“The election was as centrist as it could be, and the party lost badly. Very badly.”

Indeed. And the Party that won most seats positioned itself to our right. Shouldn’t that make leftists think twice? Even a little bit?

In his classic article, “Has the electorate become Thatcherite?”, Ivor Crewe showed many years ago that the British population never really subscribed to the kind of values and preferences the Thatcherites wanted them to have: public opinion in this country has generally and persistently been soft-social-democratic across any number of issues. Rather, Labour’s problem in the 1980s and early 1990s was the perception of economic incompetence. New Labour did very well electorally when that perception had been dispelled, and very badly when it returned with a vengeance. So one important task for the Party now is to try to regain the confidence of the electorate on economic affairs. And it seems to me unlikely that it will do this by following the advice of New Labour types, who were so heavily invested in the neoliberal economic model that came so spectacularly unstuck not so very long ago.

(Right – now it’s time to pay attention to the cricket.)

So the majority of the population voted for two center right/liberal parties – the LibDems and Conservatives, and you think they secretly wanted to vote for a left wing party?

If so, why didn’t they vote for the Labour party, which was always to the left of the other two?

Maybe because the public simply don’t want a left-wing government any more.

[moderated out]

Mark – I imagine that most people who switched from Labour to Tory did so simply to get rid of you. And on several issues – such as civil liberties – the Tories out flanked you on the left.

The election was as centrist as it could be, and the party lost badly. Very badly.

Is that fair? Labour denied the Conservative Party an absolute majority. Okay, it wasn’t exactly a photo finish, but that wasn’t as bad a result as many expected after three terms and a recession. Seems to me Labour’s centrists brought the party the longest sustained period of success in its history. Not to be sneezed at.

Absolutely right Sunny. The best possible response to losing an election is to tack hard to your core vote – after all, if you can get them to turn out for you you’ll win elections. If you can manage to get your base enthusiastic, then you’ve got it made.

Equally, the leader you should choose would ideally be a young bright former cabinet minister with a long background in the party – preferably since childhood. It doesn’t matter if he looks a bit peculiar and has an unfortunate television manner. The electorate are sophisticated enough to see beyond such petty things.

Worked for us. Well, ish.

3. On pretty much everything, the Lib Dem policies were to the left of Labour’s. If you think the solution is to keep going further and further right then please do so. I look forwards to my party gaining your former voters.

I agree that ground has shifted and centrist policies can now include high taxation of the rich, aggressive reform of the financial sector, and a more interventionist stance towards the economy (with caveats). But I still think there’s lots of policies/attitudes on the left wing of Labour that are vote losers. It’s true Labour was centrist and lost the election, but there are lots of other ways of explaining why Labour lost the election. Most political scientists would tell the combination of a recession and having been in power for a decade is a killer whatever you do.

I may have missed it, but I think it’s striking how we haven’t seen much from Labour candidates on the finance sector and tax.

On finance, I’d really like to see a Labour candidate seriously consider adopting the idea of Limited Purpose Banking. It’s certainly radical, and it’s not flaky nonesense. I think it could be a vote winner. See here:

http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2010/07/laurence-kotlikoff-replies-to-lord-turner-part-1/
http://blogs.ft.com/economistsforum/2010/07/laurence-kotlikoff-replies-to-lord-turner-part-2/
http://www.kotlikoff.net/-statement-mervyn-king

On tax, why not go for land taxes?
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/8f06df9e-8ac1-11df-8e17-00144feab49a.html
http://www.labourland.org/in_the_news/articles/tax_to_build_on.php

On the economy, I think long-term investment ought to be the theme – build a campaign about investing in Britain. Investment in education, technology, investment in infrastructure, energy etc. This would also function as a subsidy to job creation and to exporters. Building capacity to export would also be a nice move if we’re going to see inflation and currency devaluation.

Agreed!

some elaborations.

