Guest editorial: We need to talk about Gordon

Editorial // Hopi Sen

The New Labour settlement collapsed under the pressure of a fiscal squeeze. We now need a Labour mission that functions without the comfort of a painless expansion of public spending.

Rebuilding Britain’s economy

Feature // John Denham

Addressing the challenges of the squeezed middle, the British promise, and fraying communities will need an economy that looks and feels very different to today’s.

The entrepreneurial state

Feature // Mariana Mazzucato

The only way to make growth ‘fairer’ is for policy makers to have a broader understanding of the role played by the state in the fundamental risk-taking needed for innovation.

The short-lived return of Keynes

Feature // Roger Backhouse, Bradley Bateman

Keynes reminds us that it is possible, and perhaps essential, to hold a view of capitalism that is richer and more critical than the one that prevails today.

Interview: Long live neo-liberalism?

Feature // Colin Crouch, Daniel Leighton

The salient fact about the financial crisis to date is that both the power and the narrative of neo-liberalism remain intact. Colin Crouch provides a guide for the perplexed.

Building a movement against the cuts

Feature // Adam Ramsay

The last year has seen astounding protests in Britain, Europe and around the world. But we will need to build campaign machinery and structures capable of mobilising vast and deep power.

Opposing the age of austerity

Feature // Gregor Gall

There is at least the possibility that the economistic and material struggle to defend public services could help rekindle the ideological struggle to reassert social democracy.

Transforming Labour

Feature // Gavin Hayes

The litmus test of any Party reform programme should be whether the leadership is willing to hand power back to the membership at large.

Punch and Judy politics

Feature // Richard Toye

Ed Miliband should appreciate that the quest for the centre ground needs to be pursued on the terms of the left, not on the terms of those others who now claim to occupy it.

What Ed Miliband can learn from Thatcher

Feature // Robert Saunders

Traditionally, the Labour Party has founded its appeal, not simply on lists of policies, but on a vision of the good society and a critique of the times in which it lives.

Democracy, collective action and the state - an exchange

Commentary // Tim Horton, Marc Stears

Does ‘Blue Labour’ fetishise local democratic action at the expense of national institutions and identities?

Blue Labour and the limits of social democracy

Commentary // Ed Rooksby

Blue Labour’s analysis of the Labour tradition and the contemporary political conjuncture runs into the familiar dilemma of how to manage capitalism and, simultaneously, radically reconfigure it.

Retrieving the public sphere

Essay // Robert Tinker

The News Of The World scandal raises questions about public life itself – its functions, value and potency – that are little discussed today.

Renewing the case for electoral reform

Essay // Jacqui Briggs

One way the argument for electoral reform might be renewed - and the campaign rebuilt - is by highlighting the prospects that it could improve the representation of women.

Catherine Needham: Personalisation

Review // David Rowland

Why has personalisation been seized upon by all major parties as the future for welfare provision?

Will Straw et al: Going for Growth

Review // Noel Thompson

An authoritative assemblage of progressive proposals provokes an unnerving sense of déjà vu.

Marian Barnes: Subversive Citizens

Review // Catherine Needham

What really happens on the mythic ‘front-line’ of public services?

David Marquand: The End of the West

Review // Andy Tarrant

The task of building a Europe which can act on the international stage is urgent.

Nicholas Shaxson: Treasure Islands

Review // Matthew Richmond

How corporate giants and the super-rich found space to grow in the cracks of a globalising world.