Did things get better ?

Sub-titled An audit of Labour's successes and failures, Did Things Get Better ? by Polly Toynbee and David Walker (Penguin £.6.99), is the best report so far on the performance of "New" Labour over an extended period: from its triumphant takeover in the election of 1997 to 2000 and the run-up to the election of 2001.

Guardian journalists Toynbee and Walker have long been known and respected as serious political commentators, and their book goes behind the spin of the election manifesto pledges and examines the results. They produce the facts and figures and introduce the questions which voters next time should ponder.

Comments include Jonathan Dimbleby: "An important book, an invaluable guide to what we need to know to form a proper judgment in the hype surrounding elections." Jon Snow: "At a key moment when Labour needs to be held to account comes a book from two people who have been consistently sound on the issues by which the Blairite project must be judged." ------------Anthony Sinclair

The end of economic democracy ?

Readers of Thomas Frank's One Market Under God (Secker & Warburg, £18.99), know what they are getting when they see the sub-title: Extreme capitalism, market populism, and the end of economic democracy. Best known for the slowly-won but now striking success of his self-funded quarterly (approximately) journal, The Baffler, started from his home in Chicago in 1988, Thomas Frank achieved recognition for his painstaking collation and reasoned but blunt criticism of America's New Society.

Some may find a resonance here with Tony Blair's New Labour project, the Americanisation of Britain, now that it can be seen probably nearing its peak, and it is tempting to apply Thomas Frank's analysis to Blairism. In his first chapter, Getting to Yes: the architecture of a new consensus, he describes Britain as a country "whose politicians have embraced the logic of the focus group and the religion of the Market with an affection that could be off putting even to the most enthusiastic Americans." He refers to "Peter Mandelson, New Labour's frightening spinmeister..." and his comment on "bringing the era of pure representative democracy.... to an end." (Mandelson is now back publicly among Blair's confidants, and playing a leading role in Policy Network, the so-called left-of-centre ginger group and apologists for the flaws in "New" Labour's Americanisation programme)

Thomas Frank posits a future generation looking back on the 1990s, and with increasing anger noting the morphing of the language of democracy into the cant and jargon of the market place. He describes as market populism the notion that markets are identifiable with democracy and the will of the people. Market propaganda is searingly exposed, and his examination of the management industry, "bullshit on wheels," is already being applied by some critics to the situation in the UK. He persuades by the best kind of journalism, with concrete examples, but his work is fuelled, too, by a commitment to expose all the pretensions of the new capitalist order and the tyranny of the almighty market. It is my book of the year, so far. ---James Brennan

Captive State, by George Monbiot (Macmillan, pub 2000, hardcover £12), previously reviewed here) is now out in paperback, from Pan, £7.99. Sub-titled: The corporate takeover of Britain.

Copyright 2001/2002/ Brennan Publications. Contributors retain copyright of their articles, and should be named if quoted elsewhere.