Yeah – I think this is fair enough – I don’t disagree with too much of this Sunny.

The point I was trying to make re ’83 v ’97 was simply that it’s dangerous for the party to turn inward and focus on satisfying activists at the expense of the centre.

One problem with even wanting Labour to win the next election is that it implies a belief that a fourth-term goverment can be effective, rather than exhausted. There is absolutely no evidence for the proposition: ideas are formed in opposition, not government.

What you are really hoping for is a way of limiting Labour’s defeat so that it can re-invent itself in two or three years and win the election after next. I don’t find this a credible scenario, either.

The real issue is the nature of the “centre ground” – which has arguably been moving to the right for two generations now on economic, if not on social questions. Until the left is prepared to develop arguments and models for challenging the hegemony of individualist consumerism it will continue to be behind the game.

I’m glad you’ve outed yourself quite as forthrightly as you’ve done here Sunny – I was starting to wonder who you’d be supporting as an alternative leadership candidate and how long you could go without picking a side, but I’m less surprised than I am disappointed with your ability to settle for second (or less) best.

Firstly, Labour is a coalition not a party and must be treated as such. As soon as Labourites start seeking to expand their appeal it creates instability which leads to infighting and electoral damage. The current state of the party is suffering from the hangover of ’97, which – like you say – overdosed on interventionism with the culminating invasion of Iraq. It would have been far better not to have won a landslide at all.

If the heart and soul of Labour hasn’t been completely destroyed then Progress and Compass must find two individual MPs who are able to work as a team while representing both trends – think of Blair and Brown as a model: one a populist performer, the other an obsessive number cruncher, perfect! But can they work together?

Secondly, all this talk of ‘new narratives’ is just wonky wonkery. If you can’t find the right words to communicate your messages the public will quickly become bored by it. This is a true skill and a test of judgement, so the fact that the ability has been lost is an admission of failure to add to the obvious policy failings.

Which is why Ed Miliband is an atrocious choice. Yes, he ticks the right boxes: smart, personable, presentable… but he’s just so dull. Maybe he should get some voice training or have an operation on his adenoids (failing that, he should never venture beyond the black country), but to consider him in the running for leadership shows in just how much trouble Labour is in.

The next serious leader of Labour will emerge from these debates as the person who can undertake these tasks. Can he/she publicly acknowledge the different constituent strands in Labour and is it possible to remake the settlement betewen them by reaching and sticking by an agreement to work together. Blair was successful in this because he managed, or at least events transpired in his favour to enable him to avoid overtly contradicting conventional Labour wisdom about the value of the work done by Kinnock and Smith.

The next Labour PM will be the person who stakes out the challenges for the party, potentially even forcibly splitting it into real factions which would be able to honestly bargain about a true coalition in government.

The public will continue to scorn Labour for as long as the public is subjected to reminders of the Kinnockesque caricature where committed members bemoan ‘their’ Labour party, thereby exemplifying the loss of direction and divisions between the camps.

I think if there’s one guy who could possibly be leader and change things around, it would be Ed Miliband. Just thought I’d throw that out there.

Why?

I guess Sunny was at the Compass Conference & saw Ed Miliband perform. While the Compass folk were not very enthusiastic (he didn’t play to the leftie galley like some of the other speakers), it was certainly a class act.

Tim: The point I was trying to make re ‘83 v ‘97 was simply that it’s dangerous for the party to turn inward and focus on satisfying activists at the expense of the centre.

Sure, but there is the argument that at least if it satisfies its core vote then it won’t be wiped out electorally. Swing voters, arguably, have moved to the Tories now anyway and unless Labour is willing to antagonise all its core constituency, won’t win them back.

Mike: Until the left is prepared to develop arguments and models for challenging the hegemony of individualist consumerism it will continue to be behind the game.

Agreed.

Thomas – I don’t have a side as such in that I’m still favourable to Labour, Libdems and the Greens over the Tories. I’m more interested in moving the political centre leftwards than I am in simply keeping a political party in power at all costs (point well made Mike, and I agree with it).

Secondly, all this talk of ‘new narratives’ is just wonky wonkery. If you can’t find the right words to communicate your messages the public will quickly become bored by it.

But that’s why I’m talking about narratives! Narrative = the right words to communicate a message, vision for society and policies.

