If anybody were cruel enough to conduct an ideological paternity test on Ken Livingstone’s article in the Guardian this morning, the resultant DNA read-out would surely see a bloke called Georgi Dimitrov hauled before the Child Support Agency and landed with a hefty maintenance bill.

Let’s skip the bits where Livingstone (pictured) offers the de rigeur exculpation for Meltdown Thursday. As the man points out, his share of the capital’s vote went up by both relative and absolute measures. There’s no gainsaying the psephology, so on that score alone, the ‘it wasn’t me guv’ routine has to be entirely convincing.

The money paragraph is probably this assertion:

Following May 1 some people are posing the choice as between moving ‘to the left’ or ‘to the right’. This is not the right question. Labour must place itself at the centre of a progressive alliance that can solve the problems facing the country.

The notion of being ‘neither right nor left but in front’ is one of the most malleable memes in modern political rhetoric; over the past two decades, we have all heard variations on this theme trotted out by Greens, Lib Dems, and even the fascist right.

It’s hackneyed beauty is in its very evasiveness, the way in which it loosely promises everything to everybody and yet simultaneously nothing to nobody. This is non-positional positioning, vacuity elevated to the level of principle.

In this specific case, it translates to an argument for getting the Labour Party in London – and by implication, nationally as well – to bring the Greens on board, and hopefully the Liberal Democrats too.

Although there is no reference to Respect Renewal in the article as such, Livingstone has earlier dropped hints that there is a place for George Galloway inside a city-wide Big Tent, if only because it remains the beneficiary of a not negligible mosque-directed block vote.

It is also plain that the City would be a welcome, indeed critical, component in any lash-up. Livingstone makes repeated reference to the support he enjoys from big business. Yet the labour movement does not merit a single mention.

Given the omission of any reference to working class organisations – and I fail to see how this omission can be otherwise than by design – the implication is that trade unions are not regarded as core constituents of the progressive alliance Livingstone has in mind.

This is qualitatively new in terms of the history of projects of this type. For the first time since 1935, when Dimitrov harangued the seventh congress of the Comintern with a call for what has since become known as popular frontism, the working class is not accorded even a walk-on part in such a schema.

Nor is the progressive alliance justified in terms of any longer-term socialist strategy, however dilute. Unlike the doctrine that underpinned the orthodoxy of Stalinist parties for decades – including the Communist Party of Great Britain’s calls for an ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ – it doesn’t even seem to be envisaged as the first stage of a stages theory. Indeed, its goals are notably timid:

There are three tasks for a government and a mayor - to ensure the country and London are an economic success; to ensure everyone shares in that success; and to ensure that success is sustainable in the long run through improving the environment.

Livingstone maintains that ‘the difference[s] with the Tories are stark’, but doesn’t expand on this point. Little wonder; there is nothing here to which David Cameron could not sign up, at least verbally. With economic success defined in capitalist terms – and the Square Mile will ensure that it would be so defined – the Conservatives even have a legitimate claim to be the best vehicle to bring it about.

The net result of implementing Livingstone’s suggestions would be yet more cartel politics, with the outer limits of its radicalism designated by what is acceptable to hedge funds and venture capital. An ambitious, assertive and confident left could and should press for a whole lot more than that.

Without sounding emotive it sounded like an execution. Then it all went quiet. One guy in a balaclava who looked very professional started putting away his equipment and made a cutting the throat sign to someone else.

- witness to the Mark Saunders shoot-out.

Here are the stories of two deceased men who probably briefly lived contemporaneously in London, but who – until their dying moments, anyway - had little in common otherwise.

One was a public school and Oxford educated barrister on £500,000 a year, who resided in a £2m town house in Chelsea, one of the capital’s richest districts. The other was a Glasgow-born painter and decorator who lived in a council flat in rather less salubrious Hackney.

Imagine a second-rate novelist concocting characters purposely to symbolise given social classes, and you get some idea of the CVs Mark Saunders (pictured) and Harry Stanley.

