I’m confused, Imran. Do you want a “democratic centralist” Party of the kind that Blair and Brown (who, let’s face it, disagreed only over personalities) built, or not? If so, what is to attracte independent lefties to it? If not, how is the media narrative to be disciplined?

You don’t mention the s-word. I presume you don’t see a place for socialists in the Party of your dreams…

Thank you for your comment.

I think you’re mistaking my desire for structure with my prescribing specific content. I am not seeking in this article to present my policy prescriptions, rather the urgent need to build an infrastructure that generates effective policy and that exposes Coalition policy when they seek to disingenuously present it as “progressive”. The media’s insatiable desire for “news” lends itself to well-structured policy announcements, to well-composed and well-researched refutation of Coalition dissembling.

Also, quite specifically, I note that Blair did not call New Labour democratic centralist, in fact quite specifically Blair’s Clause IV called it a democratic socialist party. I certainly didn’t agree with many of Blair’s policies nor did I agree with his centralisation of the policy apparatus into Number 10. Ministers were not given the latitude to innovate and to proffer their huge experience and ability into policy-formulation and he created a number of initiative that purported to source policy broadly but were in fact neutered by the Number 10 juggernaut.

What I hope should be clear is that I want less centralisation, for Conference to become a major decision-making body again and, as I quite clearly stated, “embraces the wide experience of its phenomenal activist base and encourages dialogue within the whole party”. That means the whole Party. Frankly, if you’re an “independent” socialist and not a member, then I suggest you join the Party rather than, as some are wont to do, snipe from the outside and endlessly criticise a Party that is trying to provide a positive agenda for government.

Imran,

The trouble is, we’ve seen precious little evidence of how Ed and Newer Labour are trying to provide a positive agenda for government. To say progress since Ed’s election has been leisurely is an understatement. I for one remain unconvinced that Labour have done enough (or anything of substance in fact) to exorcise the ghost of New Labour.

Until they do so, and show me the beef of what differentiates them from both Blair/Brown, and from the regressive policies being pursued by the Coalition, I will not be beating a path to their door.

You are right, there are a large number of disillusioned former LD supporters and voters out there looking for a new home. Whether Labour can provide such a home is still open to doubt. If they eschew the deeply repugnant authoritarian approach which characterised New Labour, and come up with a truly radical, progressive alternative they might have some success; if not, we are simply in for more of the same!

I think it’s profoundly wrong-headed to say that Ed has been working at a leisurely pace.

He was elected on September 25th. It’s been three months.

Frankly, as an Old Trafford boy born and bred, all this negativity because he hasn’t fixed everything in three months, reminds me of those banners “Ta Ra Fergie!”.

Hey, but at least they gave him three years before unfurling those spectacularly wrong-headed thoughts for the world to look back at for their guffawing pleasure.

Take Blair’s ascent for example. It took him nine or so months to change Clause 4, undoubtedly the point at which he broke from Old Labour.

I think what’s confusing people is not that Ed is too slow, it’s just how spectacularly, pant-wettingly fast the Coalition have imploded. It’s taken them seven months to have riots on the street. While I admire how quickly they flip-flop from one policy to another (I am quite involved with youth justice and was staggered to see how quickly Cameron overturned policies in Ken Clarke’s green paper that he had himself advocated years previously, using the contemptible lie that Clarke had gone rogue – there is no way in Hell that Cameron would not have had numerous reviews of the Green Paper before publication), and I admire how rapidly Nick Clegg has destroyed his political reputation (I have two first edition copies of The Orange Book bought in 1994, so I’m quite smug in having been way ahead of the curve in identifying him as a proto-Thatcherite scumbag), I don’t want Ed to follow their lead in speed and sheer destructiveness.

@3

I totally agree with Galen10.

Labour needs to address the issues that led to many voters including myself abandoning the party and voting Lib Dem last election.

While I won’t be repeating that mistake in a hurry I see little of substance coming from Labour to win me back. The cynic in me fears that they’re keeping a low profile so that they can blame the coalition for a number of deeply unpopular reforms they would have made themselves. Unfair? No doubt. But after Blair it’s hard to know what exactly the Labour party stands for.