Henry is right that Ed Miliband managed to woo a difficult audience at Compass. But generally, Ed is way more personable and able to win people over than any other Cabinet member. His brother David Miliband doesn’t have that personality.

If Labour is to replace Brown with someone with personality and more obvious charm, then Ed Miliband is the best man.

Sunny, I think you’ve made yourself clear obout your partisan affections a number of times, so that’s not what I meant – I was talking about your choice for a potential leader.

While agree that Ed Miliband has some good qualities I don’t see him as a leadership candidate myself. Perhaps he is just a bit too slick and middle-class to appeal to a national Labour audience alone, which is why I’d place him as better positioned for the deputy leadership – if he can find someone to work with.

This is a general problem for Labour – it has stopped talking about teamwork and started talking about leadership (which is not left-wing territory).

All this talk about the leadership is antitheitcal to what I understand are core Labour ideals, and this leadership ‘crisis’ is just an extension of the identity crisis in which personal aspiration and social goals have grown irreconcilable since Labour came to power. So really the crisis being faced now is something for which Brown has only himself to blame, having opened the floodgates by forcing an unnecessary succession rather than putting the issue to bed.

Analysing the situation I think we should read a little more between the lines.

Labour has plenty of good second-in-commands, but they are engaged in a competition to position themselves for the next leadership at the expense of mutual aims and collective success.

The way this is playing out I think it is increasingly clear the puppet-master pulling all the strings is Jack Straw, and the current discussions are both a method of distraction from him making his real intentions clear and a proxy for his weighing the suitability of his future deputy. Straw is unchallenged as an alternate heavyweight voice in the cabinet and has made himself indispensible as the permanent fixture at the side of the leader, so we shall have to wait and see when he feels the time is right to step out of the shadows and deliver the fatal blow to Brown.

Of course he will “feel the heavy burden of duty to take on the role at this difficult time”, but he is the most machiavellian of the lot and has successfully manoeuvered himself into a position where he cannot be discounted, however much he protests: he is a loyalist, associated with former successes and has an independent power base both regionally an on the backbenches of the party – he is a threat.

Just as the saying goes “keep your friends close and your enemies closer” – and nobody is closer to the source of power than the Justice Minister.

One wonders when he looks at the polls how long he thinks he can bide his time before striking. Does he launch the coup-de-grace at this years conference believing that he can turn it around, or does he wait until Labour has been defeated at a general election and tries to hold off the next generation of youthful Burnhams, Purnells and Milibands? My feeling is that the tide of opposition is growing almost too strong and time is getting short for him to play his trump cards to wait too much longer.

Similarly, there have been instances where Brown has adopted soft-left positions (most recently on the abortion bill) and its not had political gain either.

But he hardly took the lead. From where I was sitting it was left to Evan Harris to make the passionate, secular case for the Bill. Had Brown taken more of a stand he might have reaped some benefits. However, the story was instead about how some Labour Ministers were Catholic and would be voting against, or abstaining. Since Brown wasn’t guaranteed a win, he kept quiet when he should have been showing off his moral compass.

Ed is way more personable

Jesus he must have been on form, either that or the audience hadn’t seen many speeches prior to that! I’ve seen him speak and he wasn’t very good, coming across like a geeky 6th former who’s just discovered politics…

The Compass versus Progress argument (I come to it fairly fresh and it looks to me like a long-standing village feud, not a debate) is outstanding because –

Neither faction seems to believe that what it is saying is right, and

Both factions are absolutely convinced that the other is wrong.

In addition:

Both agree that Compass is to the left of Progress, but

Progress has no concensus on which direction is forward, and

Compass is perpetually debating which direction is North,

so ‘left’ and ‘right’ are shifting signposts.

As to whether Ed Miliband is the best available candidate for a Labour John Major, I have no idea; but I would ask Sunny if that is what he is really looking for?

“As someone else quite rightly said to me on the subject recently, both Progress and Compass are too Westminster focused.”

Totally agree with that, I’ve said for some time that everyone is too focused on the Westminster system when, frankly, it hasn’t been working all that well for some time. I still think its a shame that we haven’t got a centre-left British version of MoveOn or GetUp. Advocacy groups can be very effective at both mobilising the base and fund-raising, both of which Labour is in desperate need of. Going back to the Westminster problem, we have seen that the party leadership is increasingly blind or ignorant to the opinions of its supporters when it comes to policy, an advocacy group is an effective way of reminding the party who pays the bills and gets them elected.

