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Soft Left
The soft left is a faction within the British Labour Party. The term "soft left" was coined to distinguish the mainstream left of Michael Foot from the hard left of Tony Benn. History The distinction between hard and soft left became evident during the leadership of Michael Foot (1980–83), who, along with Tony Benn, was one of the two figureheads of the party left. Supporters of Foot (an anti-communist whose background was in the Tribune group) and Benn (originally on the party's right but by the end of the 1970s to Foot's left and a more uncompromising supporter of unilateral nuclear disarmament) became increasingly polarised. In the election for the deputy leadership of the Labour Party in 1981, left-wingers such as Neil Kinnock abstained from voting for Tony Benn, signaling the emergence of an independent soft left grouping in the party. The term came to be used in contrast to hard left, who were more explicitly socialist in rhetoric, remaining associated with Ben ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Labour Party (UK)
The Labour Party is a political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The Labour Party sits on the centre-left of the political spectrum. In all general elections since 1922, Labour has been either the governing party or the Official Opposition. There have been six Labour prime ministers and thirteen Labour ministries. The party holds the annual Labour Party Conference, at which party policy is formulated. The party was founded in 1900, having grown out of the trade union movement and socialist parties of the 19th century. It overtook the Liberal Party to become the main opposition to the Conservative Party in the early 1920s, forming two minority governments under Ramsay MacDonald in the 1920s and early 1930s. Labour served in the wartime coalition of 1940–1945, after which Clement Attlee's Labour government established the National Health Service and expanded the we ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socialist Campaign Group
The Socialist Campaign Group, officially the Socialist Campaign Group of Labour MPs and also known as the Campaign Group, is a left-wing, democratic socialist grouping of the Labour Party's Members of Parliament in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom. It was formed in December 1982 following the 1981 Labour Party deputy leadership election when a number of soft left MPs, led by Neil Kinnock, refused to back Tony Benn's campaign, leading a number of left-wing Benn-supporting MPs to split from the Tribune Group to form the Socialist Campaign Group. It was at a meeting of the Campaign Group in June 2015 that the decision was taken that Jeremy Corbyn would contest for the leadership of the Labour Party. The Campaign Group maintains close links with Momentum. Origins The Socialist Campaign Group was founded in 1982 due to a disagreement within the Labour left, traditionally organised around the Tribune Group, about whom to back in the 1981 deputy leadership election. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Clare Short
Clare Short (born 15 February 1946) is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for International Development under Prime Minister Tony Blair from 1997 to 2003. Short was the Member of Parliament for Birmingham Ladywood from 1983 to 2010. For most of this period, she was a Labour Party MP; she resigned the party whip in 2006 and served the remainder of her term as an independent politician. She did not contest the 2010 general election. Shortly before her retirement from Parliament in 2010, she was strongly criticised by members of the Labour Party when she announced her support for a hung parliament, which was the result of the 2010 election. Biography Early life Short was born in Birmingham, England, in 1946 to Irish Catholic parents from County Armagh, Northern Ireland. [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bryan Gould
Bryan Charles Gould (born 11 February 1939) is a New Zealand-born British former politician and diplomat. He served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 to 1979, and again from 1983 to 1994. He was a member of the Labour Party's Shadow Cabinet from 1986 to 1992, and stood unsuccessfully for the leadership of the party in 1992. Gould returned to New Zealand and in 2004 was made a director at TVNZ. Early life and family Gould was born in Hāwera, New Zealand, on 11 February 1939, the son of Charles Terence Gould and Elsie Gladys May Gould (née Driller). He was educated at Tauranga College from 1951 to 1953, and then Dannevirke High School between 1954 and 1955. He went on to study at Victoria University College from 1956 to 1958, and Auckland University College from 1959 to 1962, graduating BA LLB in 1961, and LLM with first-class honours two years later. He was a New Zealand Rhodes Scholar to Balliol College, Oxford, from 1962. After completing a degree in Law with ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robin Cook
Robert Finlayson "Robin" Cook (28 February 19466 August 2005) was a British Labour politician who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1974 until his death in 2005 and served in the Cabinet as Foreign Secretary from 1997 until 2001 when he was replaced by Jack Straw. He then served as Leader of the House of Commons from 2001 until 2003. He studied at the University of Edinburgh before being elected as the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh Central in 1974; he switched to the Livingston constituency in 1983. In Parliament, he was known for his debating ability and rapidly rose through the political ranks and ultimately into the Cabinet. As Foreign Secretary, he oversaw British interventions in Kosovo and Sierra Leone. He resigned from his positions as Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons on 17 March 2003 in protest against the invasion of Iraq. At the time of his death, he was President of the Foreign Policy Centre and a Vice-President of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
David Blunkett
David Blunkett, Baron Blunkett, (born 6 June 1947) is a British Labour Party politician who has been a Member of the House of Lords since 2015, and previously served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough from 1987 to 2015, when he stood down. Blind since birth, and coming from a poor family in one of Sheffield's most deprived districts, he rose to become Education and Employment Secretary, Home Secretary and Work and Pensions Secretary in Tony Blair's Cabinet following Labour's victory in the 1997 general election. Following the 2001 general election, he was promoted to Home Secretary, a position he held until 2004, when he resigned following publicity about his personal life. Following the 2005 general election, he was appointed Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, though he resigned from that role later that year following media coverage relating to external business interests in the period when he did not hold a cabinet pos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Ownership
