Glasnost?

[Martin Cassini]

Funny how ideas travel full circle. Post new-Labour thinking is in reaction to the statism of Brown and the legislative mania of Blair. Politics lecturer, peer, and adviser to Ed Miliband, Maurice Glasman, sees the "big society" as the rightful territory of traditional Labour, because, alone among the parties, Labour’s values are inclusive. He is for localism as distinct from top-down Whitehall diktat, and wants to outdo compassionate conservatism with a Labour vision of the common good. Applied to the roads, join the club. After 1945, says Glasman, Labour became elitist, managerial, bureaucratic in its style and thinking, which echoes what I’ve said about the need to reclaim the public realm from the technocrats. Labour ignored my attempts to brief them about FiT ideas five years ago, so maybe it's time to try again. Observer profile of Glasman here.