I don’t want to live in a society where the only choice is to “hold your nose and vote Labour.”

And I’d rather be part of a Labour party that didn’t fart out policies because the Leader felt like it and they were part of his (and only his) preconceived convictions but because they’re based on consultation, consensus and the best opinions sourced from throughout the Party.

You might not like to hear that right now but come 2015 (or whenever Simon Hughes deposes Clegg and collapses the Government) that will give us a far better framework for success than the same old centralised New Labour approach of kneejerk reactionary policy-making in response to yesterday’s headlines.

Good article. All Labour have to do is come up with a credible alternative policy for cuts. With that, they’re back in business. Without that, they’re just verbal snipers with nothing of value to offer Britain.

4

Nobody is saying that things should be done overnight… we realise that we don’t live in a time of miracles.

However, it’s the want of ambition that concerns me most. Fair enough Ed’s only been in place 3 months….. but what was he doing beforehand or, for that matter those in the Labour party who could see the demise of New Labour coming?

Why have we still not got the credible alternative policy on cuts mentioned by Ted @7? Excuse us if we have a sneaking suspicion that the reason is that either that they have no clue what they would do, or that they would actually do very little differently from New Labour or the Coalition except in degree… New Labour Lite.

We shouldn’t have to wait until 2015, or what ever earlier date the Coalition (hopefully) implodes… we want answers now, even if they are fairly braod brush at this stage.

Surely that isn’t too much to ask?

I think it’s a preposterous ask three months into his leadership and utterly counter-productive.

Ed is trying to rebuild the Party from first principles. I think that’s a remarkably courageous, intelligent and bold thing to do. It’s what Blair did. It’s what Cameron did. It’s the right thing to do.

What’s not the right thing to do is, as Howard did, as IDS did, as Hague did, try to put a bit of lippie (or a stupid cap on) and whore yourself out to extremists (right-wing Tories in all three cases) and malcontents (people who claimed to have Tory interests at heart but ended up voting New Labour anyway).

I find the short-termism of many comments here both concerning and trite at the same time. Concerning in that they quite clearly are both ahistoric in their understanding of the political sphere and trite in that they demand exactly the wrong thing and do so with a moral conviction that is underserved.

@6

I wrote my comment while you were writing @6 which more or less made my points redundant.

Fair points – and I agree that we need to move beyond “kneejerk reactionary policy-making in response to yesterday’s headlines” but please understand that anyone not directly involved with the party (and therefore free of party loyalty) is going to need a lot of convincing that things have changed.

Moreover, please understand that people who moved their votes to a party that presented itself in the run up to the election as more progressive have been bitten twice (first by Blair, then by Clegg) and so are perhaps unreasonably impatient because they recognise that they are in danger of losing faith in political parties and want someone to give them hope.

Reading back, I think the tone of my comment is misleading: I don’t disagree with your article. Those three points are very good ambitions for the party and you explicitly identify the need for faster reform and to place a stake in the ground. That seems a key to me: to identify in public the principles for which the Labour Party under Ed stands and from which, ultimately, all policy should flow.

I want Labour to win by a landslide and I want to feel like I’m voting for a party that genuinely cares about building a more egalitarian society. I cried with happiness in May 1997; I want to feel that joy and hope again.

9 Imran

I’m not sure summoning the ghost of Blair does much to advance your case!

As I noted above, I don’t think people are expecting detailed and costed polices and commitments. Doing things from first principles is all well and good…laudable even, but it’s hardly unreasonable to expect those now in charge of Labour to tell us what they’d be doing differently.

It suggests they have no “bottom”, no strength in depth in terms of people or ideas to show us how they are different.

I’m also not sure anyone in Labour is in a position to lecture sceptical left of centre voters about being trite or not deserving moral convictions.

If you feel that your petulant and hostile reactions will help your case, it would suggest that like the Bourbons you have forgotten nothing, and learnt nothing.

The problem is, talk by Labour leaderships about empowering ordinary party members always seems to descend into a cover for the removal of trade-union influence.