You argue that the financial crisis has shifted ground etc. but when it comes to the question of whether the Labour party ought to embrace it’s left-wing, isn’t the relevant question: does the Labour party’s left-wing have any decent ideas about how to reform finance, for instance? Has anybody on the left come up with anything as coherent yet radical as Kotolikoff’s Limited Purpose Banking? Most of the ideas I’ve seen are rubbish (a “people’s bank”!) – the Robin Hood Tax might have some justification (reducing reliance on short-term financing) but it has been mis-sold and over-sold.

On investment as a theme, the idea would be to “crowd in” private sector investment (the economy will not recover without that) and as far as ‘stimulation’ goes, it’s much wiser than trying to stimulate consumption, most of which goes on imports.

@9 – the links you posted are very interesting; thank you for sharing. Why hasn’t the media caught on to the ideas that Prof. Kotlikoff is proposing? (Or has it, and I’ve just been asleep?)

I also agree on the economy (the narrative, that is) – focus on the long-term, and directly contrast the insanely destructive short-termism of the coalition’s deficit reduction plan.

I voted LibDem because I wanted LibDem. Maybe if more people had done so we wouldn’t have been saddled with the Tories?

What I wanted was an essentially left wing economy with a liberal social strategy, meaning, yes, tax the rich, spend it where it needs spending, have the State do its job rather than abdicating it to private firms greedy for a slice of the pie, but get rid of the thousands of laws criminalising everyone, get the State out of our livingrooms & bedrooms & back into the streets to improve our lives & not mess with our lives.

If Labour had done a deal with the LibDems, we might have had that. I blame Labour for this, frankly, and I will never vote Labour again, having voted Labour from the age of 18-27. I’m 40 now, so that tells you when I last voted Labour – when they came in in ’97. I was pleased as punch when they got in. They would undo the draconian crap the Thatcher & Major governments had done – but no, they largely just built upon it & ignored the largest anti-war demo ever to bring us into unjustifiable wars. Never again.

@3 Ianvisits

“If so, why didn’t they vote for the Labour party, which was always to the left of the other two?
Maybe because the public simply don’t want a left-wing government any more.”

If you think NuLabour was a party of the Left, or indeed progressive, you must have been asleep for much of their 13 years of power.

@6 Jay
“Seems to me Labour’s centrists brought the party the longest sustained period of success in its history. Not to be sneezed at.”

It is to be sneezed at if it involved the repellent, illiberal, spin obssessed control freakery of Blair, Brown and their dysfunctional coterie of political pygmies, and the selling of your soul in some Faustian crypto Thatcherite neo-liberal nightmare believing that “Things can only get better”. Yeah…..right.

“So the majority of the population voted for two center right/liberal parties – the LibDems and Conservatives, and you think they secretly wanted to vote for a left wing party?”

Plenty of people voted Lib Dem because they wanted to vote for a left-wing party. They were wrong to do so, but that’s what they thought they were voting for.

There’s also the issue that Labour and the Tories were just too similar (at least in the public’s view; what’s happened since has shown the real differences). If you’re given the choice of two parties who are much the same, and one of them has been in power for 13 years, has a leader who’s uncharismatic and looks tired, you’ve just had a recession, and the newspapers are all saying “it’s time for a change”, it’s hardly surprising that you’d go for the party that’s been out of power for a while. If there had been a more distinctive offering from Labour – which needn’t necessarily mean more left-wing, but that’s the obvious way to distinguish it from the other parties – then that can attract people, not just from the other parties but also from current non-voters.

Finally, Labour lost more voters between 2001 and 2005 than between 2005 and 2010. A lot of those lost voters left because of war, tuition fees, and civil liberties – not areas we were blazing a left-wing path.

“What I wanted was an essentially left wing economy with a liberal social strategy, meaning, yes, tax the rich, spend it where it needs spending, have the State do its job rather than abdicating it to private firms greedy for a slice of the pie, but get rid of the thousands of laws criminalising everyone, get the State out of our livingrooms & bedrooms & back into the streets to improve our lives & not mess with our lives.”

