I was shown this last week and told that Gordon Brown actually read it when it was published, deciding not to pursue it cos it seemed like too much political hard work at the time. Harold Wilson would be rolling in his grave right now. The pioneering ideas are there, they just need to be forced through to the top of the Labour party. Bring on tomorrow!

http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/120090004/PDFSTART

I don’t see why anyone should regard the election as a forgone conclusion. Not now New Labour has Twitter on it’s side, and posters of Cameron with a moustache.

I’d be interested in your definition of ‘liberal reform’ though if you think re-electing the *same* illiberal government again and again is going to deliver it.

On the eve of what’s supposed to be a huge symposium of liberal thought and policy, can we please – just for one weekend – stop behaving as if the Conservatives were already the party in power?

Who is this “we” and why do you think they are “liberal”? There is nothing liberal about Labour.

The ‘we’ Laurie refers to are the people who’ll be attending tomorrow – the broader coalition of liberal, labour, socialist and union activists wanting to pull this country in the right direction.

The Tories aren’t in power, and haven’t by any stretched ‘seal the deal’. When the Bullingdon photographs are released, and the full evidence of George Osborne’s past misdemeanors, the British public will think twice about putting a hamster behind the wheel of a tractor, and the social-democratic majority of this country will prevail. What is the best scenario for purging much of the dross and nonsense in present-day policymaking, and for taking on many of the best ideas floating around??? Probably a Labour-LibDem coalition, made to work, with strong alliances across the social Liberals and Campaign group Labour MPs. There be my wishful thinking.

”As if Labour and the Lib Dems were already in opposition.”

The Lib Dems are in opposition. Being treated like Labour’s little surrogate brother doesn’t help them.

As to that re-elect Ken Livingston conference. Calling it liberal is a debasement of language.

My issue is that there is no good result in this election.

Say Labour, miraculously, pull it out of the bag. What then? They’ll still have to cut spending, albeit with less relish than the Tories. They’ll still be led by Brown, with noone having the nerve to challenge him but the press speculating all the time nonetheless. They will have to take all the nasty, shitty decisions that wveryone’s avoiding because an election’s coming up.

Does anyone really think that things look better after four years of that?

If Labour win this year, by 2015, they’ll be as hated as the Tories were in 1997. There might actually be the hunger for a Tory government that there just isn’t now.

Oh, and if we get a hung parliament, the bond markets screw us.

I honestly can’t work out what a ‘good’ result in this election looks like.

Agree that the election isn’t a foregone conclusion.

Disagree that we shouldn’t be spending time debunking Tory myths, slogans, research etc and ripping apart any policy they actually do produce. If we don’t show what a Tory government would be like, then we will get Cameron as PM. The nature of the threat needs to be spelt out.

Yes, there’s still doubt about the result of the election. But the labour twactivists do need to realise that writing with amusing slogans to put next to David Cameron’s face is not, in itself, a strategy.

But coming up with a positive message – a reason why people will go out and vote Labour – means being honest about what has worked over the last 13 years and what hasn’t. They can Trumpet all they like about hundreds of thousands of kids dragged from just a smidgen under the poverty line to just a smidgen over, Labour’s performance on inequality has been pathetic given that they were nominally a party of the centre-left with three terms of a nearly unassailable parliamentary majority and, for most of the time, a comfortable economic position.

Laurie has a point (gosh, I am agreeing with her). The Labour party are not coming up with new ideas, they seem to rely on “we will continue as we are”. That is not good enough, especially since the consensus is that we can do better. The problem is that Cameron has come out with some other ideas (not many, actually) and they are completely wrong, but the Press, blinded by his shiny forehead, have swallowed the meme that anything is better than what we have now.

I’ve tried to dissect the Tory Health policy and it is worrying what they are planning to do. (Basically, your local NHS hospital is at risk if Cameron should gain power.) The problem is that the Press is giving him an easy ride on this.

Labour needs to pull their finger out. Every “draft manifesto” from the Tories should be followed, a week later with an analysis by Labour of what their policy really means; and there should also be a Labour policy document saying what the alternative is. This election is there to be won, but only if the party want to win it.

He is already in power. The Civil service is resisting Brown’s scorched earth, and nothing is going to be done. By contrast, world leaders are more interested in Cameron’s opionions on any given issue than Browns becuase any resonably intelligent reader of the tea-leaves can see that this is not going to be a uniform national swing election and there is, baring Bulingdon club photos of the gang up to their nuts in 8-year-olds, going to be a 50-100 seat Tory majority on May 7th.

Labour have lost. I know it, the world knows it, the country knows it, and above all, the Labour party know it. Psycholigically they are already in opposition.

Your call to arms is stirring, but futile. Like those Imperial Japanese soldiers still serving their emperor until they were found in the 50s and 60s.

Laurie – I think you are making the same mistake as the Government in being distracted by the eye-catching for the media policies the Conservatives have unrolled away from the more far-reaching and serious policies they are more quietly developing.

The liberal Left has allowed the Tories to hi-jack localism. I think Cameron and co are sincere when they talk about radically devolving power to local communities and to individuals. When they use slogans like ‘post-bureaucratic age’ – I don’t hink it is just blether; they are in earnest.

I too would like a radical devolution of power and decision-making, but of a different kind than I suspect the Tories are ever likely to deliver.

Brown is powerless to compete here – he has always been an arch centralizer and top down manager. He cannot plausibly critique a target culture he did so much himself to create.

We need more left politicians who are more democratic than technocratic. But where are they? Between now and the election we;ll see the Tories making hay with the rhetoric of emancipation – setting the people free from bossy bureaucrats. Many will find this appealing.

