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Campaigning for Labour Candidate Keir Cozens in Great Yarmouth. This Saturday and Sunday, Gill and I were in Great Yarmouth to canvass and leaflet for Keir. The train cost only £45 for the two of us (with railcard) return. We stayed in a cheap & cheerful B&B near Britannia Pier.
- September
A blog about Labour movement, trade unions, pensions,...
- September
Jun 5, 2024 · By John Gray. As Britain comes to the end of its worst period of governance in modern times, Labour will inherit the ruins of the regime it planned to bring under new management. Keir Starmer’s offer is change without disruption – an elusive notion that, for legions of discontented voters, means no change at all.
John Gray. @grayee ‧. 26 subscribers ‧ 91 videos. I'm a trade union activist and Labour Party Councillor. Interested in centre left politics, history & future of labour movement family,...
- A Feeble Victory
- The Road to War
- “We Thought The Numbers Were Going to Be Tiny”
- A Failure of Nerve
- “I’m Afraid to Tell You There’S No Money Left”
- Crushed by Coalition
- A Tale of Two Milibands
- Wipeout
- False Dawn
- Broken by Brexit
In 2001 Labour won 15 more seats than Margaret Thatcher had at her peak in 1983. But Blair’s triumph was hollow: voter turnout had collapsed, falling from 71 to 59 per cent. In victory, New Labour had lost nearly three million votes. Fewer than one in four of those eligible to vote backed Labour, giving Blair a weaker mandate than any prime ministe...
Even at the 11th hour, Labour might have avoided Iraq. Andrew Adonis, a key Downing Street aide to Blair, remembers listening in astonishment as Donald Rumsfeld, the then US defence secretary, offered Labour an improbable lifeline in the days before the Commons vote on the war in March 2003. “There are workarounds,” Rumsfeld said at a press confere...
In 2005, as Labour celebrated its fragile third term, Rob Ford, then a young PhD student, wrote a paper on what he called the “iceberg issue” of that year’s election: immigration. Between 1998 and 2004, the number of new migrant and asylum settlements in the UK had more than doubled. Public concern over immigration as the key issue facing Britain h...
If three acts in Labour’s long tragedy occurred under Blair, only one dates directly to Gordon Brown. It is the most able and disruptive leaders who shoulder the greatest responsibility for Labour’s fall, and as prime minister Brown was neither. He offered a reheating of New Labour, but without its sense of purpose, leading man or chancellor – the ...
When the financial crash hit in 2008, Gordon Brown reacted adroitly, but Labour was soon damned politically. Stewart Wood, an adviser to Brown, tells me that the prime minister knew Labour’s response “would give the Tories a total gift for the next election”; but that was the price of good policy. The Tories capitalised. George Osborne had promised...
Osborne had a willing deputy as he rewrote the narrative of the financial crisis: Nick Clegg. The Lib Dem leader’s decision to go into coalition proved subtly lethal for Labour. At first, it looked like a boon. Lib Dem support collapsed and most of these voters tilted left; by February 2011, Labour had leapt to 39 per cent in the polls, tying with ...
Throughout the late 2000s one figure hovered over Labour politics: David Miliband, who came within six MPs of beating his brother to the leadership in 2010. Was he the party’s lost saviour? Perhaps, or perhaps not. His critics say that he lacked the conviction to depose Brown as prime minister, and he lacked the charm to win over enough Labour MPs ...
Labour won 41 seats in Scotland in 2010. Five years later, it won one. John McTernan, who was chief of staff to the Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy in the months before the party’s collapse in 2015, recalls sitting in one focus group on a wet February night in Shotts, a small town between Glasgow and Edinburgh. When one middle-aged man dismissed ...
Ed Miliband’s team had expected to prevail in the 2015 election, only for Labour to lose badly. “The party was in trauma,” says Alan Johnson, who remembers being briefed on how to claim victory on election night. Instead, Labour collapsed in Scotland and Ukip surged under Farage, as Rob Ford predicted a decade earlier. In the shock of defeat, Milib...
The tantalising truth of Labour’s two-decade decline is that it might have been arrested at the last. Despite Corbyn’s vacuous politics and his gross inability to deal with anti-Semitism, a failure that casts a long shadow, Labour may yet have escaped its fate. Had Corbyn known where to lead the party in March 2019, it might be in power now. Labour...
John Grady for Glasgow East. 128 likes · 92 talking about this. Member of Parliament for Glasgow East
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Jul 13, 2022 · There is talk that the Liberal Democrats have demanded a commitment to electoral reform as the price of supporting a minority Labour government. In that case the Labour leader will be compelled by his dependency on a “rejoin” party to integrate Britain more deeply into European institutions.
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Mar 20, 2021 · Vote John Gray UNISON NEC Community. Yesterday I received notification that I have been accepted as an "eligible candidate" for the UNISON National Executive Council (NEC) elections 2021-2023.