On Tuesday this week, Saunders – described as ‘a binge alcoholic’ and reportedly prone to depression - knocked off work early began drinking heavily; one evening in September 1999, Stanley – just out of hospital after an operation for colon cancer, incidentally – stopped off at a handy boozer and ordered a lemonade.

Saunders got home and ended up having a bit of a domestic with the missus, another high-earning barrister. Neighbours heard raised voices and then the sound of gun shots. At least this was a genuine firearms incident.

By contrast, Stanley hadn’t had a row with anybody and wasn’t in possession of any weapon. He was, however, carrying a table leg which he had just picked up from his brother who had just repaired it; for some reason, another pub client rang the police to warn that an ‘Irishman’ was concealing a gun in a plastic bag.

As Stanley neared home, he was challenged by two armed police officers. As he turned to fact them, they shot him dead from just 15 yards. He didn’t have time to leave any words of farewell to his partner.

A jury at a second inquest in 2004 returned a verdict of unlawful killing, which was overturned in the High Court the following year on grounds of insufficient evidence.

There is still much to be explained about the Saunders case. But what we do know is that after a five-hour standoff - during which he threw into his garden a cardboard box on which he had written ‘I love my wife dearly xxx’ - the decision was reached to take him out.

Was there really no alternative but to kill? Doubtless we will learn more from the Independent Police Complains Commission inquiry and the inquest. But from the facts as reported in the press today, the move seems strangely precipitous. Couldn’t negotiations have gone on longer? Would not the use of non-lethal weapons have been more appropriate?

Realistically, there are occasions on which the police must be armed. There are even circumstances in which it must be right for the police to use those arms. Surely few would argue against shoot to kill where it would prevent terrorist carnage.

But that does not give the Metropolitan Police free reign to take lives on the basis of caprice, whether the victims be ordinary blokes from Hackney, Chelsea yuppies that suddenly go postal, or immigrant electricians trying to catch a tube on the Victoria Line.

It will be interesting to see if Saunders' social standing makes a difference to the way subsequent developments are reported. At this stage, we need some convincing explanations from the Met. And – unlike the Stanley and de Menezes cases – if somebody made a mistake, he or she should carry the can.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith – a woman who has confessed to using cannabis as a student – has today confirmed that cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug.

The decision has been welcomed by the Conservative Party. As we know, Tory leader David Cameron was at the age of 15 confined to the grounds of Eton College for two weeks after being caught with a joint.

It comes just days after the election of Boris Johnson – a man who admits smoking ‘quite a few spliffs’ as a schoolboy and finding them ‘jolly nice’ – was elected mayor of London.

Former chancellor Norman Lamont has incredibly enough confessed to eating space cakes, while Alistair Darling, the man currently in charge of the Treasury, also knows what to do with three Rizlas and a ripped up cigarette packet.

Under the law as it stood at the time of these people’s youthful experimentation, and as it will now be again, all of them could theoretically have been sent to prison for five years for simple possession.

True, custodial sentences are rarely dealt out to young people nicked with a bag of grass about their person. But as ever with law and order issues, there is a class dimension to how the punishment operates.

When I was a working class teenager in the 1970s, my friends were regularly fined the equivalent of two to three weeks’ wages if the Old Bill found them in possession of small quantities of dope. That constitutes retribution qualitatively more severe than being ‘gated’ for a fortnight at Britain’s top public school.

Today, a caution is by far the most likely outcome in such cases. But as the Metropolitan Police’s own research discovered two years ago, in instances where charges are pressed, black people are disproportionately likely to find themselves in the dock.

In the view of experts such as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, there is no strong case for reclassification. What is more, with dozens of MPs of all persuasions on record as having used cannabis in the past, it can have little credibility with the public.

This is, in other words, New Labour gesture politics of a potency on a par with such legendary seventies marijuana variants as Thai Stick. In practical terms, reclassification will have no effect whatsoever.

The only proffered justification – advanced by the prime minister a few weeks back – is that it ‘sends a message’ to young people that cannabis use is ‘unacceptable’.

Teenagers, who rarely hold anyone over 40 in particularly high regard anyway, will draw a ‘message’ from this pronouncement, alright. But I suspect it will not be the one for which Gordon Brown is hoping.