But this is not how things were meant to be.

#10

So here we have the possibility of peace in Northern Ireland collapsing, and yet Cameron is stirring up the situation by showing that he will not be an impartial negotiator if he should get into power, and you are saying that “world leaders are more interested in Cameron’s opionions”? More likely that they want to know how not to approach a sensitive issue.

@1: “The pioneering ideas are there, they just need to be forced through to the top of the Labour party. Bring on tomorrow!”

Great idea to have university courses freely available on the internet – like MIT and Berkeley UC courses.

But I thought that was the motivation for the University for Industry (UfI), which Gordon Brown was promoting in the run up to 1997 election. Whatever happened to that?
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4311791.stm

The little difficulty in the woodwork is that currently less than half 16 year-olds can attain 5 GCSE subjects A*-C grades, including maths and English, so what do we do about that?

#11 Gould.

I think Cameron has pulled the wool over your eyes on this one:

“I think Cameron and co are sincere when they talk about radically devolving power to local communities and to individuals.”

Take, for example, the Tory health policy. They will concentrate power in the super-quango, the NHS Board. This is not localism. The NHS Board will devise commissioning rules, so they will tell local commissioners which providers they can use (and since the Tories have a pledge to increase the number of private providers – specifically “new providers” – then that means that the NHS Board will have a privatisation agenda and will force it on local communities). The Tories say that they “will stop A&E closures”, but the decisions on such closures are taken at a more local level than the Department of Health, who will prevent the closures under the Tories. The Tories say that they will override NICE when it comes to recommending what treatments the NHS can offer. Not only is that a command from the centre, but it is overriding expert opinion.

The only hat tip to localism in the Tory draft manifesto on health is the pledge that more hospitals should be Foundation Trusts. But that is a hollow pledge, firstly because FTs are a Labour policy, and secondly, the existing legislation says that all hospital trusts have to become FTs anyway – it is not a matter of if, but when.

Scratch the Tories policies and you find that Cameron’s plans are to concentrate power, not to disperse it.

” The Tories say that they will override NICE when it comes to recommending what treatments the NHS can offer. Not only is that a command from the centre, but it is overriding expert opinion.”

Quite so. How about government promoting homeopathy on the NHS to cut prescription costs?

Labour is in paralysis, plain and simple, and will continue to be for as long as those New Labourites still at the top of the party not only apologise and atone for betrayal of all Labour’s original principles, for New labour’s arrogance,authoritarianism and incompetence, but also step aside, and allow those untainted and with both morals and backbone (hey, and even from beyond the metropolitan cliques…) to take control. In other words, don’t hold you breath as the bastards of New Labour are clinging on, trying to reposition themselves, still triangulating and spinning away.

Disowning Blair would be an encouraging start.

Er, edit to my post at 16 ^^

Labour is in paralysis, plain and simple, and will continue to be for as long as those New Labourites still at the top of the party refuse not only to apologise and atone for betrayal of all Labour’s original principles…

Laurie Penny: “How much energy have we spent over the past six months offering responses to draft Tory policy plans?”

I suspect that the answer is “not a lot”. There haven’t been any draft Tory policy plans; indeed, Cameron made it clear that the manifesto will be what is published in this year’s manifesto, and nothing else.

The Tories have delivered a few propositions that sound like ideas read off the wall in a pub lavatory. Bring back prison ships! Death to all quangos apart from the ones that we are going to introduce!

Rebutting such propositions has not generated an overload on the liberal left. The considered Tory agenda for the next General Election will be published in April. Until that time, we can only guess what it might contain and prepare our counter arguments.

The Tories have an intelligent strategy; don’t hint about your playing cards before the first round of chips goes on the table.

So what has the liberal left been talking about here for the last six or twelve months? MP’s expenses (an honest concern about dishonesty, that has been manipulated to undermine belief in electoral politics). The Chilcot inquiry (pointless). Bankers’ bonuses (missing the point that the banking model is the problem). IPCC and climate change (an argument defined by the inability of either side to consider opponents’ ideas). Nadine Dorries (I’ll give you a tenner if anyone down my street has ever heard of the woman). Rod Liddle and the Independent (who and what?).

Amongst that negativism, I’ll pick out one positive highlight. Don Paskini on welfare and employment is too statist for me, but he asks for things to be done rather than to be undone, which is a starting point.

@Charlie

When the Bullingdon photographs are released, and the full evidence of George Osborne’s past misdemeanors, the British public will think twice about putting a hamster behind the wheel of a tractor, and the social-democratic majority of this country will prevail.

This is nonsense. I loathe the Tories as much as the next man, but we should (and can) batter them on policy, not on what one of their – admittedly more unpleasant – members did way back at Uni.

I want Labour to draft a manifesto heavily detailed in policy. One of Labour’s best moves in 2005 was simply having a manifesto which was worthy of the name. I certainly can’t say if any of those pledges were fulfilled, but a positive message about what Labour intends to do with a fourth term will do more to win that term than anything else.

Anyone remember the Tories’ nasty little propaganda leaflet they published in response?

The polls are tightening. The troops are re-energised and there is much still to play for.

“Amongst that negativism, I’ll pick out one positive highlight. Don Paskini on welfare and employment is too statist for me, but he asks for things to be done rather than to be undone, which is a starting point.”

Aww, thank you

“The government has come up with precisely zero policy platforms or post-election goals, almost as if it were hoping that twelve years of overseas conflict, widening inequality and educational meltdown would speak for themselves”

F**k me, for once I agree with Laurie Penny.

Better go get a drink Tyler old buddy.