More from my head provoked by Alex Nunn’s book  “The Candidate”, I am reading the chapter on the media. Alex states that George Eaton wrote a negative piece in the Statesman on Corbyn, and ended up supporting Cooper; it reminded me of Jason Cowley’s article, “The fall of Labour’s golden generation”, available behind their identity/pay walls here, or as a .pdf, written a month or so later.

This, though is the quote that makes me remember the article, it’s anonymously second hand,

Parties in the end are machines for capturing power and there is a sort of life cycle, and you’ve got to be absolutely vigilant about renewing it. Blair and Brown thought they could renew the machine with very clever people, but with one or two exceptions they were – what is the word I’m searching for? – they were servants, they weren’t masters, they didn’t really have a vision of where they wanted to go.

I originally reviewed the article in Sept 2016.

Servants, not Masters
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2 thoughts on “Servants, not Masters”

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  • DavePost author
    21st August 2020 at 5:51 pm
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    I made a diigo bookmark of the article and highlighted both the quote above and the following two,

    Both Gordon and Tony in their separate ways must shoulder a huge amount of the blame for what has happened to the Labour Party because it was obvious to me ten years ago that we were hollowing out,” a former MP told me. “It was absolutely clear . . . [but] no one was interested. I can’t tell you the degree of apathy, indifference, because every single one of them thought it was going to go on for ever.

    And in the end, the eventually demonstrable careerist hostilities within the New Labour Project, meant that Brown had no successor. for Labour’s leadership. Abbott won more votes than both Burnham and Balls. Ed Miliband as the least obvious continuity candidate won. .

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