Social ownership is the appropriation of the surplus product, produced by the means of production, or the wealth that comes from it, to society as a whole. It is the defining characteristic of a socialist economic system. It can take the form of community ownership, state ownership, common ownership, employee ownership, cooperative ownership, and citizen ownership of equity. Traditionally, social ownership implied that capital and factor markets would cease to exist under the assumption that market exchanges within the production process would be made redundant if capital goods were owned and integrated by a single entity or network of entities representing society; but the articulation of models of market socialism where factor markets are utilized for allocating capital goods between socially owned enterprises broadened the definition to include autonomous entities within a market economy. Social ownership of the means of production is the common defining characteristic of a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Pluralism (political Philosophy)
Pluralism as a political philosophy is the recognition and affirmation of diversity within a political body, which is seen to permit the peaceful coexistence of different interests, convictions, and lifestyles. While not all political pluralists advocate for a pluralist democracy, this is most common as democracy is often viewed as the most fair and effective way to moderate between the discrete values. As put by arch-pluralist Isaiah Berlin, "let us have the courage of our admitted ignorance, of our doubts and uncertainties. At least we can try to discover what others ... require, by ... making it possible for ourselves to know men as they truly are, by listening to them carefully and sympathetically, and understanding them and their lives and their needs... ." Pluralism thus tries to encourage members of society to accommodate their differences by avoiding extremism (adhering solely to one value, or at the very least refusing to recognize others as legitimate) and engaging in g ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Social Democracy
Social democracy is a political, social, and economic philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy. As a policy regime, it is described by academics as advocating economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a liberal-democratic polity and a capitalist-oriented mixed economy. The protocols and norms used to accomplish this involve a commitment to representative and participatory democracy, measures for income redistribution, regulation of the economy in the general interest, and social welfare provisions. Due to longstanding governance by social democratic parties during the post-war consensus and their influence on socioeconomic policy in Northern and Western Europe, social democracy became associated with Keynesianism, the Nordic model, the social-liberal paradigm, and welfare states within political circles in the late 20th century. It has been described as the most common form of Western ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stalinism
Stalinism is the means of governing and Marxist-Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union from 1927 to 1953 by Joseph Stalin. It included the creation of a one-party totalitarian police state, rapid industrialization, the theory of socialism in one country, collectivization of agriculture, intensification of class conflict, a cult of personality, and subordination of the interests of foreign communist parties to those of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, deemed by Stalinism to be the leading vanguard party of communist revolution at the time. After Stalin's death and the Khrushchev thaw, de-Stalinization began in the 1950s and 1960s, which caused the influence of Stalin’s ideology begin to wane in the USSR. The second wave of de-Stalinization started during Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Glasnost. Stalin's regime forcibly purged society of what it saw as threats to itself and its brand of communism (so-called " enemies of the people"), whic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Socialism From Above
Authoritarian socialism, or socialism from above, is an economic and political system supporting some form of socialist economics while rejecting political liberalism. As a term, it represents a set of economic-political systems describing themselves as socialist and rejecting the liberal-democratic concepts of multi-party politics, freedom of assembly, ''habeas corpus'' and freedom of expression, either due to fear of the counter-revolution or as a means to socialist ends. Several countries, most notably the Soviet Union, China and their allies, have been described by journalists and scholars as authoritarian socialist states.Huntington, Samuel P. (1970). ''Authoritarian Politics in Modern Society: The Dynamics of Established One-party Systems''. Basic Books. .Lowy, Michael (1986). "Mass organization, party, and state: Democracy in the transition to socialism". ''Transition and Development: Problems of Third World Socialism'' (94): 264.Amandae, Sonja (2003). ''Rationalizing Cap ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Peter Hain
Peter Gerald Hain, Baron Hain (born 16 February 1950), is a British politician who served as Secretary of State for Northern Ireland from 2005 to 2007, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions from 2007 to 2008 and twice as Secretary of State for Wales from 2002 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2010. A member of the Labour Party, he was Member of Parliament (MP) for Neath between 1991 and 2015. Born in Kenya Colony to South African parents, Hain came to the United Kingdom from South Africa as a teenager and was a noted anti-fascist and anti-apartheid campaigner in the 1970s, and was convicted of criminal conspiracy for leading direct action events. Elected to Parliament at a 1991 by-election, he initially served in Tony Blair's government as a junior minister in the Wales Office, Foreign Office and Department of Trade and Industry. Promoted to the Cabinet as Welsh Secretary in 2002, he served concurrently as Leader of the House of Commons from 2003 to 2005 and Northern Ireland Sec ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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