“drawing on Labour’s own mutualist traditions to develop a less statist agenda,”

We can hope.

‘Labour begins the year slightly ahead in the polls, with one-third of LibDem voters having switched in six months. Labour’s challenge – to construct an alternative and persuade people to choose it – remains great.”

I suspect the reconstruction job is going to take some time. Absent some sudden and catastrophic implosion of the Coalition, the major task for the Labour party is to convince the 13% or so of voters who supported the LD’s last time that they should vote Labour.

Many will do so as they are probably “natural” Labour voters who defected in disgust at the New Labour hi-jacking. Others will be willing to vote Labour tactically, even if they don’t feel Labour has changed enough to actively support. Others (and I’d include myself in this group) remain deeply suspicious of Labour, irrespective of the fact we are unlikely to support the LD’s in current circumstances either.

Labour are unlikely to win without the support of these groups (and by the same token, the Tories are unlikely to win in their own right unless they can persuade enough disaffected former LD voters on the centre-right to switch to them too).

For what it is worth, I wish you well because I don’t think the forces of progressive, radical politics within Labour are that strong; you have a hard furrow to plough.

Well, Labour could say that it would support the provision of services by whoever was best placed to do so, be that State, market or non-profit outfit. But then it would have to say how it worked out which was which. And that, in the past, has always been the hard bit.

But is there time for all this self reflection and debate? By the time it’s concluded and the report written, the Coalition will have done so much damage, and will have had year to make its own weather, as it were. They clearly realise that their time may be short – look at the way they are pressing ahead, it’s like nothing seen before.

Pre Thatcher, I don’t think parties used, on losing an election, to go and sulk and think about things for years – that is a product of successive government with huge majorities which is not the case now. To do it now would just be self indulgent.

drawing on Labour’s own mutualist traditions to develop a less statist agenda

I wish you professional Labourites would come clean with us mere party members. Tell us what you actually want to do and stop feeding us platitudes. This is the nudge theory again: mention things that we are supposed to want before actually telling us what it is that you want us to want.

Let me tell you what I think about “Labour’s own mutualist traditions”. I see mutualism (and “social enterprises”) as a way to make capitalism more acceptable. So the Co-op (mutual) or John Lewis (profit share) are good, Tescos and Wal-Mart (plc paying dividends to shareholders) are bad. Those on the Left will agree (those on the Right are respectfully asked to butt out of this conversation).

So when Chuka Ummuna says that he wants to see Northern Rock turned into a mutual, I am fully in agreement. That is a bank becoming a mutual, and one could argue that if the mutual building societies had not turned into banks we would have been less exposed to the global financial crisis.

However, this is not what Ed Miliband means when he said at the NPR last year

What are the solutions for the future that I am interested in? I am interested in mutual solutions to some of the issues we face in our public services. To community ownership of our public services.

Whoa! Ed, we already own the public services, why should we mutualise them? What are “the issues” in public services that mutuals could possibly be “the solution”? What do we (the public, not you, the politicians) gain from this? What we lose is the ownership of the public service. What we lose is the responsibility for the public service. What we lose is the accountability of those running the service. So what do we gain?

So, Sunder, tell us (as a professional Labourite) are you thinking of mutualising private companies or public services? Be honest with us, will you?

@4 David

What alternative do they have? I’ve been critical of the apparently leisurely pace with which Labour has begun to “set out it’s stall”, but I’m realistic enough to see that it wasn’t going to happen overnight.

It is going to take time for Labour to de-toxify their brand, and as the leadership election showed, they are hardly spoilt for choice (or talent) when it comes to choosing people to lead them back into power.

Realistically, the Coalition is probably going to hang on as long as it possibly can; to do so otherwise would be suicidal for Clegg and those LD’s left who support the Coalition. So…unless the Coalition self destructs, Labour still has some time to develop an alternative platform.

I’d like to think it can do so, but it is far from a foregone conclusion.

drawing on Labour’s own mutualist traditions to develop a less statist agenda, while defending the necessary role of government from reckless retreat

Not possible, I’m afraid.

You are correct that mutualism is the way forward however it can only emerge from the bottom up, not via the top down.

And anyway.

Milliband and his cronies are as statist and corporatist as were Blair and Brown.

In answer to the question in the headline: yes

Pagar,

“You are correct that mutualism is the way forward however it can only emerge from the bottom up, not via the top down.”

Indeed, and I wouldn’t see such a movement, if it arrived, as identifying with the agenda of Labour, partly because:

“Milliband and his cronies are as statist and corporatist as were Blair and Brown.”

I know what labour needs to change: its current fixation with neoliberalism.

nothing could be more clear: everything.