Their rather more likely conclusion will be that middle aged white politicos who preach the virtues of doubling already hefty prison sentences for offences they themselves committed 20 or 30 years ago are a bunch of hypocritical old farts. In this, the youth of today might not be far wrong.

They were elected as New Labour and they governed as New Labour; now they seem to be on their way out as New Labour. Sure, there are still two years before Gordon Brown has to go to the polls, and a lot can happen between now and 2010. But – contrary to the D:Ream lyrics – it is not the case that things can only get better. They can also get much, much worse.

In a period certain to be marked by declining house prices - and quite possible set to witness the first full-on recession since the early 1990s – a Supermac-style reliance on ‘events, dear boy, events’ is likely to see the prime minister’s prospects deteriorate rather than ameliorate.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is taking over at City Hall, while David Cameron looks rather more likely than not to secure victory for the Conservatives at the next general election. Message to goodthinkful on-message New Labour androids everywhere: read that sentence again. Slowly.

Reconnection with the concerns of Labour’s traditional base is not just the right thing to do on social democratic principle, but the only means to avoid two or three successive terms of Conservative government.

A simple assertion of the sort of thinking that was once at the core of Labour political philosophy is now the course that coincides with hard-headed survival instinct-driven pragmatism.

It is no use constantly boasting that Britain has the most flexible labour market in Europe if, for millions of voters, that fine phrase translates into low pay and job insecurity. Remind me again, what exactly is wrong with employment rights at the same level enjoyed by employees elsewhere in the EU?

How can a centre-left government be so prejudiced against public ownership that it only realised the need to nationalise Northern Rock long after the Lib Dems had reached the obvious conclusion?

And leaving aside the fate of individual building societies, what is to be done now that it is plain that market mechanisms leave hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions of people – unable to find affordable housing? Would large scale construction of good quality local authority housing for rent really be undesirable?

Instead of encouraging figures such as John Hutton to deliver his grotesque ‘enrichissez-vous!’ homiletics to selected audiences, even as the government clobbers this country’s five million poorest taxpayers, why not consider ways of making the tax system more progressive?

Just by rediscovering the ideals that must have motivated many of them to become involved in politics in the first place, Labour MPs now have the opportunity to do good while simultaneously covering their sorry asses. Oi, you over there with the slim majority in a two-way marginal; what’s not to like?

It really is true that we are best when we’re boldest, best when we’re Labour. It’s high time that Gordon Brown realised that that should be an operative philosophy, rather than a contrived climax to a conference peroration.

With Labour's share of the national vote yesterday down to a level that makes 1983 look like the good old days, one of the key justifications for delabourisation suddenly looks somewhat less tenable. To revamp the slogan that must have paid for much of Charles Saatchi's art collection, New Labour isn't working.

Blair, Brown and Mandelson always sold their Trinny and Susannah makeover on the basis of electoral success. Plenty of people with enough political understanding to know better insisted that democratic socialism - or even any of form of half-hearted lingering sentimental attachment to bog standard watered-down social democracy - had to be extirpated to propitiate Middle England.

For ye have the poor always with you, and everyone knows that the poor always vote Labour, whatever happens. They are too thick to think rationally about politics, anyway. The Old Fettesians were absolutely confident of that..

And Blairism did win elections, of course. There is no denying that. However, even a decade or more of seeming success is an insufficient basis on which to judge a political project. Given Blair's reported fixation with the notion of 'legacy', the real yardstick can only be the long-term outcome.

The history of the Liberal Party shows us that. After its landslide general election victory of 1906, it must have seemed unassailable; since 1916, it has never been anything more than a sporadic coalition partner. The process took just 10 years.

The paradox of Blairism is that, despite three successive majority Labour governments, the base of the party is utterly emaciated. A degree of community entrenchment that took generations to build has been eviscerated.

Many activists are motivated primarily by career considerations. Today's cadre are full-time councillors, parliamentary researchers and trade union officials, augmented by fresh-faced barristers and disconcertingly eager young PR women with irritating high-pitched giggles and a firm eye on a safe constituency in a former mining area. Looming electoral defeat is not likely to enhance their commitment.