Democratic control is needed – one person, one vote, whether that is a member of a Constituency Labour Party, an affiliated trade union or socialist society, or an elected representative of the Labour Party. Anything short of that simple, ruthelssly egalitarian idea will inevitably become the plaything of people who think that working people have no part to play in Labour’s future.

@ 8. Galen10 ……your point is well made. Without credible alternative policies to a sitting Government, ‘opposition’ is nothing more than that. The Lib-Dems will not miss this open goal that Labour is presenting. It’s my guess the Lib-Dems have found a formidable weapon in Labour’s baron policy bank.

Three New Year’s resolutions? I can see a case for four on the basis of your article above. – If you are going to bandy words like malfeasance about willy nilly – Labour had better promise to provide each voter with a Thesaurus and a Dictionary before the next election. Michael Foot made the point, years ago, that one of the problems with too many socialists and old Labourites ( that’s all there were in those days) was to constantly try to impress each other with their erudition. They might have succeeded too – in their own eyes – but it’s a barren route politically because the electorate, not unreasonably, expects to vote for what it understands – i.e. the party that succeeds in communicating it’s message in unambiguous words of plain and everyday currency . Popular newspapers aim at a ten-year-old mentality in their readerships, ( the better ones that is) and you cannot deny that they succeed in influencing popular opinion – and getting the governments they want. Why do the corduroy-high-minded intellectuals of the left refuse to see this? Because their heads are too far up their smug egos? Labour may well need organisation, reform and good strategic planning but let’s not lose sight of who Labour are historically supposed to represent ( unlike the wasted years of the Tory Blair experiment ). Where are the old Labour orators? They are an important element that Labour once had in abundance and now need – fire, vision and eloquence – as a remedy for the current Tory / LIb Dem /New Lab constipated consensus.

As a LibDem supporter, I watched the Labour leadership contest from the sidelines. At the end of it all, I knew that Labour had a new leader who is not New Labour. That is all that I knew three months ago and that is all that I know today.

Labour shows no signs of internal review and analysis. The election process itself was bizarre; Labour held a leadership contest absent of philosophical debate beyond denial of New Labour. So the candidate who most plausibly denied New Labour won. Now what?

Liberals with a small L lost faith in New Labour when its centralist, managerialist and anti-civil tendencies became too large to swallow. Not New Labour has not spread any bait for liberals. There may have been a few crumbs for social democrats, but they will still be looking over the shoulder to see how liberally the coalition acts.

“even the turncoats at The Guardian haven’t fully jumped on Ed’s bandwagon”

That’s because it isn’t a bandwagon, it’s a hearse.

The problem with Ed is that he lacks any sort of leadership ability. That’s why he spends so much off his time hiding behind behind Aunts Diane and Hattie.

He isn’t a leader of the opposition so much as a latter day Bertie Wooster.

“By shaping and effectively articulating Labour 201X’s philosophical underpinnings, we can source ideas from throughout the party, develop policies that resonate with the public mood and start setting the agenda”

We saw what happened when Labour last articulated it’s philosophical underpinnings. It basically involved trying to get ‘white folks’ angry at people just like you.

BTW, has your Great Helmsman found the courage to fire the racist scumbags responsible for that campaign yet?

15

“There may have been a few crumbs for social democrats, but they will still be looking over the shoulder to see how liberally the coalition acts.”

Speaking on behalf of my people , I think you will find many social democrats have “voted with their feet” and abandoned the Liberal Democrats. This probably accounts for much of the fall in LD support from the 23% polled at the GE, to the current level of 9-11% depending which polls you believe.

As to whether Not New Labour have opened their kimono enough to tempt us to vote for them again…….. nope, definitely not. I think there are a lot of people out there, whether they self identify as a social democrat or not, who feel genuinely that there is now NO party which represents them, or which is worth supporting.

It is a sad state of affairs indeed.

Think you are right on the first two, but I don’t really see how Ed can win over the support of the lunatic far-right press, who still see anyone to the left of Thatcher as a militant communist.

@12 One person, one vote has been discussed for a long time. Recently read Campbell’s diaries (I had to wait until I could source a sufficient supply of anti-emetics) and Blair was discussing that alongside Clause IV reform back in 94/95. It’s a shame that he and Brown couldn’t get their act together on that. But I live to hope.

