Your guide to the key intellectual texts, thinkers and activists
The rising parliamentary stars
Rachel Reeves
Former Bank of England economist, now shadow work and pensions secretary, she is a key player in Miliband's modernisation plans, recognising the need for spending restraint.
Tristram Hunt
Catapulted into key job as shadow education secretary in a recent reshuffle. A TV and academic historian prepared to take on Michael Gove over schools reform.
Gloria De Piero
A former TV journalist recently elevated to the shadow cabinet, with responsibility for women and equalities. She is a good communicator, not afraid to push radical ideas.
Chuka Umunna
Smooth on TV and radio, and reliable on complex City issues in his role as shadow business secretary.
Emma Reynolds
Another with experience of life outside Westminster. Set up a lobbying firm in Brussels before entering parliament and is now shadow minister for housing.
The business gurus
Michael E Porter
One of the founders of responsible capitalism and author of a seminal article on "shared-value capitalism" for the Harvard Business Review, looking at business models including Unilever (see below)
Dominic Barton
managing director of management consultancy McKinsey
He wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review on the flaws of western "quarterly capitalism", arguing it is too short term and comparing it with Asian, and particularly Japanese, capitalism.
Paul Polman
chief executive of Unilever
Widely recognised as a proponent of responsible capitalism, he scrapped quarterly reporting at Unilever.
The ideas gurus
Roberto Unger
Influential Brazilian political and social theorist who argues for a moral and spiritual revival in socialism to escape its current "dictatorship of no alternatives".
Jon Cruddas
The MP for Dagenham, head of the policy review pushing for a radical agenda for a modern, post-crash left.
Kathy Thelen
An influential economics professor who challenges common assumptions among progressives.
Mariana Mazzucato Author of The Entrepreneurial State (2013), this Sussex University economist argues for a proactive role for the state in developing new technologies.
The journals
Juncture
IPPR's journal of politics and ideas, whose wide choice of contributors is inspired by the 1980s success of Marxism Today.
New Statesman
Venerable magazine now enjoying a new lease of life as the go-to weekly for Milibandites.
Renewal
Voice of the One Nation group of Labour activists.
The aides
Stewart Wood
Former Treasury adviser, Oxford don, Gordon Brown aide: instrumental in developing the analysis of shifting ideological moods and structural failings in British capitalism that make radical reform necessary.
Marc Stears
Oxford University friend of Ed Miliband's, and now professor at Oxford and Miliband speechwriter. He is more sceptical of the capacity of the state to deliver social change than the more orthodox Labour view.
Sonia Sodha
A key figure in shaping a new business and economic agenda when she worked as Ed Miliband's aide from 2010-12.
Stan Greenberg
A US pollster and former adviser to Bill Clinton, he now does Ed Miliband's polling; influential, especially on how to win from a populist left position. Also served as a polling adviser to vice-president Al Gore, Nelson Mandela and Tony Blair, among many others.
Arnie Graf
Community organiser. Loved by Miliband as an avuncular American progressive, he provides a comfort blanket of "new politics". The importance of this to Milibandism should never be underestimated.
Independent thinktanks and charities
IPPR (Institute for Public Policy Research)
Run by Nick Pearce (former policy unit head at No 10), it devises policy in terms of what might work in an era of no money.
Resolution Foundation
Its director, Gavin Kelly (former deputy chief of staff to Gordon Brown), is the man with the PowerPoint slides that tell the whole squeezed-middle story.
Which?
Consumer charity whose head, Richard Lloyd, a former No 10 adviser, has a backstage pass to the offices of Eds Miliband and Balls.
The key books
Varieties of Capitalism (2001)
by Peter A Hall (ed) David Soskice Concludes that there is more than one path to economic success. Nations need not converge to a single Anglo-American model.
The Great Transformation (1944)
by Karl Polanyi
Dealing with the huge changes ushered in by the emerging market economy, and said to be Ed Miliband's favourite book.
Winner-Take-All Politics (2010)
by Jacob S Hacker and Paul Pierson Identifies the real culprit behind one of the great economic crimes of our time – the growing inequality of incomes between the vast majority of Americans and the richest of the rich.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2014)
by Thomas Piketty
Paris professor argues that the main driver of inequality – the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic growth – threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir discontent and undermine democratic values.
by David Sainsbury
The former Labour minister argues for a "new" capitalism with its sharper teeth blunted, avarice expunged, fairness and social justice imprinted on its soul – and innovation and entrepreneurship providing the rocket fuel.
by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett
Why do we mistrust people more in the UK than in Japan? Why do Americans have higher rates of teenage pregnancy than the French? What makes the Swedish thinner than the Australians? The answer: inequality, say the authors.
What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets (2013)
by Michael Sandel
A rage against the commodification of everyday life.
The Bully Pulpit (2013)
by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Biography of Teddy Roosevelt. The book Miliband gave to his senior aides for Christmas. Roosevelt was not against capitalism. He was a Republican, after all. His ambition was to fix capitalism to make it better serve more Americans.
0 comments:
Post a Comment