The child, the family and the GP: tensions and conflicts of interest for GPs in safeguarding children May 2006-October 2008 Executive summary May 2009 and Research Brief March 2010

This Executive Summary and Research Brief provide an overview of a research project (full report available on the repository) exploring the key role identified for GPs in safeguarding children. The initial focus of this research was to investigate potential ‘conflicts of interest’ where parents and children were both patients of the GP and to identify strategies for managing these conflicts. In response to initial feedback from the piloting of research tools, the focus of the research was broadened to explore and understand the range of conflicts, interests and tensions that might constrain the participation and engagement of GPs in safeguarding children and child protection processes, and the complexity of relationships between GPs, parents and children, and other professionals. A summary of the study methods, strengths and limitations and key findings is provided, together with messages for policy, research and practice

Feminism and ‘the S-Word’

A roundtable discussion on socialism and feminism, chaired by Jo Littler, with Mandy Merck, Hilary Wainwright, Nira Yuval-Davis and Deborah Grayson

Radicalizing the Movement-Party Relation: From Ralph Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn and Beyond

Parties and movements, even those that share similar values, exercise distinct sources of power that do not work in the same way and are not necessarily in harmony with each other. The notion that a left party is about standing for election on the basis of socialist policies in order to win national office and take control of the commanding heights of the economy is still at the back, if not the front, of the minds of many left activists. In this thinking, movements are understood, implicitly at least, as the foot soldiers for the election of a left government, in exchange for which the party voices their demands. I argue here that a radical left party whose power lies in its position of representation in the elective institutions of the state cannot simply through representation become a ‘voice’ for movements whose power lies in the creative capacities in society – as if these movements have no distinct, autonomous sources of power, which may possibly conflict with a left party in government – and also in the process of winning office.My argument is that when radical movements engage in electoral politics, this tendency for electoral pressures to swamp their autonomy as agents of transformation poses a dilemma. On the one hand, electoral success for a radical left party that has taken up the demands of the movements is likely to be favourable for social movements. After all, movements engage in electoral politics because they want changes that require government action, not least to end the rule of austerity economics. On the other, even those parties committed to radical left policies too often fail to take seriously enough, even if they ‘talk the talk’, the proven fact that electoral success is, on its own, an insufficient source of power – and practical knowledge – to achieve the social, economic and political transformation that both left parties and social movements desire

Western Europe: democratic civil society versus neoliberalism

NoThe volume, which this chapter forms a part, explores how the idea of civil society has been translated in different cultural contexts and examines its impact on politics worldwide. Comparing and contrasting civil society in Latin America and Eastern Europe, Western Europe and the United States, Africa and South Asia, and the Middle East, the contributors show that there are multiple interpretations of the concept that depend more on the particular political configuration in different parts of the world than on cultural predilections. They also demonstrate that the power of civil society depends less on abstract definitions, and more on the extent to which it is grounded in the context of actual experiences from around the world. This book includes some of the biggest names in the area such as Mary Kaldor, Ronnie Lipschutz and Helmut Anheier

Reclaim the State: Experiments in Popular Democracy.

NoThe anticapitalist protests at Seattle and Genoa are dramatic symbols of a growing collective anger about the of a few multinational corporations. But there is more to anticapitalism than demonstrations: concepts like participatory democracy and economic solidarity form the heart of alternative but equally compelling visions. Hilary Wainwright, writer and long-time political activist, set out on a quest to find out how people are putting such concepts into practice locally and taking control over public power. Her journey starts at home, in east Manchester, where local community groups are testing Tony Blair¿s commitment to ¿community-led¿ regeneration by getting involved in the way government money is spent. In Newcastle, she joins a meeting of homecare workers and their clients to challenge the threat of privatization of homecare services in that city. In Los Angeles she talks to the people behind the community-union coalitions that have had major successes in improving the impoverished bus system and in winning a living wage for employees of firms contracted by the city. And in Porto Alegre she discovers the wider democratic potential of the participatory budget, the basis of investment decisions in many Brazilian cities. Local democracy and ¿people power,¿ it turns out, provided the foundations for a global alternative, as her visit to the World Social Forum reveals

