Maurice Glasman
English academic, social thinker and Labour life peer in the House of Lords.
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One of the crucial problems we have as a party is that we have brought our leadership in from much too narrow a group. Basically Oxbridge graduates, in particular economics graduates, politics graduates, social scientists and lawyers. We need to reconnect to working-class communities, we have to reconnect to ethnic minority communities and bring up real leaders from within the people we represent.
On the face of it, these look like bad times for Labour and for Ed Miliband's leadership. There seems to be no strategy, no narrative and little energy. Old faces from the Brown era still dominate the shadow cabinet and they seem stuck in defending Labour's record in all the wrong ways: we didn't spend too much money, we'll cut less fast and less far, but we can't tell you how.
What I've learnt is when you walk into a family argument and people tell you it's about principle don't get involved. There is more to life than principles.
We show no relish for reconfiguring the relationship between the state, the market and society. The world is on the turn, yet we do not seem equal to the challenge.
We've got to reinterrogate our relationship with the EU on the movement of labour. The EU has gone from being a sort of pig farm subsidised bloc to the free movement of labour and capital. Britain is not an outpost of the UN. We have to put the people in this country first.
New Labour’s community development work was all private-sector driven, consultation-tinged regeneration that was done to poor people rather than being controlled by them. I found it, on the whole, a massive waste of money.
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