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.

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..

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 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!

But will he reshuffle himself?

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.

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).

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?

* 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.

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

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.

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

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).

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?

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.

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.