“This is a general problem for Labour – it has stopped talking about teamwork and started talking about leadership”

While I am not completely innocent on this front, something the other day reminded me that primarily, there is a young and committed cluster of non-Blairites in the party who need to be supported before we start discussing leadership. People like Douglas Alexander – who really shone on BBC’s Glasgow-East coverage – the Milibands, Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls and Alan Johnson who have clearly been bullied by Blairites for some time now.

That said, discussion of Browns successor has to remain on the table. Don’t forget that if nothing else Labour cannot afford to fight the next election without a different leader. The financial donors will not return whilst they believe the party is as doomed as it is under Brown.

there is a young and committed cluster of non-Blairites in the party who need to be supported before we start discussing leadership. People like Douglas Alexander – who really shone on BBC’s Glasgow-East coverage – the Milibands, Yvette Cooper, Ed Balls and Alan Johnson who have clearly been bullied by Blairites for some time now.

This is one of the most incredible things I’ve read on the net in quite some time.

Re: the 1983 manifesto – didn’t the SDP split damage the Labour vote far more than the supposed ‘longest suicide note in history’? The popular vote for Labour was approximately 3 million down on 1979, and the SDP-Liberal Alliance up approx 3 million on the 1979 figures for the Liberals. Our New Labour friends tend to forget this in their quest to paint left alternatives as unpopular or irrelevant.

Sunny: I am glad that you picked up on Luke’s piece. I read it yesterday and had been meaning to recommend it. I think his critique of Neal’s analysis is good as far as it goes. Labour is not going to win the next election by a populist economic lurch to the left. But I think that the two “solutions” that he has proposed – another lurch to the right on law and order and hope that the economy improves – are even less convincing.

I think Labour won in 1997 for three reasons – and all three points are now playing against it.

1. People were sick of the Tories after 18 years.
2. Major had looked like a ditherer on Black Wednesday and the preceding recession had damaged the Tories reputation for economic competence.
3. Labour had detoxified its reputation.

Point three did not happen overnight. I remember canvassing in the 1979, 1983 and 1987 elections and can remember how disconnected Labour was from ordinary voters in all of them. We had almost overcome the legacy by 1992, but it only took Neil Kinnock to stand up and wave his arms about at the Sheffield rally to remind several million people that they still did not completely trust Labour.

Personally I think that both John Smith and Gordon Brown could have taken Labour to victory in 1997, but there is no doubt that the narrative (good word) which Blair created did significantly broaden Labour’s base. The problem was that the triangulation strategy contained within it an internal contradiction and the whole “Newness” of New Labour was obviously going to have a sell-by date.

I think that Sunny’s critique of both the “Compass” and “Progress” positions is right and I would be equally pessimistic about Labour’s chances.

What is fascinating about Barack Obama is how he has turned over the conventional wisdom of both the “left” and the “right” in the Democrats. President Lula has done the same in Brazil. Both of them also understand that politics is not conducted solely within the nation state any more and you need a convincing foreign policy. I have yet to see anyone seriously grasp that point within the British left (since Blair crashed and burnt liberal interventionism).

“…politics is not conducted solely within the nation state any more and you need a convincing foreign policy. I have yet to see anyone seriously grasp that point within the British left (since Blair crashed and burnt liberal interventionism).”

I completely agree with you there, and I think that one of Gordon Brown’s weaknesses is that, even before the economy imploded and he had to focus on internal issues, he did not craft a foreign policy. David Miliband has had a virtual carte blanche at the FCO. Even Bush, under who the economy has a $400billion deficit and most of the world is incredibly disenfranchised with America, has had a (albeit minuscule) part of his reputation redeemed.

I do feel that this could prove an advantage for David Miliband in a leadership election, although, I do fear that foreign policy will be completely forgotten with the emphasis on the economy.

Sorry Sunny, but I am afraid that drafting Ed Miliband as PM is going to prove beyond even beyond your powers of persuasion. But that would be the development that could really turn this political drama into Oedipus: it would involve the political assassination of his long-time political ally and boss, followed by trying to take on and deny his brother for the crown.

But think Sunny’s broader analysis is good (and also not incompatible, as Tim says, with his point).

