I’ve just returned from Queen Mary, University of London, where some of Labour’s brightest minds, including Jon Cruddas, Jonathan Rutherford and Maurice Glasman, are meeting for a one day conference on “The Politics of One Nation Labour” (the event is being live blogged by Labour List).
Stewart Wood, Ed Miliband’s consigliere, who sits in the shadow cabinet as minister without portfolio, opened proceedings and drew laughter when he revealed that he’d just bought a copy of Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom (a favourite text of Margaret Thatcher’s). One of the main reasons he entered politics, he said, was Thatcher and her belief that “ideas could be transformational”. As Miliband has hinted in his statements since her death, he and his allies take inspiration from how she broke with the political and economic consensus of the time and established a new governing philosophy (although one might pause to note the irony of a Thatcher-esque project that describes itself as “one nation”).
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