…and instead by voting Lib Dem, you helped to achieve the opposite.

Hmmm. This sounds very like the Conservatives’ call to return to core conservative values after 1997.

I’m not saying that there is nothing electorally wrong with going leftwards, but since out-and-out left-wing parties have lost every general election they’ve contested since 1979 (by Sunny’s own logic, the Labour party 1997-2005 were centrist, whilst I am classing 2010 as left-wing simply because of the ideology that the campaign tried to invoke) it is hardly the best logic. Incidentally, I’d argue that out-and-out right-wing parties have lost every general election since 1987 (Major’s 1992 campaign was no more radical than Tony Blair’s five years later, and David Cameron was careful to show himself as centrist), so the argument against centrism could really do with some bolstering from either side.

Rather than silly arguments about where to position oneself perhaps coming up with a coherent set of ideals, informed by left-wing values, but attractive to voters would be an idea? If they are good enough, these ideas will become normalised, accepted and centralised along with ideas such as a National Health Service or non-nationalised utitilities, which were contentious and radical in their day.

@16 Don

Hardly. Many who voted LD (including myself here) did so without much conviction in hope that it would result in a left of centre, progressive coalition. The fact that we didn’t get that is just a tad more complex than your facile response, including the deliberate kyboshing of the prospect by the NuLabour angry brigades, our rigged electoral system, the fact that too many people are politically clueless and make their minds up in the polling booth on the basis of who wears the nicest tie, etc, etc.

A liberal social strategy was hardly likely to be forthcoming from an unreconstructed Labour party: even now many of them are still banging on about the same illiberal policies that lost them so much support. Like Luis @ 9 & 11 there was a strong alternative vision waiting to be presented to the public: it’s a shame it wasn’t articulated, but expecting the nauseating NuLabour project to to it is a fantasy. I don’t think they are entitled to sit on the sidelines now saying “we told you so”.

What’s different now is that the financial crisis has changed how people see equality and fairness in British society. They are much more happier advocating higher taxes on the rich; they want to curb corporate power; they want the financial sector to be restrained.

Curbing corporate power and restraining the financial sector are not only leftist policies- they are libertarian policies. We need to start to analyse and discuss these issues on the correct axis.

Labour spent the last twenty years getting into bed with the syphilitic corporates so that, in the end they didn’t even notice who was fucking who. When the financial crisis came along they had no choice but to bail them out on their way to the STD clinic.

Tell me, which of the current leadership contendors was not involved in the orgy?

To have any hope of election in the future, Labour needs to get back to its roots to support the individual and the small business and to fight state corporatism. They can do this by promoting mutualism and by attacking those who wield financial and monopoly power.

I’m not holding my breath.

I don’t think any of Labour’s strategists have yet got their heads around how the new volatility in politics is going to affect things like left/centre positioning.

There’s a cold shower of an article in New Republic showing how soon after Obama enthusiasm the US public has started to move rightwards again:

voters now place themselves much closer to the Republican Party than to the Democratic Party on {the} left-right continuum. Indeed, the ideological gap between the Democratic Party and the mean voter is about three times as large as the separation between that voter and the Republican Party. And, startlingly, the electorate places itself a bit closer to the Tea Party movement (which is well to the right of the Republican Party) than to the Democratic Party. All this represents a major shift from five years ago, when mean voters placed themselves exactly halfway between their ideological perceptions of the Democratic and Republican parties.

The public may have an appetite for higher taxes on the rich now, but then they already have higher taxes on the rich. What do you propose for 4 years from now – 60% top rate of IT?

@19 pagar

“I’m not holding my breath.”

Probably wise..I’m not either. As noted above by Luis and others, there probably was (is) a platform to be made for an alternative approach, but it’s difficult to see if it has much traction. Boosting spending on infrastructure, education, technology..yes. Actually making real progress on environmental issues, alternative energy..sure. Promoting liberal social policies, higher taxes on the rich, greater controls over the banking sector, windfall taxes on huge bonuses, closing all the tax loopholes and making sure the richest actually pay them… all would be good.