I see that thomas says ‘Labour is not a party but a coalition’. But can anybody identify any democratic governing project which is not an electoral and social coalition? (It is especially true in anglo-saxon politics where we have coalitions within parties more than between them). That is in the nature of politics, isn’t it?

The Labour party was created as a coalition of trade unions, middle-class socialist intellectuals, and liberal non-conformists. It can govern when it has a broad base of working-class support along with sufficient middle-class support, as it achieved in 1945, 1964/66 and 1997/2001. And it loses office when it can no longer persuade those social coalitions that they have enough in common to stick together.

There are often tensions within such coalitions. The Tories combine market liberals yet also social conservatives and eurosceptics. Sometimes they break – both Thatcher and Nixon/Reagan managed to break up their opponents’ coalitions. And sometimes unlikely coalitions are pretty successful – eg the Republicans small government liberals, big government moral conservatives and national security conservatives, where the cracks are very obvious now, but it has been dominant for 30 years. The Democrats lost the south after LBJ signed the 1964 civil rights act because a more ideologically defined party had to put civil rights first, even if it lost votes and even if the right exploited that. So future Democrat winning coalitions are different to that which Roosevelt had: perhaps appeasing the racist vote was the dirty secret of the new deal coalition.

We can all see that [new] Labour is now badly, badly struggling as an electoral project because its argument of economic prosperity and social justice is challenged on both fronts; because it is struggling to persuade core support that it stands for Labour values, and because it is struggling to hold onto swing and switch voters too (some of whom may feel it has been too Labour on tax and spend). Arguing about which problem to worry more about is debilitating, and largely pointless. (As Sunny suggests, too much of the Progress-Compass argument feels like two ‘litmus test’ projects of ideological correctness for New vs Not New Labour, when both are too narrow).

More fundamentally, it isn’t clear what the coalition stands for. Not being the Tories was important as glue. It clearly isn’t enough. Here, a project defined more strongly by what it wasn’t than what it is has struggled to find the positive definition it needs. (My own view is it is in there, struggling to get out, but that’s debatable).

Advocating hunkering down with the core vote is defeatist in the long as well as short-term. Having said that, I agree with one important part of the thrust of what Compass says: Labour does need to be more ideological, more social democratic, more confident in its principles to rebuild. But then it needs to ensure it is also open and pluralist, rather than closed, inward-looking and sectarian. That is partly about content. But it is also about tone, culture and style of politics.

That is a difficult trick to pull off. New Labour around 95-96 had some of that – when Blair was much more on a ‘new politics’ approach than transpired post-97. (Ironically, New Labour turned out to have a centralist political culture that is quite reminiscient of some of our far left friends, which is where some of the most certain New Labour people learned their skills – Reid, Milburn, etc).

I am not pretending to have the answers here. But it seems to me that the future successful ‘next left’ progressive politics we will need to build would need working-class and trade union votes – and should not be ashamed of having a social base based on social need- within a broader appeal. Part of this is collective security as a broad enlightened self-interest argument (as with the NHS), part of it is an idealistic appeal to the type of society we want. This could be rooted in the Labour/social democratic tradition on social justice/inequality but try to combine these by engaging with other and broader progressive constituencies (environment, development, liberal traditions on civil liberties and democratic reform). There will be tensions and difficulties. My party is not on speaking terms with some of those who we need to try to engage with again. We can’t turn that around in 3 months, even 12-18 months. But we can recognise that, and at least try to find spaces to talk, disagree with respect and no doubt change our own minds too.

And I think we will need not just cultural change but different political institutions as well (a more open party politics; but also new progressive campaigning infrastructure – like a MoveOn model – which does not belong to any party but where people from different parties and traditions might come together on particular issues; also different political institutions – eg electoral reform – are a necessary condition for some of this).

Of course, we have a choice as political activists as to whether we are interested in constructing broad governing coalitions, as well as issue-based activism. Some people will decide to engage only on the latter front, because they feel that there is no broad-based project that speaks to their concerns. And we have a political culture where articulation is becoming much stronger and more immediate than aggregation. But politics is aggregation, making collective choices, brokering disagreements. This culture clash within progressive constituencies may also be another source of some tension, sometimes creative tension generating new insights, perhaps sometimes not. But I expect that it will be a necessary tension to those who want to create broader coalitions, and a reason why these will be more broad and heterogenous than progressive coalitions of the past.

