Tag: Pensioner

Politics is raw in Britain today. Political life moved slowly and predictably: most western democracies seemed much the same from one year to the next. Conflict, whether between ideologies, social classes, political parties or other interest groups, ought to become a thing of the past. In 2005, the year New Labour won its third consecutive general election, Chantal Mouffe, a Belgian political theorist who had been living and teaching in Britain for more than 30 years without attracting much attention outside academia, published a short, sharp book called On the Political. “You have to think back to that feeling of liberation,” Giddens told me. He became Labour leader the following year. “The weakness of the Tories drained turnout,” says David Miliband, one of New Labour’s more thoughtful figures, who became an MP in 2001. “When she described the third way as trying to have ‘politics without enemies’, I remember thinking, ‘She’s got a point!’” he told me. One of the paradoxes – you could say hypocrisies – of New Labour was that in order to create a more consensual politics it first had to dominate those who didn’t believe in it. That turned out to be an approach for the good times.