Here at New Statesman Towers we’re just putting the finishing touches to this week’s magazine, but I wanted to tell you about the remarkable polemic from Anthony Barnett you’ll find in it.
Barnett, the co-founder of Charter 88 and openDemocracy pioneer, launches a ferocious attack on Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson and argues that all left liberals have a duty to vote New Labour out of power.
But he has little time for those who claim that David Cameron’s Conservatives offer a credible alternative. The Ashcroft affair, he writes, confirmed that the two parties inhabit the same “corrupt conservatory”.
Instead, he calls on voters to support the candidate most likely to increase the number of independent and third-party MPs, and produce a hung parliament.
Here are two key extracts:
We need to hang parliament and hang the two main parties. We need to vote Brown and Mandelson out, first of all, but not vote Cameron and company in to carry on where Labour has left off. We need a hung parliament so that invention and new voices are registered, so that the public can express how it has lost trust in the political class, and different forces be allowed to reshape the political scene.
Those on the left should help Britain vote out New Labour, but frustrate the Cameroons. Brown, Mandelson and Blair had an unprecedented opportunity to reform the British system with public support. Instead, they chose to intensify the centralisation of power.
Unsurprisingly, Barnett’s definitive break with the Labour leadership has already provoked a hostile reaction from some. So, in the first of a series of replies to the piece, the distinguished academic David Marquand rejects calls for a hung parliament and accuses Barnett of preferring a minority Cameron government to any sort of Labour administration.
Make sure you pick up the new issue tomorrow and join the debate about the future of the left.
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