Why is it that people keep banging on about moveon but not getting off their backsides and creating one?

Leon: well to be fair to Sunny isn’t that part of what the Liberal Conspiracy is trying to do.

Wow that bait was taken quicker than expected!

LC is a great and a needed site but comparisons to MoveOn are a little overblown, it’s a bunch of Labour party luvvies, bloggers and MPs all talking to each other.

Where is the 100 000 people email list? Or the LC BBQs happening across the country? Or the membership formulating campaigns to pressure the so called progressive elements in the political mainstream?

Leon: mass movements come and go in reaction to broader forces and changes in society. Although MoveOn was set up at the end of the Clinton era it only really came into its own during the Bush years. Of course that is competely different to the situation currently confronting the British left, but I think that some of what LC is trying to do is about providing space for people to come together across party lines.

Going back to the original point of Sunny’s article, the two factions in the Labour party seem to be squaring up to an internal fight which will probably be as debilitating as the one it went through in the early 1980s – with all its attendant accusations of back-stabbing and treachery (David Miliband has a great piece currently in the Guardian which doesn’t mention Gordon Brown once and lapses into the first person at exactly the moment where he wants to make it clear that he is most definitely a potential leadership contender).

You really think Britain is going to produce anything like MO in it’s current form?

Anyway, yep it does look like the challengers representing Compass and Progress are being chosen, anyone want to bet on Brown surviving past conference?

just a comment to Sunny about Compass. I think it is well understood in Compass that it has to construct a cross class coalition and that issues like social insurance and security in the wake of casino capitalism chime with both middle and working class people. It’s wrong to say that it is only concerned with Labour’s core voters. However the loss of the core vote and the collapse of party infrastructure in traditional strongholds is a sign of plitical and organisational collapse and has to be addressed.

There is also a debate about the future. Compass has to be a longer term project setting out what Sunder calls a ‘next left’. New Labour as a political project is over and it seems highly unlikely that Labour will win a working majority at the next election. We can get too caught up in thinking about personalities and who might be the next leader. What we need is a social democratic political project – someone will emerge out of that.

Sunder Katwala says: I agree with one important part of the thrust of what Compass says: Labour does need to be more ideological, more social democratic, more confident in its principles to rebuild. But then it needs to ensure it is also open and pluralist, rather than closed, inward-looking and sectarian.

OI agree and there is a debate within Compass about its need to look outward and to build alliances with social movements, ecological movements etc. I’m not sure it is too ‘Westminster focused’, if it is it is by default, its trying to work its way out of its cultural past into something different.

One of the strengths of the Compass model of political organising and education is that it is both inside Labour and building relationships outside, creating links that hopefully transforms its culture, opens up its politics, introduces new ideas. Anyway that’s the idea, always harder in practice.

Sunny quotes Labour Cllr Luke Akehurst:
“Voters are angry about the credit crunch, knife crime, unaffordable housing, fuel prices and fuel tax, and food prices. The Labour left are talking about hostility to ID cards, Trident, 42 day detention and public services reform and PFI, issues where the public support the Government or just don’t care.”
This whole discussion ignores what I find among my friends: many of them simply find UK govt incompetent, be it central or local – and, as the Information Society allows us to see more and more about other countries, that will get worse. They will, for example, accept ID cards if the job is done properly – but they don’t believe that it will be done properly. They see govt, local and national, as getting more and more nasty and wasting more and more of our money (and, locally, it doesn’t make any difference which of the 3 parties has control). So start looking for a solution to that from the democratic left, please. From encounters with civil servants in 2006, I thought that Brown was working out a way forward, so what (or who) has stopped him?

LC is a great and a needed site but comparisons to MoveOn are a little overblown, it’s a bunch of Labour party luvvies, bloggers and MPs all talking to each other.

I guess I should expand on this a bit more in an article… but I will say that there are people trying to create a British version of MoveOn, and I welcome that because LC will have its own space and a British MoveOn will only complement that. I’m working with them on the project of course 🙂

People involved in the US one? Or people over here who are using it as a model for a new org/site?

Luke Akehurst is right in the sense that if we are looking for ways of attracting voters back to Labour we have to identify policies which can be sold to the wider public and not just focus on our own personal bugbears. Having said that, it doesn’t mean that because the issues he mentions aren’t neccessarily high on the priorities of the public they are not important or relevant.
There is a point well made in the comments on his site that the reason the focus is often on issues such as 42 days detention, ID cards, public service “reform”* and PFI is that it is the government which is obsessed with these issues and it is a pointless and damaging obsession which distracts it from what it should really be doing to improve people’s lives.