If only there was a party that would promote that platform…..

@16 Don,

Galen10 basically said it all. Labour’s record had been since 1997 to indroduce more & more laws to make criminals of us, & to engage in foreign policy that made reasonable people ashamed to be British. After the Iraq War had been started, the general election post 2003 showed a swing away from Labour. They knew we didn’t like what they’d done, but their response was more of the same. Now, if someone keeps kicking you in the face the one thing you don’t do unless you’re a total masochist is carry on supporting them. They needed to sit up & take notice, but they didn’t. We blogged and protested, but still nothing, finally we switched to the LibDems. Even immediately after the election the Labour party had the chance to deal with the LibDems & present a united left-centrist coalition – it wouldn’t have been a “strong government” insofar as they couldn’t railroad through unpopular laws any more but would have to get consensus. Well, if that had happened – GOOD. They’d had far too much rope already, far too much free reign to do whatever they wanted despite the protests of the electorate. But no. They refused, like a spiteful child. They did this. There were a few things Labour did right, but these happened quietly & in the background while the glaring idiocy ran riot for 13 years. Did they think they could carry on like that forever?

Sorry if I’m ranting but seriously, having been an activist for them for 10 years I feel they betrayed a lot of us. I wouldn’t play the beaten wife & continue to support them. I just couldn’t.

Indeed. And the Party that won most seats positioned itself to our right. Shouldn’t that make leftists think twice? Even a little bit?

You had a very unpopular incumbent who couldn’t communicate, a tired party, an opposition the entire media supported and tons of Ashcroft money. They still didn’t win outright.

What does that tell you?

Sorry, can you define centrist? Labours screw ups were not what I would regard as centrist.

The Iraq war was a far right wing conspiracy to steal their oil, and if everything went well to the launch a war with Iran to steal their oil. Remember the leader of the Conservative party Ian Duncan Smith said we should invade, even if they have no weapons of mass destruction.

The deregulation of the banking industry was right wing free market clap trap.

Identity cards and the police state was not centrist.

Nothing centrist about New Labour.

Jay @20

I’m amazed by that.

I really dislike people who treat their political opponents as if they are bad or stupid, but it really looks to me like the Republicans are a bad and stupid party and that the American electorate is going to vote for them nonetheless. We’re looking at a situation where the greatest democracy on the planet votes crazy.

Anybody who hasn’t should read Martin Wolf’s chilling analysis of the future under Republicans:

http://blogs.ft.com/martin-wolf-exchange/2010/07/25/the-political-genius-of-supply-side-economics/

The best possible response to losing an election is to tack hard to your core vote

given that the Tories were talking about nasty bankers and accepting that nationalisation had to happen – I think you’re naive about where the core vote actually is.

There’s a cold shower of an article in New Republic showing how soon after Obama enthusiasm the US public has started to move rightwards again:

There’s evidence to show that the American public always moved in the opposite direction to the party in power. During Bush they weren’t exactly enamoured by his policies.

On top of that – it’s less to do with how voters see themselves and more to do with how they see the President. If he becomes unpopular they define themselves against him. That happened with Bush and it’s happening now with Obama.

The idea that the electorate is aligned to Tea Partyers is rubbish though. 538 showed a few weeks ago that Sarah Palin’s endorsement didn’t help much (and actually hurt some candidates) and in many cases the Tea Party candidate is going to get pulverised. See the Nevada race, where Harry Reid is now crapping all over Sharon Angle.

I thought that Labour would do much worse in the elections than it did but I’ve not worked out why that was. Note that Cameron didn’t think that the Conservatives had won:

“David Cameron has admitted that even the night before he eventually became Prime Minister he told his wife he had lost hope of making it to Number 10.”
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-10801650

The public is pissed with Obama because he is too right wing. He has not changed a thing from the Bush policy in Iraq and has increased the war in Afghanistan. The majority wanted a public option on the healthcare bill ,but Obama gave then a giant corporate sell out that is going to come back to bite the Dems in the ass. People are now forced by law to give money to private health care insurers.