@17 Thank you for your thrilling and compelling insight into Labour’s philosophy and campaigning tactics. Indeed, Phil Woolas was and is, and I use the technical term here, a scumbag that exploited racism to win, much as the Tories and the Lib Dems have used race (hint, every single Tory leader before Cameron and their dog whistle politics) and homophobia (hint, he drives a yellow cab and is the Deputy Leader of the Liberal Democrats) to win some famous elections in their time.

But it clearly doesn’t represent Labour’s core philosophy. Having run the communications and strategy on a victorious, against all the odds, campaign in May – Hammersmith – I am confident that things can be done differently, and that Labour’s core philosophy doesn’t centre on demonising, as you so charmingly put it, “people just like [me]“. By which I assume you meant people with mild asthma.

@19 The key to the Press is that, leave aside the ideology of their owners, they’re magpies. SHINY THING! RUN! NEW SHINY THING! RUN! NEWER SHINY THING! RUN! Etc.

Stripped to the bones by their owners, with barely enough journos to investigate who nicked a three-year-old’s lollipop, they rely on wires and lines fed to them by political parties. So we have to do their work for them. Written PQs are increasingly a source of stories. Once answers are received journalists are on the blower asking Members why the questions were laid down and what the line is. That’s also why blogs like Political Scrapbook, Liberal Conspiracy and Left Foot Forward are so powerful; all the journos read the sites and then crib useful stories from them, often quite shamelessly. So to effectively lead and manage the newscycle, you need more than just “spin” (which as I mentioned gets the last paragraph on a story about Coalition policy) but active research, information-gathering networks (which Legal Aid centres are shutting, which Sure Starts, which Third Sector organisations had their funding cut, etc.) and people that can sculpt that into a story and feed it to the media.

They’re far easier to manage if you see them as the desperate craven magpies they really are.

Imran Ahmed @ 22;

A very interesting and eyebrow-raising theory about the ‘new’ high tech. approach to news journalism. How true is this? Assuming it is as you say, aren’t you being a little over-confident that ‘ they are easier to manage if you see them as the desperate, craven magpies that they really are?’ Just because they plunder the blogs and posts for stories and angles – doesn’t, by any means, mean that they won’t be regurgitated as stories with an easily digestible pro-right bias for their readers. This is hardly managing them -in fact – they will be exploiting you. They may have added magpie habits to their time-dishonoured lack of scruples – but they are still the fowl-pest-ridden Tory Vultures of old. If the radical web sites like those you quote in 22 above – could displace newspapers altogether – then we might have grounds for open and frank comment optimism. The Barons won’t lay down that easily and you may be sure that your sites will be constantly attacked by their right-wing shite-hawks – to misrepresent and undermine your arguments and to clamp down on your very worthy intentions.

@20

The internal party ‘reforms’ which defined New Labour were justified on precisely the grounds I was warning against: the dilution of the trade-union and working-class roots of the Labour Party.

Under Blair, ‘OMOV’ was a way to bash the unions and the Left. He abandoned it whenever it didn’t suit his neo-liberal agenda: witness the stitched-up electorate college Blair imposed on the London mayoral selection to stop Ken Livingstone.

Real grassroots democracy in the Labour Party must include all of the Labour Party, especially the hundreds of thousands of affiliated trade unionists who constitute a clear majority of our members.

@21

No, I meant people like you who aren’t who aren’t white.

And you haven’t answered my question. Has Miliband fired the racist scumbags who ran Woolas’s campaign?

If not it is far to assume that he agrees with their core philosophy of trying to get white folks angry with people such as yourself.

Friend, I’m a Pushtun, with a heritage from Waziristan and Afghanistan. My dearly beloved and sadly departed grandfather, Syed Nisar Ahmed Kakakhel, was white with green eyes. My father is pale skinned, as are my six younger siblings. So I’m confused as to why you think I should be getting angry about people like “[myself]“.

That’s the point. I don’t, nor would any other decent human being.

But we’re not talking about decent human beings. We’re talking about the racist scumbags Labour pays to run its campaigns for it.

You know. The ones that still have Ed Milliband’s full backing.