Transformative power: political organization in transition

Many of the political resources that shaped Syriza’s response to the present extremities and led it to a position in which it is uniquely – but still conditionally – trusted by so many people in Greek society are the outcome of considerable learning from the trial and error of other radical parties across Europe and the experience of the European Social Forum. This essay seeks to contribute towards continuing this dialectic of transnational political learning on the left. By generalizing from the distinctive features of Syriza, and also bearing in mind lessons from other experiences where parties with similar ambitions have been unable to sustain their transformative dynamic, I will suggest approaches to problems of political organization, further consideration of which might help to overcome the quandary of the left. My discussion of these themes will focus on the problem of transforming the state. This is a major issue for Syriza as it campaigns and prepares for office in and against a notably corrupt and anti-democratic state. One of four sections of the programme drawn up in 2009 by members of Synaspismos, the largest party in the Syriza coalition, is entitled ‘Restructuring the state’. My framework for approaching this fundamental issue sees sources of democratic transformative power autonomous from the state as decisive to the possibilities of change. The economic dimension here is crucial. Political change is seriously hindered if it lacks a base in non-capitalist relations of production, including the production of services and culture, however partial and incomplete. At the same time, it must be said that a conflictual engagement in as well as against the state is a necessary condition for systemic change. Such an engagement has to be rooted in, and accountable to, forces for democratic change in society. Without a strategy of this kind to transform and, where necessary, break state power, transformative struggles will recurrently lapse into containable counter-cultures and their potential for the majority of people will be unrealized. To develop my argument, I draw particularly on the experience of the radical left of the Labour Party in governing London in 1982-86; and that of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) in opening up decisions about new municipal investment to a citywide process of popular participation in Porto Alegre from 1989 until 2004

Civil Society, Democracy and Power: Global Connections

NoThe term global civil society is hotly contested, admit the editors, who offer their own definition. Of the three editor-contributors and 11 additional contributors, nine are affiliated either with the Centre for the Study of Global Governance, LSE, or the UCLA Center for Civil Society. Contributions to this annually updated yearbook tackle the debate on definitions; NGOs; multiculturalism; the Arab perspective; oil and activism; globalism, democracy, and democratic power; prominent individuals behind the global civil society; and methodologies for measuring and analyzing it, among other issues. The last section gives a chronology of events. Of interest to social and political scientists, activists, students, journalists and policy makers. Editor of Red Pepper, Hilary Wainwright, identifies the conditions in which global civil society can reinvigorate or hinder the development of local democracy with examples from China, Brazil and Guatemala

Building New Parties for a Different Kind of Socialism: A Response

Barry Winter and I share a common starting point: a common concern with how the left can connect and communicate with the majority of people. I believe that the left's position inside the Labour Party has changed from being the opportunity it arguably was in the past into an imprisonment, which actually distorts and constrains the left's ability to convince the people of the relevance of radical socialist politics. The implication of my argument is that any section of the left which restricts its political location to the Labour Party and refuses seriously to consider the prospect of a party to the left of Labour, isolates itself from the people. It will make itself marginal, 'on the fringe' of political debate. My case is that in the long or even medium run, the most effective way for the radical left in the UK to engage with the political mainstream, as in most other West European countries, is with a political voice to the left of social democracy. This is not to say that working through such a party is an exclusive option; there would still be a significant left working mainly within the Labour party as, for example, in Denmark, Germany, Norway, Holland and Spain where there is a significant social democratic left, strengthened by the existence of a political competitor to social democracy's left

Once More Moving On: Social Movements, Political Representation and the Left

A paradox highlights the problem facing the radical left in Britain today. Historically the British working class movement has been one of Europe's strongest: the earliest, the most densely organised, one of the most militant and associated throughout its history with a rich variety of wider democratic movements and co-operative experiments. Yet the British state has remained one of the most undemocratic in Europe, retaining close protective bonds with the financial heart of British capitalism. It is as if some resilient, invisible membrane has separated the labour and other democratic social movements from unsettling the real centres of economic power in Britain. No doubt the membrane has many constituents but one is certainly the highly mediated, indirect way in which extra-parliamentary radicalism is represented - but in effect diffused - by the Labour Party. The membrane is held in place by the majoritarian, first-past-the-post electoral system which makes it very difficult for minorities on the left, reflecting radical social forces, to thrive and gain a voice of their own