A quote from William Keegan this morning:
A veteran of many past Labour efforts at seeking credibility, Roy Hattersley, makes an appeal for sanity in a new book (The Socialist Way —Social Democracy in Contemporary Britain, I B Tauris). Labour has a choice, he says: "It can grub about in search of policies which will attract the swing voters and lose the next general election or it can become again an indisputable party of principle and win."
I think that sums it up.
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The Labour Party deserves the biggest hammering in its history in the next general election – only then will it wake up/ give an opportunity for a party of opposition to arise. many labour voters will turn to UKIP in the mistaken belief that it is the party of ‘ordinary people’ (we only have to look at their tax proposals to see the fallacy of this). It is time for a new opposition with Caroline Lucas as an articulate leader, perhaps.
Absolutely it sums it up. Frankly, on present trends the Labour Party is quite likely not to win the 2015 election. It has to articulate an alternative narrative. The present Coaltion is so EVIL I can hardly bring myself to mention and discuss any of their policies. I supported Ed Miliband’s election as leader via the Fabians but now I have grave doubts. Unfortunately I do not envisge any politician in the Labour Party having the necessary leadership skills to deliver us from the quagmire that we are now in. This is the end result of bureaucratic politics. I spent most of the 80s and early 90s as an activist campaigning against Thatcherism but this is so much worse. Apparently the younger generation have no real attachment to collectivism and so do not value the best aspects of the welfare state. Baby boomers such as myself are being blamed for loading so much debt on the younger generation and the mainstream media are reinforcing this message. Maybe , as some of your regular contributors have stated, a new party does have to rise from the ashes of Labour.
Teresa,
I wouldn’t lose too much sleep about “being blamed for loading so much debt on the younger generation”. The UK government owes the debt to no one but itself and so the national ‘debt’ is nothing more than a number on a spreadsheet.
That people see it as a real and very scary debt is yet another mainstream ‘fallacy of composition’ error, which, as Richard blogged the other day, is the belief that what is true at a personal level applies to the economy as a whole.
By the way Warren Mosler uses the term ‘Deadly Innocent Fraud’, of which the above is fraud No. 2 in his short treatise “Seven Deadly Innocent Frauds of Economic Policy”…
http://moslereconomics.com/wp-content/powerpoints/7DIF.pdf
Is very accessible and I highly recommended reading it.
I’m a floating voter but can’t see any credible leadership candidates in the Labour party . Ed Milliband is probably the best Labour have got at the moment . Then again Mr Blair was a credible leader and domestic issues soon enough exceeded his boredom threshold .
The other two main parties aren’t exactly endowed with credible leaders either .
If you want to know which part has , or had , the worst leadership candidates take a look at Nick Clegg . There is a man who is basically a salesman and as with most salesman it wouldn’t matter what he was selling ; vacuum cleaners one week or cars the next , perfume the week after .
The guy doesn’t seem to have convictions which would have prevented him joining the Conservatives or Labour so one might assume he chose the political party with what he perceived to be the worst leadership candidates because that would be the easiest to claw his way to the top of .
Where Labour could do a lot better is by replacing career poli’s with people with real experince . To start with ditch Tom Greatex as shadow energy minister and replace him with Graham Stringer who did a hard science degree and knows his .. from his elbow .
Please see my later comments about the Labour Party Leadership and Invertebrates;-)
I understand the sentiment behind many of the above comments but the tone appears reminiscent of the ‘beautiful soul’. Just imagine how hard it must be to be the voice of the labour movement in a neo-liberal world where all the main institutions (EU, World Bank, IMF) are neo-liberal and all your main partners are mostly neo-liberal. Then think about how Francois Hollande is being portrayed. Then think about the deterioration of the BBC since the 2010 election (almost no substantial coverage of the NHS debacle), the churnalism of the press who recycle govt. propaganda (and we can now see how devious this propaganda is), and the lack of a real civil society movement against what’s happening.
Is it really so bad what Labour are doing? A party who, in trying to modernize, ended up as neo-liberal as those people it once professed to detest but who also pumped huge funds in to the NHS, passed minimum wage laws and initiated working tax credits (which benefited me substantially), who attempted to combat poverty through Sure Start centres and so on.
I think you people need to remember that politics is not a cost-free display of effortless moral superiority. It is often very, very grubby and sometimes involves lying to those who might support you. I am not advocating Labour should lie but the Conservatives and LibDems have and those on the moderate left need to remember this always. The person who wrote that Labour deserve to be hammered is really out of line. Should that happen there may be no way back for those of a liberal, progressive persuasion. You need to have faith that the two Eds and others do have some idea what they are doing. They’ve been in govt. and no-one else who posts here has come even close. They need to persuade 10-14 million people who do NOT engage in politics to vote for Labour. The few tens of thousands who have considered views do not matter that much. However some of those who consider themselves informed could help by offering constructive ideas (as Richard continually does) rather than complaining about the veneer Labour shows to the world. The veneer is not meant for you but for them. The cynicism of politics itself runs deep but if you know where to look the ideas and some idealism can still be found.
(Thought about not posting this but….ah! what the hell!)
Well, thank you for doing so
Yours is a reasoned voice even if I do not agree with all you are saying