The Labour tradition and the politics of paradox.

This ebook is made up of the papers and a selection of the responses to them that were the outcome of four seminars organised between October 2010 and April 2011. The seminars were held in Oxford and London and involved politicians and intellectuals whose politics ranged across the spectrum of the Labour Party.
The task of the seminars was to start laying the political and philosophical groundwork for a new Labour politics for the coming decade. The aim was to ask some fundamental questions about the condition of the country and the predicament of Labour following its defeat in the May 2010 general election. The ebook takes as its starting point the paradoxes of Labour’s tradition which constitute its ongoing relationship with tradition and modernity, nation and class, labour and capital, community and the individual, society and the market, the state and mutualism, and between belief and empiricism, romanticism and rationality, obligation and entitlement. By exploring these paradoxes the ebook aims to open up the Labour tradition to new syntheses of meaning, and so to originality and transformation. Out of this work we begin shaping a new story for Labour for the decade ahead.

Jonathan Rutherford has also written a number of articles within this e-book.