From Inside Housing magazine:
The credit crunch has suddenly exposed many failures of unregulated free markets. But to my mind, it is the structural problems of the housing sector that have been most starkly illuminated. The US mortgage market lit the fuse for this economic explosion, as banks gave out mortgages to people who couldn’t really afford to pay them back. The credit crunch originates in the myriad of debt repackaging to lay off these sub-prime mortgages.
From The Guardian:
New Labour thrived on good times and bull markets. The culture of easy credit and consumerism disguised its evasions of class and power. Now the markets are in freefall, and its ideological failings are brutally exposed. In the manors and town houses of the super-rich those who have brought about the calamity harbour their wealth. They are untouchable and unaccountable. Their tax havens are sacrosanct. Corfu reveals how our political elites, seduced by their opulence and power, do business with them. This is not just an economic crisis, it is a crisis of democracy.
From The Guardian:
The days of private good and public bad are over. The credibility of the banking and finance industry has crumbled before our eyes. But state intervention in the form of credit and regulation alone will not turn the crisis around. For the long term, we have to furnish crucial areas of public interest with publicly accountable, state-owned institutions. The first test of whether the government gets this is about to come.
From The Guardian:
Jon Cruddas tells Hélène Mulholland that the Labour party has lost its emotional connection with the British people
From The Guardian:
Labour is looking into the abyss, frozen into immobility. The plotters gather. But the problem cannot be reduced to the leader, nor solved by changes in personalities. The New Labour project is exhausted. There are vague plans by Blairites to resurrect it. But this is not the 1990s: the New Labour brand is now toxic. In such endings lie new beginnings. We need policies to tackle the economic meltdown, but most of all we need a politics. The status quo is no solution. We have to rediscover our idealism and our belief in our founding values – equality, justice, democracy, freedom. Socialism once gave us passion and hope and we need to draw on its intellectual resources and remake it for this new time and for new generations.
From The Independent:
It is time for the left to take on the New Conservatives. This challenge cannot be separated from the need to address the problems facing post-New Labour social democracy. By critically engaging with David Cameron’s Conservatives, the left can rethink its principles and renew itself.
From Soundings Magazine:
The Conservative Party is now resurgent, attempting to reinvent its political traditions and preparing for power. But do their politics provide any answers to the challenges that lie ahead? What political direction might they take if they win the next election?
From The Independent on Sunday:
The past few days haven’t exactly been the Labour Party’s best. Even going by the political developments of the past 12 months, this week we seem to have been peering over the edge of a large cliff. We have not exactly covered ourselves in glory with some unedifying behaviour by senior members of the party. Voters will forgive us for many things, but engaging in an internal row that would make student faction-fighting look pretty cool is not one of them. Some Labour politicians should know better.
From The Guardian:
We appear to be at an economic turning point with unpredictable, yet sure to be significant, political consequences. Just in the last week for example, in separate contributions, both Charles Clarke and Martin Jacques have argued that we are approaching a critical moment; signalling the end a long wave of capitalist evolution. These debates, in turn, echo more abstract economic discussion concerned with the end of a specific phase of capitalist development associated with certain patterns of free market economic growth and financial deregulation, productive technologies and political organisation stretching back to the mid 1970s.
From The Guardian:
To win the next election Labour has to change. This will not happen by accident. As a party we have to consciously choose to change. The debates to be had over the next couple of weeks are critical in this process as they will demonstrate whether we have the will and the capacity to do so.