Anthony Painter

I had a busy day yesterday with two pieces published. One was in the Huffington Post which was on UK-US relations at the end of 2009. I made it a bit broader and have to confess that one or two ideas- including the Max Weber reference!- came from Jonathan Todd’s excellent post on the new multipolar world. The full article is here and was also posted on LabourList. Here’s a taster:

“It has become screamingly obvious – and brought into sharp focus at the largely failed Copenhagen Summit – that the American President has less freedom of manoeuvre now than at any time since the 1930s. This is a reality that President Obama seems to have accepted in a pragmatic way. His approach is one more of possibility than unrealistic idealism. Sure, leaders do not touch the outer limits of practicality without their imagination stretching even further but that imagination can also leave reality behind. This century may not be the ‘Chinese century’, as some suppose, but it most definitely will not be a unipolar American century either.”

Earlier in the day, my weekly LabourList column was posted. I revisited some of the strategic questions about how Labour should approach this election year. Gordon Brown released his New Year’s message yesterday which, I’m very pleased to say, contained a lot of the substance that I was looking for. I’ll leave it to your judgement whether the overall tone and message matches. Again, a taster:

One of the oldest adages in British politics is that oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. It is verging on banality to even write it. And yet, the closing months of 2009 have seen the government’s strategy seemingly resting on the diametric opposite of this. Its positioning and strategy has been about deflecting attention onto the Tories.

What has been the result? Well, taking an average of the poll score in November and December from UK Polling Report we can see that Labour has gone from an average of 27% in November to 27.7% in December. Hardly earth shattering. And the Conservatives? They’ve gone from 39.2% to 40% from November to December. Does ‘class war’ work? Judge for yourself.

There are five short months, in probability, until the election. There is only one thing that will secure a victory for Labour. That’s the government making a case for why it has the leadership, competence, and vision to guide the UK through what will inevitably be a choppy and challenging four or five years.

Finally, James Crabtree has an excellent piece on the future of the left blogosphere- Winning the Web War- in the New Statesman this week. It mentions this blog and the George Osborne blog post I wrote a couple of weeks ago thanks to the ingenuity of @thedancingflea.

Anyway, that’s it for 2009. I’m off to a tropical idyll to see in the new year- Dublin. Cheers and Happy New Year!