He has fought for corporate sell out Dems like Blance Lincoln and Joe Lieberman.

The tea party is nothing. It is simply the base of the republican party. Poll after poll has showed that these people voted for Bush. They are not new, just a well funded corporate stunt to intimidate the Dems to moving further to the right. Obama’s biggest problem at the next election is getting Dems to come out and vote because they feel they have been lied too.

keep smoking the weed, Sunny.

Left-wingism, right-wingism and centrism are meaningless descriptions from another long-buried age, an age of confrontation, stagnation and rocketing inequality. They are inherently conservative descriptions, hollow charicatures which distract from addressing issues and avoid answering the internal contradictions and paradoxes raised by all ideologies.

there’s no point in disagreeing further with anything you write since you disagree with yourself from one line to the next (the pragmatists dropped the dogma… eh?).

so the only reason you still exist is as an entertaining reminder that influence ocurrs on the basis of opinion, not fact.

Even a cursory glance at your argument that the public supports higher taxes on the rich shows that you base this on anger at tax avoidance – in other words the logical conclusion of your argument is in direct contradiction of the one you posit. Yours is the very definition of how to create a perverse incentive and whyeac.

Any success gained by a party on the back of such unreliable and inconsistent claptrap should put the fear of the almighty into all sane people – which only needs illustrating by the financial messes recent history showed them to produce.

All the Labour leadership candidates are nothing of the sort. They all stand on the platform of dangerous irrelevance they are responsible for creating. Watch for further declines in their support as the infighting to breaks out again and their internal coalition fractures. The Labour party conference this year is guaranteed to be a rollicking gala performance!

Amidst all their chaos the new leader faces an existential dilemma – funding – go bankrupt or get deeper in hock to a cabal of militant unionists who have nowhere else to go. Labour’s economic models for the party and the country are simply unsustainable – particularly so whilst they aren’t considered in any way a realistic alternative by non-tribal trade union members. And yet this remains to be addressed by each and every single one of them. Leadership is not about dodging the bullet – it is about taking the hit on behalf of the collective to prove you can stand up.

Sunny, your confused frustration is palpable. You seriously need a long holiday. About 5 years will probably do it.

@24 – Sally. You’re good value, you lass. Apologies for being an intruder in an internal, you know, whatever it is – Labour post mortem? Don’t get the Tomlinson dude; he’s useless. Anywho, back to your decription of Iraq as ‘a far right conspiracy to steal their oil’. Not really that far right, is it? They’ve got oil to sell, they want to sell it, we want to buy it.

As for Labour losing the election, again, apols for it being none of my business, but old people were angry with Gordon Brown – it goes right back to the pension thing; when yer mum’s pissed off, you’ve just got to stand there and listen to it. All they bloody do every day is talk bollox to each other over very tasty cakes and stuff.

Modded out? For that? Tad sensitive aren’t we old boy? Or do you think I wa being unfair given Labour’s record on civil liberties?

@32

Agreed.

When I saw it earlier I remember thinkoing it was the first bit of sense you had expressed for a while and I cannot think what could have broken the blog guidelines.

Sunny?

Mark

“The election was as centrist as it could be, and the party lost badly. Very badly.”

Indeed. And the Party that won most seats positioned itself to our right. Shouldn’t that make leftists think twice? Even a little bit?

Yes but the Tories only won 36% of the vote, despite having most of the media and huge amounts of money on their side, that hardly suggests great public enthusiasm for a return to the right now does it.

Also on some issues e.g. the Tories positioned themselves to the left of Labour.

@Galen @Skiamakhos – you should have been listening to what Nick Clegg was saying before the election, and what the Lib Dems were doing when they were in power at a more local level. If you wanted a more leftie alternative to Labour, there’s always the Green Party.

