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Chapter 4 - Trawling the Past as a Guide to the Future

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2023

David Coates
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University, North Carolina
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Summary

“Onions can be eaten leaf by leaf, but you cannot skin a live tiger paw by paw: vivisection is its trade, and it does the skinning first. If the Labour party is to tackle its job with some hope of success it must mobilize behind it a body of conviction as resolute and informed as the opposition in front of it. The way to create it, and the way when created for it to set about its task, is not to prophesy smooth things. Support won by such methods is a reed shaken by every wind.”

R. H. Tawney

“So why is the centre-left by and large not benefiting from the failures of [its] political opponents? The answer lies in its absorption of the politics of the centre-right, going back almost three decades.”

Wolfgang Münchau, 20 September 2016

“If Jeremy Corbyn is the answer, then Labour is asking the wrong question.”

The Observer, 19 July 2015

It is a feature of very dark nights that they tend to be followed by particularly bright mornings – or at least that the contrast between the two states of being always seems to be remarkably sharp. The morning of 9 June 2017 in the United Kingdom was one such moment of sharpness: a morning of unexpected brightness after an otherwise long night of political darkness for centre-left parties on both sides of the Atlantic – a night that stretched back to at least the May 2010 general election in the UK case, and in the US one to the Republican Party’s recapture of the House of Representatives later in that same year (with that capture softened only slightly by Obama’s retention of the presidency in 2012). There was brightness for the UK centre-left in June 2017 in the fact that the election result was far better for the Labour Party than most commentators, including sympathetic ones, had thought likely; and there was brightness too in the simple partisan pleasure of watching more conservative political figures no longer sweep all before them. But elections always tell wider stories, and the one in June 2017 certainly did.

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Publisher: Agenda Publishing
Print publication year: 2017

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