Penny Red went to the launch of the Demos’ Open Left project:
Purnell believes that left ideology necessitates ‘choice in public services’, which is a tad rich coming from the man who single-handedly purged the welfare state of its last remaining shreds of compassion earlier this year with his intricate schemes for lie detector tests, workfare-style sickpay deals and a punitive scheme for addicts and alcoholics. Will Hutton, fashionably late as always, talked a great deal about the language of fairness and ‘just deserts’. The tone of the debate was consistently philosophical, which is absolutely fine when debate is also inclusive – but the elephant in the room was its narrow field of vision.
Purnell opened his talk by declaring that he had been refreshed, since leaving the cabinet, by the expansive vision and energy in the wide, wide political world of….thinktanks! I listened for the sniggers, but there weren’t any. And looking around I saw why: in a roomful of 100 people meant to be talking about the future of the left, there were precisely no activists and nobody who looked like they’d ever spent time on state benefits. There were, however, plenty of Guardian journalists, a lot of folks from Demos and the Fabian Society and five – five! – people I personally knew from Oxford university. So where were the have-nots in the debate? Surely it was their conversation to have as much as anyone else?
Sounds to me the future of the left could’ve been much improved by a well-timed bomb here… Demos should’ve been honest and called this the “oh shit we’re losing the next elections, bang go our cushy jobs, quick, we need to justify our existence again” project. A whole cohort of New Labour hanger-ons and coattail riders is going to be thrown out of work when the Tories get into power — the smart ones have already hitched their cart to Cameron — and they’re panicking. These are not people used to work for a living.