by TERRY EAGLETON et al.
Living on a Dollar a Day PHOTO/Renee C. Byer/Daily Mail
The announcement of the general election coincides with the 50th anniversary of the May Day Manifesto. Ken Loach, Howard Jacobson, Jeanette Winterson, Shami Chakrabarti and others say what a 2017 manifesto for the left should look like
Terry Eagleton
As a 24-year-old Cambridge academic, I was lucky enough to be involved in the writing of the May Day Manifesto of 1967. It was a genuinely collaborative project among a range of leftwing intellectuals of the day, a bunch of whom descended on Raymond Williams’s cottage outside Cambridge to cobble together a powerful indictment of Harold Wilson’s Labour government. EP Thompson scribbled away in one corner of the living room, Stuart Hall discussed neocolonialism in another, while Ralph Miliband phoned in from the LSE. The general air was one of tweeds and pipe smoke. There were no women, a fact that even the most dedicated militant of the day would not have found in the least strange.
…
Reni Eddo-Lodge
The left needs a new vision on race and tackling racism. Step one: take our lead from the people most affected by it. Step two: a total moratorium on giving in to white resentment. No more conceding to the right’s agenda. No more “controls on immigration” mugs. Be honest with the electorate about the real threat to all of our jobs – it’s not grabby immigrants but automation. Our vision for the future can counter the right’s narratives of hopelessness, because the point of progress is to leave the past behind.
…
Tariq Ali
The graph of history is never linear, but often twisted and broken. There is no automatic road to progress. We are going through a period of disillusionment, despair and cynicism during the course of which a huge vacuum has opened up. The capacity of humans to inflict damage and suffering on each other and the environment shows little sign of abating. As reason deserts us and the defenders of the status quo turn their eyes away from the writing on the wall, an old-new right emerges in different continents: Trump in the US and Modi in India.
…
Shami Chakrabarti
Purple is the new red. The moment is right for the left to champion its feminist credentials and future. There can be no significant improvement in the lives of women across the world unless there is greater economic equality. Feminism can no longer be adopted like an accessory or as some kind of niche or not-quite-political, non left-right issue. Women are at the bottom of the pile in too many aspects of life in the first and developing worlds and the rate of progress is far too slow. Austerity is a war on women, whereas fairer corporate taxation can allow for the kind of targeted investment that can free them from poverty, inequality and insecurity.
The Guardian for more