Post by stevedtrm on Mar 27, 2016 22:08:47 GMT
Edited from the Guardian article:-
It is hard to know what to call the bits of the Labour system stubbornly immune to Corbynmania. “Blairites” won’t wash, since the shock of defeat has if anything brought the old Brown and Blair camps together. (Commons tearooms have been buzzing lately with conversations between people barely on speaking terms for years). “Moderates” sounds too boring, “The Resistance” – a nickname adopted by some around Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna – too excitable, especially for the significant rump of Labour MPs who just want a quiet life.
BLUE LABOUR, PURPLE LABOUR AND SCARLET LABOUR?
===
thinktanks and talking shops sprouting .... – from Jon Cruddas’s Labour Together to Hunt and Umunna’s Labour for the Common Good – is a first stab at such an intellectual renewal. But there is a growing anxiety on the right that shiny new policies won’t be enough, unless the right faces some harsh truths about why it was so overwhelmingly rejected. “Nobody has the answer on this yet,” says a former shadow minister. “But there’s no route to a different approach that does not run through convincing members it’s what they actually want.”
Cruddas’s observation that the voters Labour needs to win back are economically radical but fiscally conservative – keen to see capitalism reformed and wealth gaps closed, but pro-austerity – has got MPs thinking about marrying the popular bits of Milibandism with something more economically credible.
...
“Some of our councillors are doing brilliant things that are an antidote sometimes to the Westminster reality,” says Alison McGovern, the Wirral South MP and new chair of the centrist thinktank Progress.
...
They may also be the moderates’ best hope of getting across the idea that there is nothing morally dubious about wanting to get elected, or to do things rather than talk.
“I’m proud of being pragmatic,” says McGovern. “It’s because I feel things in my heart that we have to try and get things done. My constituents will judge me on whether or not I manage to get the boarded-up shopping centre sorted out or deal with anti-social behaviour, not whether I’ve written a nice article. If there’s something [Progress] have to offer it’s making sure the Labour party is connected with that pragmatic attitude.” She loathes, she says, feeling powerless to help struggling constituents: “I feel really bad that young people are now going through what I went through.”
....
But even baby steps like this raise difficult questions about how far the moderates should go in meeting a radicalised party membership halfway. Some close to Tony Blair are already urging a more aggressive defence of what he and New Labour stood for, a view characterised by one of those lobbied as “these wimps, they’re not doing anything”.
But the backlash against his public interventions in the leadership contest this summer brought home to serving Blairites both how toxic his brand has become for some, and how irrelevant it will increasingly be to a coming generation of voters who barely remember him in office. Some wonder if it is time to go further in explicitly acknowledging a break with the past, especially on the economy. One leading Blairite points to David Cameron’s public disowning of Margaret Thatcher’s famous (if misquoted) line that there is no such thing as society as a possible model for a gentle, symbolic distancing from the master.
But for Hunt, it is less a question of breaking with Blair than acknowledging that times move on. “One of the unfortunate mistakes of the last parliament was not a strong enough defence of Labour’s record in office, which provided the template for all that ‘we never achieved anything’ stuff,” he says. “My view is that the Labour government of 1997-2010 needs to be seen in historical context as a great progressive reforming government, but it needs to be history; the notion that you do all of that again is for the birds. Tony was elected 20 years ago as leader. We regard that period in office as we regard Wilson, Callagahan and Attlee; part of the great heritage.” The future of the brand, however, remains anyone’s guess.
===
The lesson many draw from this summer is that far from sounding progressive, the moderates had begun to look dangerously old-fashioned, failing to recognise that the world had changed since the crash. Or as Hunt puts it: “We’re still dealing with the aftermath of the crash and of austerity and the lack of a big compelling idea about how social democracy works today.”
It is hard to know what to call the bits of the Labour system stubbornly immune to Corbynmania. “Blairites” won’t wash, since the shock of defeat has if anything brought the old Brown and Blair camps together. (Commons tearooms have been buzzing lately with conversations between people barely on speaking terms for years). “Moderates” sounds too boring, “The Resistance” – a nickname adopted by some around Tristram Hunt and Chuka Umunna – too excitable, especially for the significant rump of Labour MPs who just want a quiet life.
BLUE LABOUR, PURPLE LABOUR AND SCARLET LABOUR?
===
thinktanks and talking shops sprouting .... – from Jon Cruddas’s Labour Together to Hunt and Umunna’s Labour for the Common Good – is a first stab at such an intellectual renewal. But there is a growing anxiety on the right that shiny new policies won’t be enough, unless the right faces some harsh truths about why it was so overwhelmingly rejected. “Nobody has the answer on this yet,” says a former shadow minister. “But there’s no route to a different approach that does not run through convincing members it’s what they actually want.”
Cruddas’s observation that the voters Labour needs to win back are economically radical but fiscally conservative – keen to see capitalism reformed and wealth gaps closed, but pro-austerity – has got MPs thinking about marrying the popular bits of Milibandism with something more economically credible.
...
“Some of our councillors are doing brilliant things that are an antidote sometimes to the Westminster reality,” says Alison McGovern, the Wirral South MP and new chair of the centrist thinktank Progress.
...
They may also be the moderates’ best hope of getting across the idea that there is nothing morally dubious about wanting to get elected, or to do things rather than talk.
“I’m proud of being pragmatic,” says McGovern. “It’s because I feel things in my heart that we have to try and get things done. My constituents will judge me on whether or not I manage to get the boarded-up shopping centre sorted out or deal with anti-social behaviour, not whether I’ve written a nice article. If there’s something [Progress] have to offer it’s making sure the Labour party is connected with that pragmatic attitude.” She loathes, she says, feeling powerless to help struggling constituents: “I feel really bad that young people are now going through what I went through.”
....
But even baby steps like this raise difficult questions about how far the moderates should go in meeting a radicalised party membership halfway. Some close to Tony Blair are already urging a more aggressive defence of what he and New Labour stood for, a view characterised by one of those lobbied as “these wimps, they’re not doing anything”.
But the backlash against his public interventions in the leadership contest this summer brought home to serving Blairites both how toxic his brand has become for some, and how irrelevant it will increasingly be to a coming generation of voters who barely remember him in office. Some wonder if it is time to go further in explicitly acknowledging a break with the past, especially on the economy. One leading Blairite points to David Cameron’s public disowning of Margaret Thatcher’s famous (if misquoted) line that there is no such thing as society as a possible model for a gentle, symbolic distancing from the master.
But for Hunt, it is less a question of breaking with Blair than acknowledging that times move on. “One of the unfortunate mistakes of the last parliament was not a strong enough defence of Labour’s record in office, which provided the template for all that ‘we never achieved anything’ stuff,” he says. “My view is that the Labour government of 1997-2010 needs to be seen in historical context as a great progressive reforming government, but it needs to be history; the notion that you do all of that again is for the birds. Tony was elected 20 years ago as leader. We regard that period in office as we regard Wilson, Callagahan and Attlee; part of the great heritage.” The future of the brand, however, remains anyone’s guess.
===
The lesson many draw from this summer is that far from sounding progressive, the moderates had begun to look dangerously old-fashioned, failing to recognise that the world had changed since the crash. Or as Hunt puts it: “We’re still dealing with the aftermath of the crash and of austerity and the lack of a big compelling idea about how social democracy works today.”