Robin Cook in memoriam

Robin Cook has died, very unexpected, while he was still very much campaigning for Labour to go back to its socialist ideals. Robin Cook was an outspoken opponent to the Iraq war and a hard critic on Tony Blair. On the Compass conference in June that I took part in, Cook was saying in his speech that

"We have to celebrate the public service ethos, and stop undermining it by making it parody the market economy. Health and education are too important to be reduced to the commodities market...we have to be up-front...about the redistribution of income levels. Why does the top tenth of the population pay less tax than the bottom tenth? And why, if we believe in law-and-order, haven't we prosecuted one employer for paying less than the minimum wage?"

By the way, it seems as the next project for Compass is to publish a pamphlet written by journalist and academic Prof Robert Taylor who "looks at the Swedish model of social democracy and contributes to the 'Can we do a Sweden?' debate". This pamphlet will be discussed at the Labour Party conference this year. Interesting!