Blog

Lockdown’s moral mission creep

The campaign that called on people to stay at home to “protect the NHS” was effective and necessary; its upshot, however, is that we have all spent a more than a year engaged in a campaign of state-sponsored curtain twitching of a particularly extreme bent.

2001: Revisiting the ‘Death’ of Multiculturalism

It is twenty years since British cultural politics was reconfigured around the assumed death of multiculturalism, and the ascendance of populist xenophobic anti-immigration identity politics. Stuart Cartland reassesses this history and asks how its effects can be reversed.

Ten First Thoughts on Batley and Spen

A week after Batley and Spen went to the polls Mark Perryman offers ten thoughts on Labour’s narrowest of victories.

Ten first thoughts on Amersham

Mark Perryman argues that the result of the Chesham and Amersham by-election suggests the need for Labour to work with other progressive parties

The right-hand man

Richard McNeill Douglas on Jeremy Heywood

How social democracy lost the future

How does Labour, a self-proclaimed party of social change, engender less faith in its plans for the future than the party whose name means to conserve?

Exiting Hogwarts Castle

Good politicians have their fingers to a pulse that most of us never even know is there. Once upon a time, Tony Blair had this. He doesn’t have it anymore.

What Bennism has to offer Starmer

The Labour Party faces an existential crisis. It must expose the contradictions of the new Tory agenda, and face up to the challenges facing the country.

Carers’ Agency: Building agency and institutions

A year into the pandemic, Renewal is publishing a series of essays by careworker Paul Cotterill on power, professionalisation and decommodification in care work. The final essay in this series grapples with the tasks of professionalisation, the role of progressives in facilitating the agency of careworkers, and how careworkers as a profession can lead the … Continue reading Carers’ Agency: Building agency and institutions

Carers’ Agency: Professionalisation, precedent, prejudice

A year into the pandemic, Renewal is publishing a series of essays by careworker Paul Cotterill on power, professionalisation and decommodification in care work. The second essay in this series looks back at the rise and partial fall of nursing as a profession.  While a nursing elite professionalised quickly in favourable conditions, this professionalisation was … Continue reading Carers’ Agency: Professionalisation, precedent, prejudice

Carers’ Agency: Power and professionalisation

A year into the pandemic, Renewal is publishing a series of essays by careworker Paul Cotterill on power, professionalisation and decommodification in care work. This first essay looks at power and powerlessness in relation to careworkers, moving towards a core argument of this series: that a way to resolve the powerlessness wrought by decommodification in … Continue reading Carers’ Agency: Power and professionalisation

Renewal 29/1

Renewal 29/1 is finally out in print! Subscribers should receive their copies soon, if they haven’t done so already. We’ve put up four articles from the current issue for free: James Stafford on Labour’s patriotism problem, Stella Creasy and Karl Pike on narrating the covid crisis, Morgan Jones on Young Labour’s ‘fully automated luxury factionalism’, … Continue reading Renewal 29/1

From Momentum to Conundrum

Is change afoot amongst Labour’s beleaguered left? Mark Perryman seems to think so.

Labour, the nation and the world

The worldwide shift away from ‘hyper-globalization’, towards a greater role for the nation state in economic organisation, creates an opportunity for Labour. It allows us to imagine a distinctive project of national renewal that links domestic and foreign policy.

Rural Renewal

The British countryside is at a particularly perilous moment. Starmer is right to address this, but needs to be careful not to further entrench urban/rural divides.

How to make Starmerism work

Work can’t frame every policy or position, but it can offer a substantive unifying programme.

Respectable radicalism?

Anneliese Dodds has set out a framework that would have been fine under the old regime—in fact, it marks a return to the Corbynomics of 2017.

Big v Small Politics

Labour politics is all-too-often a spectator sport. Mark Perryman argues we need a transformational political culture; ‘small’ politics – politics from below – has the potential to generate the broad political alliances that we need.

Values, virtues and socialism: a reply to Jobelius and Vӧssing

Debate and discussion about how social democratic parties should be defined and what such parties should be trying to achieve goes back many decades and will continue. Jobelius and Vӧssing have made a significant intervention. But to be convincing, it needs to be clearer by which values social democratic parties should be defined and why those values are of most importance for social democratic parties. Clarifying both the relationship between social democratic parties and socialism, and the meaning of socialism, would greatly aid that task.

Where next for the soft left?

Open Labour gained 9% of the vote in the recent NEC elections. Founder member Tom Miller talks to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite about its strategy for building the soft left’s influence within Labour, and what defines the soft left approach.

Teaching about Justice in the Time of Trump—And Beyond

Why did so many people vote for the cynicism and egoism that Donald Trump represents? Thad Williamson examines the reasons for Trump’s success, and suggests that we must make political struggles and material interests central to our analyses of social justice.

After Trump, before Biden: What’s next for the American left?

Joe Guinan talks to Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite about the outcome of the US election, the unfolding crises of Covid19, the openings for a transformative political economy and what the strategies for the left of the Democratic party should be now.

How Donald Trump almost stole the US election using creative timing

Joe Biden is now President-Elect of the United States, partly because Donald Trump’s own efforts to steal the vote using suppression, legal challenges, and the power of timing narrowly failed. Andrew R. Hom explores the GOP’s use of creative re-timing in its efforts to time the cast and then time the count.

Anti-Semitism, morality and left populism

The true sources of Labour’s divisions for the past five years lie somewhere else altogether – at the level of approach and mindset. If we are to understand what has happened to the party since 2015 – and to stop it from happening again – we must acknowledge this.

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