In electoral democracies generally, the traction and attraction of the main parties of the centre-left and centre-right have diminished so much that they struggle to maintain a grip on power, let alone dominate and swap power between them as they did from the 1950s to the noughties of this century.
Archives for March 2015
Latvia: no template for Scotland
It’s a commonplace of Scottish political discourse to compare our nation of 5.2m to independent near-neighbours such as the Nordics – Denmark, say, with its 5.6m – or, more recently, the Baltics, with their 6.2m in three countries. ‘We could be just like them.’ But comparisons can be facile. Latvia, with its 2m people, is a case in point.
Does classic British social democracy have a future?
Back to The Future of Socialism, by the Labour MP and former Cabinet minister Peter Hain is a bold effort to reimagine for today the most influential text by a British social democrat of the last century.