@35 Don

..Green Party?..lol. If I wanted to live in cloud cuckoo land I’d move to North Korea..or perhaps just wait for Dave’s Big Society to bear fruit…

“They’ve got oil to sell, they want to sell it, we want to buy it.”

So you really are that stupid!

I give up! If Luke Akehurst is a ‘centrist’ now… who the bloody hell is on the right?

“The best possible response to losing an election is to tack hard to your core vote”

Agreed. Hard to do if you spent 13 years systematically undermining them socially and economically though. Let them eat guacemole and all that.

@37 – Sally. Yes, I most defo am that stupid.

Just as the Republicans in the US had to be defeated in the US in 2008, Neo Con Labour had to be defeated in 2010. The big cuts in Housing Benefit were already being prepared for Labour. The new smiley anti cuts face of Ed Balls was happily offering up over £2 billion in education “savings” above those proposed by the Chancellor. So on economics there was no difference. All of the Parties offered an agenda of varying varieties of shit sandwich.

While all of the headlines have been about wicked Tory cuts, people forget the slogans of the 80′s – not everything is economics. Under Neo Con Labor our civil liberties were being destroyed. If you were a young man in a big city you were a suspected terrorist and could be randomly searched just because the police did not like the look of you. If you happened to be Muslim you could have counted on that happening daily and a recent example in Birmingham shows that you could have CCTV disguised as lampposts pointing at your home.

Never mind if you looked a bit Mexican and had a ruck sack or looked a bit fat and the police fancied a bit of happy slapping.

Neo COn Labour were not forgiven for the Iraq war crimes in 2005. The public were not convinced that electing the Tory Prince of Darkness as a Leader was a better choice. In fact the Tory campaign of vote Blair get Brown boosted Labour.

Labour must no longer be an authoritarian party. It should feel ashamed that its former Leader described the Conservatives as too left wing on civil liberties. The likes of David Milliband should not be looking to become Labour Leader they should be looking forward to facing the Hague (and I am not on about William).

Rather, Labour’s problem in the 1980s and early 1990s was the perception of economic incompetence. New Labour did very well electorally when that perception had been dispelled, and very badly when it returned with a vengeance. So one important task for the Party now is to try to regain the confidence of the electorate on economic affairs. And it seems to me unlikely that it will do this by following the advice of New Labour types, who were so heavily invested in the neoliberal economic model that came so spectacularly unstuck not so very long ago.

So the very people you credit with eradicating the perception Labour was “economically incompetent” are also blamed for the unravelling of that perception years later?

You may be right, but why should the latter be invested with more significance than the former? Why should the “New Labour Types” responsible for 3 election victories be ditched because they oversaw a defeat in the midst of a world recession?

This is like Man Utd fans calling for Ron Atkinson to replace Sir Alex. Fergie may have won 3 titles on the bounce, but he lost out to the blues last year, didn’t he?

You had a very unpopular incumbent who couldn’t communicate, a tired party, an opposition the entire media supported and tons of Ashcroft money.

Right, so nothing to do with this “centrist” nonsense you began with then. Agreed.

I still don’t get what the furore over the massive cuts is about. It is just returning govt spending to 2005 levels.

If that’s where the right is on the economic spectrum everyone who was in in the Labour cabinet before that is a hardline right-winger.

Add to that the increases in inequality and the progressive erosion of personal and civil liberty under Labour and the leadership debate on the ‘left’ is just laughable.

Gordon Brown deliberately chose to paint himself as a reactionary nationalist and the Milibands were happy to stand in his shadow.

Isn’t it time to recognise Labour have been the party of the ‘right’ for almost a decade now?

Bob: I give up! If Luke Akehurst is a ‘centrist’ now… who the bloody hell is on the right?

Tom Harris? Frank Field (on social issues)?

Brownie: Right, so nothing to do with this “centrist” nonsense you began with then. Agreed.