* The word “reform” is obviously used in the New Labour context which means “bringing in the private sector and introducing markets” – that being the sole possible method of reforming public services.

Andrew: You cannot use the market because the govt is the only setter of the rules – and it is that rule setting in ‘one size fits all and its actually the wrong shape’ form that so many find fault with. I’m reminded that we were changed from being subjects of the Crown to being citizens of the UK quite a long time ago, but nothing has changed.

Yes, I agree. I certainly wasn’t advocating markets as a solution to the problems of our public services – I was remarking on NuLabours assumption of such.

I have to say that Akehurst’s “wait and see” approach is the worst possible one – it is both complacent and wilfuly ignores the depth of the governments problems. He says in another post –

people are hurting economically, they are angry, and rightly the Government has to take responsibility for the state of the economy. If we sort it out and the economy recovers before the General Election we will likewise take the credit.

Er, it doesn’t quite work like that. The economy improved greatly in the latter years of John Major’s government and a fat lot of good it did him. And what happens if it doesn’t get better? What’s his plan B?

To those saying Labour need to reform and come up with better policies, I think you’re underestimating the power that long running dissatisfaction can have. I said back several months ago that Brown needed to duck out and give someone two years to work up a new direction. That two years is now looking closer to 1 by the time you get a contest over and done with, so it’s now getting to the point where he cannot go wihout Labour admitting a defeat to the Tories on a wider scale.

As some polls have indicated, and I don’t really question them based on (annecdotally) the mood I tend to feel, people are less hating on Brown for his dithering and what not, and it’s now spreading to the party. The whole party has left it far too late to act and in that sense I agree the “wait and see” approach will only help compound their failure.

Labour is starting to get stigmatised with the public, and without absolute proof of a policy that is amazing happening for the whole public…let’s remember the public don’t exactly trust Labour on promises either right now…anything they announce will be viewed with a “well yeah, but it’s not good enough” kind of attitude, especially when announcing so many policy directions that you could have previously found from the Tories (work for benefits) or the Lib Dems (votes at 16).

I said a few months ago that if Labour took the hard decisions that really needed making I could see them pulling off an election victory, but now that time has passed for me, and their only real hope now is that the tories manage to shoot themselves in both feet over the next year, and maybe kill a few children while they’re at it (metaphorically of course).

There’s some good points here, but in making the case for what needs to be done the implication mounts of what Labour is not doing. Ultimately you’ve got to ask: what is the Labour party?

Sunder, as soon as you deconstruct the formulation of what a party is then you are questioning the basis for its continued existence. So by admitting the description of a ‘party’ is inadequate it becomes necessary to reexamine what its foundations are.

Labour may well have started as you say, but it is an expression of inherently conservative thinking to claim exclusive political ownership of those demographic and social segments and ignore the shifting trends which politicians vocationally represent. The split between society and parliament enables these shifts to be represented by a constantly evolving state of voting blocs within the houses, so the fight against the constitution of our democracy in the name of so-called equality is exposed by one’s unconditional loyalty to any one or group of favoured segments.

Society is increasingly dissatisfied with the party structures forged in the furnace of total war and the political behaviour emanating from poles of partisan necessity; party membership is increasingly unable to support national activism; political funding is inaequate, inadequately directed and inadequately explained. In such a situation it is easy to understand the temptation of those so-inclined to bypass, subvert or resist fair regulation in order to advance their causes, while apathy is the logical conclusion of disillusion.

With hindsight it may also seem logical that the PLP has developed a philosophy of managerialism over the general membership which is at odds with the mutual platform shared across and between the founding fathers’ different factional interests when Labour first started coalescing, but from this point of history it is less obvious whether those interests are served by remaining so tightly bound – especially when there is no serious wider existential threat to the nation to force the stabilisation of political coordination within the party strata.

So how Labour fits into the system in the future depends on how the system is comprised in the future.

The fact is that Labour is made up of distinct regional groupings, as well as intellectual and social groupings, each of which overlap to some extent but have diverged to the point where there is nothing or virtually nothing left which is a common uniting theme. The negative anti-tory position was split with the LibDems in order to build the 1997 coalition which brought Labour to power and any final semblance of unity was only contained while the leader who embodied that strategic mood was still in place.

