Browsing the archives for the Labour tag
With the Blairites having made the first foray, waves of other party insiders have followed on, telling us why Labour lost the election.
The general pattern is this: Labour insider who believes Labour should be X announces ‘Labour lost the election because it wasn’t sufficiently X’.
It’s all very unedifying and depressing.
Did you know that one of the ways you are entitled to vote in the forthcoming Labour leadership election is as a Labour ‘supporter’?
How do you get to be that? Well, you give Labour three quid – three whole pounds – and register online to say you’re a supporter. Wow – such commitment. Pay three quid and have the same say as a committed party member of twenty or thirty years’ standing and/or somebody who gives many times that amount of money each year. That seems fair: much better than the bad old days, isn’t it?
What an opportunity for devious people to influence the result in favour of the best candidate from their point of view. I’m sure Conservative Megabucks Inc. could afford to rustle up any number of ‘supporters’ at three quid a time just to vote for the candidate they see as least likely to threaten their own party.
But I don’t suppose they will, and they probably don’t feel they need to. Just thought I’d mention it as a possibility.
Who feels inspired by Labour’s new leadership campaign, currently contested by similar kinds of people offering similar kinds of things? You’re not? I thought so. But admittedly it’s a tough call in difficult times.
Can we aim high and get hold of Nicola Sturgeon on a transfer before next season, please? She’d make a great leader for Labour.
No? Hmmm, you’re probably right. She has expressed a commitment to her present team and is on a winning streak. Besides, this Conservative-agenda-following, electorate-lecturing Labour party doesn’t look likely to achieve Champion’s League politics in the near future, and without that there’s no chance of attracting the top players.
Bernard Crick once called Giddens’s The Third Way ‘a book of well-meaning abstract generalities curiously or cautiously avoiding any inferences to policy’, and described those who searched for this mythical pathway as ‘people too busy to think or too prudent to commit themselves to anything specific’.1
The third way (let’s abandon the grandiose initial caps) seems to have fallen out of Labour discourse now. Did it expire as Tony Blair marched into the sunset, or did it merely mutate, to live on in later incarnations of Labour as a kind of political retrovirus? If the third way proper died with St Tone, then perhaps Gordo’s tenure was the fourth way, and Ed’s post-2010 party may have been the fifth, or the fifth shading into the sixth.
To put it another way, if the way of the way is still living deep within Labour, are we still languishing under a version of the original third way, that sociologist’s conceit, or have we now moved on to some kind of progeny – to way no. 6, or even as far as way no. 7?
With luck, the fact that even the Blairites aren’t talking about the third way means that it has gone for good and died without progeny. And we can hope that it has taken the predetermining caricatures of the first and second ways with it.
Some supporters of Ed Miliband likened him to Clement Attlee, and this theme emerged again in the run-up to the 2015 election. ‘Ignore Ed at your peril’ was the usual message. ‘Look what happened in 1945 when they ridiculed Attlee.’
It wasn’t to be, but it’s instructive to think about it the other way round. It’s inconceivable that a Clement Attlee transposed to 2015 would win a general election. In fact, it’s inconceivable that he’d ever get to be a party leader in these casually character-assassinating, hyper-marketised times. Think of the gleeful vitriol in the Tory press. Imagine what the army of gobshites below the line and on social media would make of him.