...and Left

Letter to a friend (by Alan Johnson), on normblog - highly recommended. The conclusion:

Our job is to push on past a stalled modernity and a demented reaction. How? By consistently fighting for global democratization and global development: making tyranny history and making poverty history. That's how the decent left will come to know itself and challenge the pro-tyrant left.

Time to focus again on the objective of a world where all people have enough to eat, decent drinking water and so on, but also the rights of free expression and assembly. Time to get back to Norman Geras' theses of a minimum utopia...

This might not be any closer than it was almost a year ago, when I posted comments here,  but at least people are talking about it more - remember G8, Gleneagles and Live8 - or they were before 7 July drove everything from our heads. It even sounds more like Blairism than Marxism.

Update (19 Jul): further thoughts in comments at 'Touched by Bloodless Abstraction'.