Gordon Brown’s criticisms of his ‘Liberal’ (they can’t make their minds up who they favour) and ‘Tory’ (they are for the few not the many) opponents has made his (and therefore Labour’s) contribution to the public debate redundant between the two and is helping return the country to nineteenth century factionalism and fluid alleigance, so it would help ‘Labour’ to be ahead of the game and shape this future rather than implode under the pressure of it.

The fact is that the Labour party is the principle product and beneficiary of the movement to which former voters pledged ourselves – now we are faced with the choice of whether we keep our wagons hitched to the vehicle as we struggle to keep it under control when to do so prevents our ability to hold the drivers to account.

Labour does have one secret weapon in the cabinet which will help the party win the next election and would side-step all the problems faced currently – provided Gordon Brown is replaced as PM – Gordon Brown as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

But will he reshuffle himself?

Referring back to 28: Andrew, sorry if I gave the impression that I though that you are pro-markets in public services, and I’m pleased that you are not. But nobody has taken up my plea for a programme from the democratic left to address the alienation that so many have against government. It seems to me that it is socialism that the democratic left have to keep away from. Not being much of a historian, I nevertheless suspect that the Christian Democrats try to do that, yet our SDP failed.
There is a seminal comment in the 17th July Public Administration Select Committee witness session, where they interviewed “Sir John Bourn KCB, former Comptroller and Auditor General, Sir Richard Mottram GCB, former Permanent Secretary, and Kate Jenkins, a former senior civil servant.” Ms Jenkins said: “The theory of Next Steps, and I am sorry to keep using the shorthand, but the theory of setting up executive agencies was, in part, to push both ministers and senior officials into a position where they had to do this extremely difficult task, which most of them found very difficult indeed, which is to be specific about what your policies should mean in practice and what it is that is expected of a large government executive operation. Now, we found that this was very seldom spelled out and certainly in the mid-1980s a lot of what happened happened because of the diligent, hard-working, honest, urgent sense of the need to get on of middle-ranking civil servants who were not given adequate and clear instructions on what they were expected to do, or even how much money they had to spend.”
The democratic left has to work out a way to make government in this country work properly – and there is plenty of evidence available on how to do it.

I admit a conflict of interest since I’m involved in coordinating Compass Youth, but I do agree with Jonathan Rutherford on Compass. Have a look at the issues it has campaigned on, like the windfall tax on energy companies, drive to build council houses, living wage, a fairer tax system. I know many people across the political specturm and even more who don’t care about party politics who support these policies. I also agree that it has learnt its lessons and trying to work out of its cultural past to be something different.

I agree with Mike and Sunny, my issue with always looking out for the centre ground, is whether you see it as a triangulation of left and right, which in essence is what New Labour is about (i.e. with my left hand, I’ll develop Sure Start and with my right, I want
local authorities to make 3% savings year on year…which may include cutting children’s services! which is what you’re alluding to Thomas) or whether you develop ways of building trust of people on the ground – voters and activists – bringing out their concerns
and providing ways for them to negotiate the complexities and contradictions that we face.

Humanite, MoveOn or GetUp don’t just happen out of the ether. I’m sure people on the left said the same thing in the US, that it was a shame that we can’t mobilise like the Republicans do, deep into the community. Then a small group of people,
said wait a minute, we can mobilise deep into the community, but why should we look at the Republicans for inspiration, let’s create something that expresses our values and makes sense to people.

As Leon says, rather than referring to MoveOn all the time, it may be interesting as Sunny have been doing to look at what this means in our context. The point that Sunder makes about the potential culture clash within progressive constituencies is
an interesting one that I think we need to think about and negotiate, as it has the potential for creative tension if we start working on bringing people together across those constituencies as equals amongst equals.

I would recommend anyone to read this, but more importantly I think Leon’s recommendation for an LC BBQ!

Noel,

preventing the continued expansion of state services does not necessarily amount to making cuts, just as changes to the tax regime don’t necessarily prevent economic growth. Such dogma is outdated and misplaced.

The state and private sectors don’t exist to further their own ends, but to further the shared ends of a fully-functioning society – it is a matter of personal and political perspective whether it is a competitive relationship exists in harmony or animosity or as a form of necessary cooperation to complement spontaneous behaviour and organised volunteerism.

