Labour Party in Denial

I couldn’t agree with with Mick Hume at Spiked more:

The storming reception accorded to Mandelson on Monday was widely hailed as the moment when New Labour’s fortunes could start to turn. To me it signalled the opposite. The sight of Labour activists cheering their Blairite bête noir showed how bad things have got, and how desperate they have become. After all, Lord Mandelson is the unelected, widely reviled symbol of all that the old Labour left is supposed to despise about the Tony Blair years: a backroom fixer and backstabber for whom politics is about positioning and image more than principles and ideas. That he has been brought back into the centre of government owes less to his own self-styled status as a giant of politics than to the standing of the political pygmies around him.

It is not Mandelson who has changed. He remains the embodiment of the fact that New Labour believes in nothing beyond its own re-election. Yet there were the rank and file Labour Party delegates, cheering him to the rafters. It sounded like a death rattle, a case not so much of whistling past the graveyard as singing from the grave.

And this is why they are going to lose next summer. It’s also entirely avoidable. They could wipe ID cards out today, but they’d rather pretend otherwise. They could end the ISA today, but they’d rather ‘review’ it instead. They could improve their environmental standing, but would rather stick with the neoliberal idea of growth and pretend there’s a reason for a new runway at Heathrow. They could deal with the issues such as a terminal lack of new social housing, which the BNP are feeding off, but even the Home Secretary would rather just stick his head in the sand. Electoral reform? Try a solution which will boost their fortunes rather than the Greens or Lib Dems. Reform the House of Lords? In a generation or so. House of Commons? Not any more…

The party which introduced the Human Rights Act is going to sacrifice itself needlessly to one which has insisted it’s going to repeal it, and is best friends in the European Parliament with the far right. Proportional representation couldn’t be more needed to help get a better deal for us.

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