Month: February 2026

He came to my house once, many years ago.

Back in 1993, I ran a by-election campaign in Hackney for the Labour Party, occasioned by the resignation of a local councillor who was found guilty of fraud and sent to prison.  The campaign included typical canvassing activities such as knocking on the doors of local houses and flats, and talking to the residents to try to identify those voters who were likely to support our candidate.  We had selected an ambitious young activist, who was well connected in senior Labour circles, and one Sunday morning he turned up at my house, ready to go canvassing, accompanied by the MP for Hartlepool, who was the Labour Party’s former director of communications. 

To his credit, notwithstanding his national profile and reputation, this famous visitor spent a couple of productive hours talking to local electors, he completed his canvass returns accurately, and was friendly towards the six or seven others party members who were out working that morning.  Our candidate duly won the by-election and served on Hackney Council for five years, before being elected MP for Rhondda in 2001.  He has been at Westminster ever since.  His canvassing companion had an even more successful political career – as a Cabinet Minister, a European Commissioner, and more recently as Ambassador to the United States of America – at least until this week, when he was arrested and charged with misconduct in public office.  It is now more than thirty years since I welcomed Peter Mandleson into my home, to support our modest efforts in what was a minor local political campaign. I have not spoken with him since, and I have moved house three times, but his public disgrace feels a little bit personal, as if some of his taint still lingers on in my life.

Continue reading “They have more money”

In 1932, Bertrand Russell published an essay in Harper’s Magazine called In Praise of Idleness, in which he provides a clear and succinct definition of work: work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so .  The second kind, he continues, is capable of indefinite extension: there are not only those who give orders but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.  Today, nearly a century later, the first kind of work remains very important, including energy extraction, industrial production, farming and food distribution, textiles and clothes manufacture, building construction and renovation, transportation and storage, painting and decoration, and – arguably – most professional sports, but the numbers of workers employed in altering the position of matter is proportionally far smaller than it was when Russell’s article was written.  The second kind of work – management and its ancillary disciplines – has grown significantly in scale and complexity in the last hundred years, although qualitative improvements in its outcomes remain hard to demonstrate. 

Russell set out to argue that, a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by the belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.  Idleness – or laziness – was once the prerogative of the ruling class, he wrote, whether the slave owners of ancient Athens or the aristocrats of feudal Europe.  In these societies, the small number of men and women who were rich did no work, but lived comfortably by forcibly appropriating surpluses created by the work of many others, who were left merely with sufficient to survive (and not always that much).   In his day, Russell observed that within the new capitalist ruling class, the men and their sons prided themselves on their own hard work, which they believed justified their wealth, but were determined that their wives and their daughters should lead lives of leisure.  Russell concludes his essay with the claim that technology now allows for all members of society to enjoy much greater leisure time, if only work and resources were move evenly shared: modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen instead to have overwork for some and starvation for others … we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines … in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

Continue reading “Work hard”