Southern Comfort Conference

Southern Front: No more discomfort - Labour's Southern Future

Southern Comfort, and its predecessor, Third Place First, played a crucial role in the 1990s. Taking us from just 10 seats across eastern, south western and south eastern England in 1992 to 40 in Labour’s landslide victory just 5 years later. It couldn’t have been done without the work of Labour members on the ground. Labour members who knew the hopes, the fears and aspirations of southern voters. Who spoke about our lives and those of our friends and neighbours as we live them in this part of the country. Labour supporters who made sure that Labour wasn’t something you watched on television but a force for good, a force for change in our communities. The hard news of course, is that we’ve got to do it all over again. I have no doubt that every single constituency in the three regions of southern England did better under Labour, than they would have done under any other party. We should never forget how we turned round the NHS, expanded university places, fixed the leaking roofs and outside toilets of village schools, or the businesses started and succesful,. That sense of unfairness, those fears for the future, are being talked about across southern England. In almost every home; outside school gates. At work. The sudden loss of Pfizer was a chilling reminder that even in life sciences, one of the industries in which we thought we were world beaters, our hold on the future is not as tight as we would like. The resentment of the squeezed middle, and the fears for the future are felt every bit as strongly here in southern England as anywhere else. In what have traditionally been the more prosperous and successful parts of the country, the tension between what people have come cto take for granted and what the future holds has never been greater. As Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice have shown, the aspirations are as high as ever, but anxiety and insecurity are high, too. Our children, and our friends and neighbours children, find it the hardest to know how they will find a home of their own; more southern children go to university but face spiraling fees and a lifetime of debt.. George Osborne’s pursuit of cuts too far and too fast, dissected so clearly by Ed Balls on Thursday, not only threatens growth and jobs, but means we will have fewer police officers in the villages, towns, suburbs, and cities of southern England. We know that markets create great wealth and opportunity but also insecurity and unfair rewards.

Southern Comfort Conference

The Picture of Health, Medical Ethics and the Movies

White masculinity in the recent South

Out

Reclaiming genders, transsexual grammars at the Fin de Siècle