It is an open question where initiative starts and how to motivate action, and I strongly doubt any aims are served by failing to recognise the complexity of situations and how approaches change with much fluidity.

The windfall tax on energy companies is controversial because it highlights how different sectors fare differently as the market rebalances under the evolving reality.

Look at airlines and hauliers and it is easy to see that slack in one part of the economy is matched by severe pressure elsewhere, yet the windfall tax implies that the government doesn’t wish to relate the two for the political hit it faces when it is forced to admit the structure of market regulations is unfairly weighted. So Labour is looking to take the easy way out by offering inadequate bribes to the public in the hope of sustaining the unsustainable – in effect blaming public behaviour for the incompetence resulting from its own bias and undertaking an authoritarian power grab (where power is in this case is represented by money).

Winter fuel allowances do not compensate for the poverty created by inaequate state pensions just as the state pension is no compensation for the accumulation of problems from inadequate financial planning by successive governments.

Never forget the symmetry of the relationship that every state failure leads to suffering on an individual scale and that every private failure leads to suffering on a social scale.

Why is it that poets tend to be socialist and accountants corporatist?

I don’t agree that windfall taxes equate to offering inadequate bribes to the public (what about the windfalls on privatised utilities in 97?). I do agree that we can’t sustain the unsustainable…the state’s failure of regulation in this area and also treating citizens like passive consumers. We could incentivise community ownership of energy assets, rather than invest massively in nuclear.

On tackling fuel poverty, why not introduce smart tariffs for energy where people would get access to cheaper energy up to a reasonable level and then charge higher rates if you consume more than that.

Are accountants corporatist, maybe but that doesn’t mean they don’t support “socialist” policies like the living wage, which we have been campaigning on – as a result, KPMG and PWC have implemented the living wage in their plc. Poetic justice? Maybe..

Noel,

the case for a windfall tax in ’97 was acceptable because it was sold as a one-off, not as a tax of last resort. If a second windfall is made then obviously the first was not a one-off and Labour is contradicting its own case for probity and giving another reason to replace this government – in all likelihood with Cameron’s Conservatives – is that what you want?

Community ownership of assets (ie nationalisation) presents serious difficulties in the current economic climate, as there is no support for the massive tax hike which would be needed to pay for it, nor is there support for the secondary tax hike which would be required to maintain projected levels of investment without similar price hikes. The knock-on consequence of nationalisation hits private pensions and other investors as the capital growth is squandered, thus creating additional state dependents who require a tertiary tax hike to prevent them from falling below the poverty line (Prudential were one of the major shareholding dissenters in the EDF/BE takeover) while simultaneously reducing monetary flows and reducing overall tax takes. Additionally to signal such a significant restructuring of the economy would cause massive unrest which simply cannot be sustained financially under democratic conditions. Maybe you need to study the economics of the 1970’s again.

I don’t think you’ve quite understood how the dynamic of layered financial markets creates growth multipliers and therefore underwites our financial security despite how the practicalities of restrictions to the markets exacerbate wealth inequalities on practice. The simple fact is that the social market model is more responsive than the state model and the benefits far outweight it’s weaknesses, though the existence of those weaknesses mean that the state will never become completely obsolete or totally undersirable. At the other end of the scale an under-regulated market with an underpowered regulator leads to price bubbles such as the recent housing bubble and the tech bubble of the late 1990’s.

So it’s a question of finding a balance.

‘Smart’ tariffs are interesting as a potential solution to fuel poverty, but you need to have a method of checking that they aren’t being subverted unfairly, otherwise it makes more sense to simply offer a flat rate for usage at the lower tariff because the higher rate becomes seen as inflated.

The type of energy assets requiring investment is in a different category altogether and I don’t think you help yourself by creating confusion between the two.

Nor do I think you’ve quite yet grasped the full expanse of difference between poetic justice and the common sense ability to adjust to political reality – retrospective analysis and ideology in the abstract are fine, but just make sure you keep it on the dusty shelves of academia and away from the rigours of daily life.

Here goes, the campaign for a windfall on social and environmental justice, read more where? liberal conspiracy evidemment…https://liberalconspiracy.org/2008/08/06/we-call-for-a-windfall-tax-on-energy-companies/