Letter of the week: The charm offensive

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A very interesting article by David Miliband in this week’s issue (The NS Essay, 6 March). Hannah Spencer is my new MP, and Miliband brought home just how dreary Labour’s by-election campaign was. Change is needed before the general election. “Credible and radical” are not descriptors that spring to mind when considering Keir Starmer. During the 1990s, the flair and wit of Tony Blair played well with the electorate and the media. The political goldfish bowl gives no credit to perseverance and diligence. Rather, it rewards charisma, finely tuned optics and media-savvy storytelling. At opposite ends of the political spectrum, Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski have a perceived authenticity and an ability to inspire and engage with voters in a genuine way. Contrast this with a well-meaning technocrat, telling us that he is going further and faster to deliver an agenda that no one is even listening to any more.

In a time of international crisis, Starmer’s serious and analytical approach could be an asset. But on the domestic front, he needs to reconnect with the voter base before it is too late. In this age of social media and populism, people are searching for inspiration and clarity. If Labour can’t provide this, voters will look elsewhere.
Rachel Massie, Denton, Greater Manchester

Lead by example

The standfirst of David Miliband’s article says, “after Gorton and Denton, it is time for our leaders to lead” (The NS Essay, 6 March). I hope the government can turn things around, but time is running out. While credit must be given to the Green Party for its victory in Gorton and Denton, Reform UK beating Labour in a previously safe seat may be more significant.

In 2024, facing the prospect of a parliamentary victory by the far right, parties on the left in France got together to form the New Popular Front and prevented a far-right victory. Unless there is significant progress, the Labour Party, the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats (and possibly Plaid Cymru) should start talking. They should put up just one candidate in each constituency, whoever is best placed to win that seat. A joint platform could introduce proportional representation for future general elections. This would prevent a party opposed by a majority of the electorate governing the UK. It may also make a Labour-only government impossible, but this is preferable to sleep walking into a dangerous future.
Paul Tuxworth, Solihull

While I agree with David Miliband that the government has failed to have an over-reaching philosophy or strategy, I take issue with him regarding the progressive ends he claims New Labour adopted. That government continued with the neoliberal economics of Margaret Thatcher. Since her government, neoliberalism and “the market” have pervaded everything, not only in business but also in public services, from education to the NHS. There was little that was progressive: limited reform of the House of Lords, the saddling of public services with debts under PFI, ignoring the north… I could go on, but will leave it to Thatcher, who said her biggest achievement was New Labour and Tony Blair.
Moira Sykes, Manchester

I am grateful to David Miliband for drawing my attention to RH Tawney’s 1932 essay in Political Quarterly on the task that faced Labour after the 1931 general election. Having won more seats than any other party but far short of an overall majority, Labour had to form a government. Tawney writes that the party had to choose between sticking to its principles and struggling to win support or surviving by promoting legislation acceptable to the other parties. “They threw themselves into the role of The Obsequious Apprentice, or Prudence Rewarded, as though bent on proving that… His Majesty’s Labour government could rival the most respectable of them in cautious conventionality.”

The present government is not in the same position: it has a big majority and can pass what legislation it pleases. The problem is that it appears to have no principles. Miliband quotes with approval Tawney’s view that “the function of the party is not to offer the largest possible number of carrots to the largest possible number of donkeys”. True enough, but he omits the alternative function that Tawney provides: to carry out “the large measures of economic and social reconstruction which, to the grave injury of the nation, have been too long postponed, and with that object to secure that the key positions of the economic system are under public control”.

Tawney’s 1931 book Equality was an important contribution to the renaissance of Labour thinking that culminated in the party’s transformations of Britain and the global order after 1945. Today’s Labour leadership would do well to read it.
Hugo Radice, Askrigg, North Yorkshire

In it to Gwyn it

Will Lloyd’s reference to a book on Welsh history by Gwyn A Williams brought the memories flooding back. I expect the book in question was When Was Wales? (1985), which followed a TV series Gwyn co-presented with Wynford Vaughan-Thomas. As I recall it, Wynford presented the “romantic” view of Welsh history, then Gwyn countered with his version, highly coloured by his Marxist view of history.

I first encountered Gwyn Williams 20 years earlier, when I had arrived in York as an English literature undergraduate. He had just been appointed to one of two history chairs. Word got around that he was an entertaining lecturer and students across the board flocked to the series of lectures on Marxism that he put on. I suspect much of it went over my head, but I do recall that glorious Welsh accent grappling with the enunciation of the words “dialectical materialism”, with a slight stutter on the “D”.
John Dearing, Reading

God Save the anthem

Graham Judge makes a useful point about the national anthem needing a rewrite to celebrate our nationhood and diversity (Correspondence, 6 March). But what we also desperately need is an anthem for England. At nearly all events where an English team is involved, the anthem played is that of the UK. There must be Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish who find this appropriation offensive and arrogant. Surely we English can be more imaginative. Perhaps the New Statesman should run a competition to find a new English anthem?
Nick Foster, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

There’s no need to rewrite our national anthem. All we need to do is to change from “God Save the King” to “Jerusalem”. It’s been waiting in the wings for long enough.
Mike Walsh, Espoo, Finland

The conscience of my conscience

I was disappointed by Anthony Gottlieb’s reduction of idealist philosophy to a “desperate gambit” in his review of Michael Pollan’s A World Appears (The New Society, 6 March). The notion that it is consciousness, not matter, that is fundamental is far from a “mystical” perspective – or at least, it is no less mystical than the assertion that subjective experience can emerge from combining together unconscious bits of matter in a sufficiently complex arrangement. This position has been held by the majority of scientists for 150 years, and yet we have made zero progress towards an explanation of what consciousness or, indeed, matter is.

Gottlieb would do well to look into the work of Bernardo Kastrup, whose logically robust model of analytical idealism makes a profoundly coherent and eminently rational case for consciousness being the primary “stuff” of the universe.
Ed Scott, London SE26

Her Eminence

In his review of Tracey Emin’s retrospective exhibition at Tate Modern (The New Society, 6 March), Michael Prodger claims that her art “seems uninterested in the world outside herself” and advises her to “get outside, go and draw a tree”. In her work, Emin aims to express the emotion and atmosphere of life in an original style. It is not unusual for artists to use themselves to represent the human condition. Rembrandt painted himself throughout his life: should he have drawn trees instead?
Gillian Mather, Edinburgh, Scotland

Best to Becky

In among the continuing praise for the style and substance of the New Statesman, one name seems to go largely unrecognised. My thanks to Becky Barnicoat, whose wit and concision (Outside the Box, 6 March) made me laugh in trying times.
Les Bright, Exeter

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[Further reading: I am ashamed to be an American]