Um…

Ed Miliband has been an adviser to Gordon Brown since 1994 (!). It’s hard to think of many people more New Labour than that.

James Purnell was an advisor to Tony Blair as early as 1989, and worked in no. 10 as a SpAd from 1997.

Dougas Alexander first worked for Gordon Brown in 1990, and has been seen as one of the Brownite posse (with Ed Miliband) since 1997 (until that called-off election presumably).

These are the replacement to the ‘old New Labour crew’? How could they be any more representative of ‘old New Labour’?

BZZZT! And the Staggers was doing so well until it named Workhouse and Miss Hoolie among Labour’s “brightest thinkers”. If yet more triangulating mediocrities like Purnell and Alexander are the best Labour have to offer, then they deserve to be buried come the General Election.

Very good points by Tim J and burkeswork @1 and 2.

Incidentally, what happened to John Cruddas? He’s been keeping a low profile of late…

claude,

“Incidentally, what happened to John Cruddas? He’s been keeping a low profile of late…”

I believe he has been gaining an h?

But if government insiders are the future for Labour, I suspect that the Liberal Democrats have a bright future (there’s something I never thought I’d say).

Why no mention of Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper?

Which list are they on?

And how about Hain? The future or the past?

I think Ed Miliband has some interesting ideas, especially about energy and climate change.

I agree on James Purnell though. His ideas at the DWP sank faster than lead balloons. And now suddenly he’s being hailed because he is in love with London Citizens? Pssssh!

I don’t buy the ‘Young Turks’; argument of the NS, for similar reasons to the earlier posters. If ‘by their works shall ye know them’, then Purnell’s workfare ‘reforms’ pretty much damn him (in his case it’s more ‘and you will know us by the trail of the dead’). Moreover, they don’t seem to form a ‘generational’ faction that could have knifed Gordon in a proper contest – maybe they were all waiting in vain for D. Miliband to sh*t or get off the pot re. a leadership bid.

Wot, no mention of Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper – and the house-price bubble?

Cruddas is the man.

After Blair and Blairism (aka the Third Way) and, for the moment, never mind the meeja, but I think the electorate is now a deal more sceptical about charismatic personalities. Btw what, exactly, is Cruddas’s charisma? I’ve forgotten.

Douglas Alexander has done great things at DFID (as did Short and Benn). Talk to anyone in the international development field – not just those in receipt of DFID funds – and they’ll tell you that he’s on the right side of all the arguments, in terms of international finance (lobbies hard for reform of the IFIs), spending priorities (education, maternal and newborn health, women) and the need for transparency and accountability in aid spending. It’s a source of constant surprise to me that so many on the left seem ignorant of, or reluctant to give credit for, NuLab’s extraordinarily positive record on international development. I’d be more than happy to see Dougy A at the upper end of the Labour party for a long time to come.

Ed M, similarly, has made big strides in the carbon debate – given the inevitable restrictions placed on him, and that DECC is a small department without much of a power base – and has been prepared to make enemies within the cabinet, including Mandelson and Brown himself (whom Ed M fell out with over the Heathrow decision, for which he has carried the can in public).

Btw what, exactly, is Cruddas’s charisma? I’ve forgotten.

1. He lives in Notting Hill.
2. He’s a Catholic.
3. He has a PhD. (i.e. proper intellectual, unlike Balls)
4. He has the unions in the bag.
5. Unlike the Milibands, or any other likely candidate, he is not associated with the mistakes of the Brown premiership.

In the mood for intelligent reading?

Read this and pass it on, because it encompasses Labour’s lovely “spin Doctors” and the Mirror and the Sun:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v27/n07/jenny-diski/mirror-images

and Rupert Murdoch, too

@13: Re Cruddas, the intellectual.

How does anyone get a PhD in “Philosophy” with a thesis subject like: “An analysis of value theory, the sphere of production and contemporary approaches to the reorganisation of workplace relations” ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jon_Cruddas

I’m not too impressed and unconvinced that qualifies Cruddas as “an intellectual”. After all, Dr Goebbels had a doctorate in philosophy too.

I’m not over impressed with Ed Balls’s grasp of economic policy issues – especially when reflecting back on the glaring absence of government policies for the house-price bubble and the £1.4bn mountain of consumer debt – but at least when he talks about economics, it’s what I understand as economics and not some rehashed Marxism.

@15 Bob B: “I’m not over impressed with Ed Balls’s grasp of economic policy issues – especially when reflecting back on the glaring absence of government policies for the house-price bubble and the £1.4bn mountain of consumer debt…”

The two problem examples that you pick are about human behaviour rather than traditional government twiddling with tax rates, exchange rates, borrowing etc. If people organise their household finances on the basis of ever increasing house prices, they are setting themselves up for a shock. Ed Balls may or may not grasp that point, and we won’t truly know until the Cabinet papers are published.