Beloved comrades.

I would like to bring light in the darkness and share a generally chirpy mood at the end of a long year.

The Labour Tradition and the Politics of Paradox was published in 2011 to great interest and controversy. Arguing that Labour had lost its way, it called for a radical politics rooted in the best of our national and labour movement traditions. Over a decade on, we are republishing it in full.

The UK stands at a moment of decision. Globalisation is rapidly giving way to a new age of geopolitics. With the Russian invasion of Ukraine the politics of blood and iron returns to the European continent and with it the demand for a new politics of national security. Both Labour and the Conservative Party must now confront the UK’s long, slow slide into a chronic state of disrepair and dysfunction. Their failure to do so has left England in a state of deep disillusionment with parliamentary democracy.

Recent days have been deeply traumatic for Labour. The predictable list of causes of our crisis have been rehearsed: poor leader, Brexit, right-wing press, the pandemic. Blame is apportioned and scapegoats called out. The most rancorous and ideologically intransigent dominate, crushing reasoned discussion. But these responses evade the reality that Labour’s crisis is deep and structural.

The experience of the loss of a sense of belonging is an important factor in the rejection of Labour, and more broadly in the reaction against liberal politics and economics. A collective feeling of dispossession and political disenfranchisement contributed toward the UK’s exit from the EU, the electoral realignment in British politics in 2019, and Labour’s fourth consecutive and worst defeat since the 1930s.

When I speak to people who grew up in Eastern Europe under Communism they tell me that it was not simply the falseness of the slogans that were so dispiriting, it was their relentless optimism. ‘Forward to a brighter future’ was a perennial favourite apparently. In this genre New Labour transcended Bolshevism in its commitment to a false progressive imperative with ‘Things Can Only Get Better’.

The 2019 General Election led to a major realignment in national politics that Labour must now resolve by bridging the divisions in the country and rebuilding its national coalition. The biggest class and cultural divide is between those with a degree who have a good chance of having a career in a well-paid profession, and those who do not and who are likely to be in low wage, low skill jobs with few prospects. To win an election Labour needs a politics that brings together these estranged, often antagonistic classes in a common cause.