Blair’s Shadow

Blair’s Shadow

We in the Labour Party need to get to grips with Blair’s legacy. His shadow and that of his government still hangs over even this leadership election and it seems I am not the only one to thinks so. Andrew Fisher wrote something similar to this in the Independent. Coming to a consensus and coming to terms with its legacy will be difficult. I feel that it’s best viewed by considering the two full parliamentary terms as separate entities but for many of course the decision to go to war in Iraq will over shadow everything else he did. I have thought this about its record for a while but at least one speech by Zarah Sultana MP, and the adverse reaction to it and Jeremy Gilbert at Open Democracy who wrote Labour should have argued against the last 40 years of economic policy, not just the last ten have made me revisit New Labour’s record. This article reflects my views on the New Labour governments, together with my view that we i.e. Labour have been losing votes for 30 years and that 2017 was the anomaly. In the rest of this article, see below/overleaf, I look at the positive achievements of the first term, the evolution of the 2001 manifesto and the privatisations and war decisions of the second term. I look at the destruction of the Party’s checks and balances, the areas of failure (Trade Union law reform and housing), the power of Government and the seemingly inexorable loss of votes since 1997 aided by doomed and flawed New Labour’s electoral strategy of assuming the working class had nowhere else to go. … …

The innovators dilemma in political parties

On my way to writing the article “Servants, not Masters”, I needed to check my material and links about Emanuelle Avril’s unfinished white paper called, “The (Unintended) Consequences of New Labour: Party Leadership vs Party Management in the British Labour Party”. and was presented to the Political Studies Association 2015 conference, in March so before the 2015 election and consequent Labour leadership election. Eaton’s source identified a failure of the New Labour leadership to renew itself as a cause of it’s failure and Avril’s paper explains why they were always going to be incapable of it.

…. it is true to say that internal consensus and cohesion, as they manifested themselves in New Labour, constituted obstacles to innovation and therefore endangered the survival of the party …

and the ambitions of their successors. (This post continues overleaf/below.) … …

If Only

Last weekend, I went to see “If Only”, a play by David Edgar about the politics surrounding the formation of the coalition and a subdued appeal for the political parties to rediscover their identities; identity destroyed by triangulation.

If Only

Triangulation is a political strategy used mainly by social democratic parties and the US Democrats, of moving to the right and forcing your opponents to differentiate themselves by moving further to the right. It’s extremely cynical and extremely dangerous. However, if it’s just about winning, it clearly worked for a number of years for the Labour Party, isolating the Tories under the leadership of Major, Hague, Howard and Duncan-Smith. The danger in this strategy is that many of those who genuinely agree with the policies abandoned have no-one to represent them in the national political debate; the left in society become politically voice-less. A further danger is that neither the acolytes of triangulation nor their supporters believe in what is being said and promised by politicians, it reinforces the slur that all politicians are liars by making it the truth. …

The New Statesman, Episode 2006

alan+sarah

We, that is Mrs L & I, went to see “The New Statesman, Episode 2006”, staring Rik Mayall as Alan B’stard on Saturday. Marsha Fitzalan also reprises her role as his wife Sarah. Sadly, no new jokes, its the same old B’stard, using politics to make money, and have as much, if a bit too fast sex as possible. He’s joined New Labour and works in No. 9 Downing St now. …