There were articles in The Guardian over the weekend that explained a great deal about Labour.<\/p>\n
First, there were these comments by Andy Beckett<\/a>:<\/p>\n The party\u2019s current crisis, while most directly caused by Keir Starmer\u2019s political shortcomings and the chillingly selective morality of\u00a0Peter Mandelson, is really the result of one Labour tradition demonstrably failing in government to meet the needs of today\u2019s world. Often dominant in the party, especially over the past 40 years, you could call that tradition Labour minimalism.<\/p>\n Labour minimalists believe that England is a fundamentally conservative, right-leaning country, in which the party can only succeed electorally and in government by appearing as moderate and unthreatening to powerful interests as possible.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n As he then noted:<\/p>\n In 1985, in his first act as a senior party figure, Mandelson commissioned a report by a fellow Labour minimalist, the political analyst Philip Gould<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cPositive perceptions of the Labour party tend to be outweighed by negative concerns,\u201d wrote Gould, \u201cparticularly [about] unacceptable \u2018beyond the pale\u2019 figures.\u201d<\/p>\n Provocative leftwing MPs, bold-sounding leftwing policies, fierce leftwing rhetoric: all should be pared back, marginalised or dropped altogether, the two men agreed, so that Labour could reposition itself advantageously on the centre ground.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And as he added:<\/p>\n First under Neil Kinnock, then Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and finally Starmer, minimalism became the party\u2019s operating principle.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The aim? A politics rooted in anything but the interests of ordinary people, who were treated as being both as expendable and irrelevant by Labour as they were by the financial elites to which the Party's leadership fawned. Is it any surprise there is a crisis?<\/p>\n John Harris echoed similar themes<\/a> when writing about Labour's planned reform of special educational needs and disabilities support, saying:<\/p>\n All told, the government\u2019s underlying vision seems to be of a great rebalancing, away from personalised support towards the kind of top-down system in which families basically get what they\u2019re given.\u00a0A report<\/a>\u00a0last week from Sky News held out exactly this prospect: ministers, it said, \u201cultimately want to restrict the number of children with specific per-pupil funding packages, and to curb the number of parents who end up taking their case to tribunal\u201d.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n The message is, once more, of contempt, and as John Harris then noted:<\/p>\n What that might say about the Starmer government\u2019s basic instincts is both fascinating and depressing. In the midst of all its chaos, this sometimes looks like an old\u00a0Labour<\/a>\u00a0administration, in the worst possible way. It has no modern versions of that tradition\u2019s good stuff: massed council-house building, or the creation of the NHS. But what remains is a familiar and very old-fashioned mistrust of redress, choice and accountability, a tendency to side with officials and penpushers, and an apparent belief we should all be grateful for whatever favours the state can give us. At a moment when Labour is being regularly warned of the dangers of retreating into an ideological comfort zone, that would be quite some safe space in which to take refuge. It would also test a lot of people\u2019s faith in a party they hitherto believed was on their side: in all likelihood, to breaking point.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n
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