By Stephen Tall | Mon 12th July 2010 - 1:20 pm

The first of the post-New Labour memoirs, Lord (Peter) Mandelson’s The Third Man, begins its serialisation in The Times today.

Those who pay for the paper, in print or online, will have the joy of relishing its every detail. If like me you’re reliant on the Press Association’s fillet, it seems the big splash is what we knew already: that Nick Clegg told Gordon Brown he would have no option but to resign if there were to be any chance of Labour and the Liberal Democrats cutting a deal.

Unlike every other Labour MP except James Purnell, however, Nick did …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , and | 23 Comments
Mark Pack

Fight to succeed James Purnell turns nasty

By Mark Pack | Sun 14th March 2010 - 9:10 pm

Tameside Eye has the story about the fight to win the Labour selection in Stalybridge & Hyde, where James Purnell is standing down. It has both its serious and its farcical elements.

The serious: a series of anonymous emails have been sent out making a wide number of personal attacks on Cllr Jonny Reynolds, one of those in the running to be Labour candidate. The emails have come from two IP address: one which has also been used by another Labour Councillor, Sean Perry-Parker, to send out emails and a second one which is a local council IP address (and therefore …

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Posted in News | Also tagged , , , and | 2 Comments
Stephen Tall

Purnell to quit as MP – what does he mean by that?

By Stephen Tall | Fri 19th February 2010 - 11:00 am

Well, there’s a turn-up: James Purnell – former secretary of state for work and pensions, the man who almost brought down Gordon Brown, and seemingly a strong contender for the Labour leadership after the next election – has announced he will be quitting Parliament at the general election. Here’s how The Times reports it:

Labour insiders said that he was telling his Stalybridge and Hyde local party that with regret he was standing down to seek new challenges. …

After his resignation Mr Purnell returned to the back benches and has played a big part in running the Demos centre-left

…

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Posted in News | Also tagged and | 11 Comments
Stephen Tall

The 14 non-Lib Dem MPs who backed the Single Transferable Vote

By Stephen Tall | Wed 10th February 2010 - 6:43 pm

The House of Commons yesterday voted by 365 votes to 187 to hold a UK-wide referendum on changing the voting system next year from first-past-the-post to the alternative vote. The Lib Dems reluctantly voted for the alternative vote, as the most modest of improvements on the current, broken system.

But the party, in the person of Cambridge MP David Howarth, also moved an amendment to leave out ‘an alternative-vote’ and insert ‘a single transferable vote’ – in other words, to ask Parliament to approve an electoral system which would at last reflect the votes cast for parties across the country, …

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Posted in Parliament | Also tagged , , , and | 13 Comments
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