I’m explaining why Cameron didn’t win a massive majority. You haven’t accounted for the millions of votes the centrists lost since 1997. The Tories are more unpopular, but that doesn’t explain why Labour losyt so much support.

Sally: Obama’s biggest problem at the next election is getting Dems to come out and vote because they feel they have been lied too.

This may be true, but that doesn’t make him right-wing. He’s been frustrated intensely by the so-called Blue Dogs. Or Republican-lite Dems as I prefer to call them.

Though I agree that Luke Akehurst is on the ‘right of the Labour party’. When I call him and Hopi centrists, I mean more in terms of where they see themselves in relation to the public, not the Labour party.

On his last day in India David Cameron talked about re-industrializing Britain. (After 30 years where the only word that was mentioned was de-industrialization). Has any candidate in the Labor leadership even mentioned this word? Or has the party still got its head up the butt of the City of London and Big Banks?

Message to Nu Labor. There is a world outside the M25. If you want to attract their votes you should start at least thinking about how to support manufacturing industry and reindustrialization.

What was fascinating about the prog last night on the formation of the Coalition was how Cameron and the tories and Lib Dem leadership had spent months before the election thinking out the terms of a Lib Dem/Tory coalition.

Had anyone in Nu Lab even thought of a coalition before the election – even though it was blindingly obvious it was going to happen – and started to map it out?

Cretins! Unbelievably incompetent, inept, arrogant, uncaring, third rate toss pots.

And Balls and the Millibands are really going to lead us to electoral success?

There’s something quite wonderful about concluding an article blaming the Labour Right for the electoral defeat of a Labour government with “it’s time to move on from the battles of the 80s”.

“On his last day in India David Cameron talked about re-industrializing Britain. (After 30 years where the only word that was mentioned was de-industrialization). Has any candidate in the Labor leadership even mentioned this word?”

Words are cheap, especially in the context of politics. It is action and policies that matter, and though they didn’t go nearly far enough there was a clear movement in that direction in the last few years of the last Labour government.

“you should start at least thinking about how to support manufacturing industry and reindustrialization”

I note that it wasn’t a Labour government that killed off a project of major strategic and economic importance to industry on dubious and curiously unclear grounds.

I note that it wasn’t a Labour government that killed off a project of major strategic and economic importance to industry on dubious and curiously unclear grounds.

Yes it was. TSR-2.

You really need to reassess Clause 4. As a statement of explicit socialist intent it was absolutely critical to the Labour Party and its abolition has harmed us in innumerable ways. It has allowed rightists to shift the definition of what Labour should stand for so much that at times we have been indistinguishable from the Tories.

I realise revisionist history of the 1990s tells us we couldn’t have won in 1997 without re-writing Clause 4, but that’s clearly untrue. Under John Smith the Labour Party was a modern, electorally appealing organisation that was on course for victory in the next election. The Blairite revolution and the re-drafting of Clause 4 may have won us a few extra votes among Tory supporters, but was it worth it? I don’t think so.

Chris,
is it only ideological socialists who see things through a black-and-white, for-us-or-against-us prism?

Even Marx’ own dialectic model contradicts your analysis.

So had John Smith won the election in 97 with Clause 4 to the fore it would only have hastened the implosion of Labour, with Michael Howard’s nasty party taking over to enact a serious of vicious policies far beyond anything that would be acceptable to todays coalition.

You should be glad for small mercies and think a bit more clearly about the consequences of polarisation before you start to advocate them. Or perhaps you are one of the dupes.

@51

Um, the Labour Party had moved away from the stirring words of workers’ power in Clause IV before Blair took over. I doubt whether the millions of hearts’n'minds the LP needs to capture give a monkeys about the LP constitution, or the phrases and words it uses. It is everything that is wrong with the Left of the party that it refuses to see past the battle of Clause IV and thus does not engage with what real people are bothered about these days (jobs, fairness, decent public services).