Open Democracy

The Future of the Left and Neo-Liberalism’s Appeal as a Liberation Movement Gerry Hassan Open Democracy. March 15th 2010 The Future of the Left is one of those perennial subjects that run through time memorial, from the crises of how to deal with Nazism and fascism in the 1930s, to the problems of Stalinism in the 1950s, affluence in the 1960s, and Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s. On Friday I contributed to a panel discussion on this subject which also included Tariq Ali, historian Tristram Hunt and Chris Mullin, MP and was chaired by journalist Ruth Wishart. This was

Continue Reading The Future of the Left and Neo-Liberalism’s Appeal as a Liberation Movement

Goodbye to ‘Churchillism’: From Munich and Suez to the Iraq War Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, March 5^th 2010 Gordon Brown’s role in the Iraq war will come under focus today when he gives evidence to the Chilcot inquiry. The Iraq war is the point where Tony Blair lost his political touch, and became ‘Bliar’ in the eyes of many voters. Despite four previous inquiries into the war, none of them as comprehensive as this, a sense of anger, frustration and lack of trust now pervades how the public view politicians and the conflict. Much of this anger is addressed personally

Continue Reading Goodbye to ‘Churchillism’: From Munich and Suez to the Iraq War

An Age of Anger: The London Review of Books and the British Crisis of Democracy Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, March 1st 2010 The current crisis of the British state, politics and democracy should be a golden moment for radicals, constitutional reformers and campaigners. It should also be an era in which left and liberal publications have the opportunity to engage and involve a wider audience about the state of the nation and democracy. One of those publications is the ‘London Review of Books’, which sees itself as urbane, cosmopolitan, liberal minded, addressing British concerns and global issues in a challenging

Continue Reading An Age of Anger: The London Review of Books and the British Crisis of Democracy

The Curtain Closes on an Era: The End of New Labour Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, February 23^rd 2010 We all know that our politics are becoming more and more trivialised, sensationalised and reduced to gossip, innuendo and about people and processes, as the storm of the last few days has illustrated on Andrew Rawnsley’s book, Gordon Brown’s behaviour, and the counter-actions of Christine Pratt of the National Bullying Helpline. Rawnsley is one of the leading culprits of politics as devoid of content and in particular, values, interests and ideas. Instead, everything in his political world is about information, and in

Continue Reading The Curtain Closes on an Era: The End of New Labour

The Man Who Saved the World: The Many Faces of Gordon Brown Gerry Hassan Open Democracy. February 15^th 2010 All week the British media have trailed two domestic political stories – one about the unravelling of the Cameroon Conservative project, and the other about Gordon Brown’s interview with Piers Morgan (1). The Brown interview marks many claim a new phase in ‘the Broon project’: one his backroom staff have often been working on day and night with no visible result – namely the humanising of the coarse, dull, workaholic ‘Broonman’. The other angle is of the slow corroding of our

Continue Reading The Man who Saved the World: The Many Faces of Gordon Brown

Putting the Debate over Labour 'Cuts' into History Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, January 14^th 2010 The mainstream media coverage of the future of public spending has become entirely focused on the need for future spending cuts with the only issue left in doubt that of timing, the degree of brutal language used and the areas which are supposedly meant to be exempt: the latter thus combining hardness and special pleading! Nick Clegg, Lib Dem leader, got into a small amount of bother transgressing the boundaries of this new consensus when he talked of the need for ‘savage public spending cuts’.

Continue Reading Putting the Debate over Labour ‘Cuts’ into History

Living in a World of Make Believe: The Myth Makers of the Globalising Age Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, January 6^th 2010 Thirty years ago in another economic and political age the Glasgow University Media Group analysed the biases of current TV news in a series of seminal reports beginning with ‘Bad News’ (1). They made the case that across a range of issues: economic, industrial and political, news which professed itself to be ‘impartial’ was instead imbued with a deeply selective and partial view of the world. Since then a much more powerful, partisan and explicitly ideological account of the

Continue Reading Living in a World of Make Believe: The Myth Makers of the Globalising Age

The End of a Year, the Beginning of the End of an Era Gerry Hassan December 31^st 2009 It's not just the end of a year and of the decade. I suspect 2008-9 will go down as the end of an era: a pivotal transition point – similar to 1973 – our demarche from a thirty year span of neo-liberalism to the start of ...  all we can say at the moment is that a contest has begun. The last year had many dimensions. Globally there was the G20 summit in London in April which saw Gordon Brown take centre

Continue Reading The End of a Year, the Beginning of the End of an Era

The Late Great Project of British Nation Building: Pathe News Presents from the ESRC! Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, December 16th 2009 A few years ago the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) decided to initiate an annual series called ‘Britain in ….’ each year. This was on one level some wheeze about academics thinking they were advancing public information/engagement, hitting some KPI target on Knowledge Transfer, while branding and positioning itself on newsagent shelves in the slipstream of ‘The Economist The World in …’ annual series. For all its faults as a magazine, ‘The Economist The World ….’ series is

Continue Reading The Late Great Project of British Nation Building: Pathe News Presents from the ESRC!

Looking into the Void: James Naughtie’s Northern Odyssey Part Two Gerry Hassan Open Democracy, November 27th 2009 After James Naughtie’s laugh a minute, cliché-ridden put down of Scotland and the town of Kilmarnock, I listened to his latest jaunt on the ‘Today’ programme (1) into the northern territories with a mix of fear and trepidation. This was an altogether different tone of programme, reflective and somewhat nuanced, allowing shades of grey, complexity and ambiguity, and thus making the earlier programme even more perplexing in its black and white putdowns, self-satisfaction and labelling of the whole town of Kilmarnock as a

Continue Reading Looking into the Void: James Naughtie’s Northern Odyssey Part Two