Labour's collapse has been political, too. The James Purnell Tendency even argues that Labour has now become 'ideologically neutral', as if there could be some sort of no non-aligned movement in a society riven by ever greater inequality.

The result has been disastrous policies such as the abolition of the 10p tax band, a proposal that would once have been regarded as so morally repugnant to a party of labour that it would not even merit consideration.

One MP I campaigned with yesterday suspects that Charles Clarke will formally launch a stalking horse leadership bid this weekend, if Ken Livingstone is ousted as mayor of London. That is certainly looking possible. But Blairism without Blair, in a markedly less photogenic package to boot, is hardly the solution to Labour's problems right now.

One minute French students were getting all uppity because of a ban on having visitors of the opposite sex in their dorms; the next thing you know, ten million workers had taken over their factories and de Gaulle's semi-authoritarian state was visibly teetering.

Sadly, I was only eight at the time, and May 1968 will for me personally always be more about Lego then les événements. But for the true soixante huitard generation, what happened in France that year was a defining political moment.

It is probably impossible to underestimate the subsequent psychological significance of these protests for the far left. Its role as a symbol - or dare I say it, myth - is perhaps second only to that of Russia 1917.

Its most common usage in this context is as a counter to the commonsense argument that revolutions simply cannot happen in advanced capitalist countries. May 1968 proves they can, we are told. Well, almost, anyway. But how valid is this case?

Prompted by the 40th anniversary media coverage that will presumably grow to a crescendo this month, I have been rereading some of the leftist literature produced to mark the 20th anniversary in 1988. Much of it, extravagently celebratory in tone, seems to me to overstate results and prospects.

Crucially, many writers fail to grasp that what occured was not a revolution. To say that is not to downplay the importance of developments that genuinely do deserve the much overused adjective 'earth-shaking', just as the classic picture of rioting in the streets of Paris hints.

France in 1968 was a textbook example of dual power, in the sense that Lenin used the term. But it was - again in the jargon - a prerevolutionary situation, not a revolution proper. Perhaps it would have possible to secure a relatively peaceful transition to socialism; the means of production were in the hands of the working class and, given the correct approach, a largely conscript army might have split on class lines.

On the other hand, there were 70,000 troops on the other side of the Rhine, and de Gaulle's cross-border chopper trip proves he would have been prepared to use them if a crunch had come. Nor would other capitalist countries have stood idly by and watched one of their number succumb to workers' control. They too would likely have committed armed support.

What is more, the forces of indigenous reaction could undoubtedly have mobilised the support of millions of people on the right. It would be lightminded to insist that extensive bloodshed could have been ruled out in advance.

Several writers slam the cowardice of the Parti Communiste Français, and maintain that 'correct Marxist leadership' of their precise and pure ideological stripe was the only missing magic ingredient.

But to postulate this is to fail to ask why neither the Trotskyists nor the anarchists secured a mass base, either through their work in the preceding decades or in the course of the struggle. Why do our historians think their outfit would necessarily have done any better? There is more to politics than retrospective transitional demands.

All of this leads me to what I think is the most pernicious effect of the May 1968 myth, namely the idea that there is a serious chance that a small group of revolutionaries can suddenly be catapulted to the bigtime, almost on the random caprice of history.

The 1988 literature on 1968 was full of confident predictions that revolutions were on the agenda, in France and even in Britain too, before the end of the twentieth century. This perspective, to say the least, hasn't panned out.

This post is not intended to say that we will never see new May Days, or even new Octobers; what I am arguing is that France 1968 was an exceptional historic conjuncture that even four decades on has yet to be repeated.

It is essential for the revolutionary left to dream, of course. But given a reality that could see two fascists elected to the London Assembly today, remember that day dreams can be debilitating.

Happy May Day comrades. Sous les pavés la plage.

Labour MP Kate Hoey – once politically close to the International Marxist Group, and pictured left – denies that she is about to defect to the Conservatives. But as a general election that David Cameron now looks like winning comes ever closer, few would be surprised if one or more New Labourite does decide to switch sides.

Remember, at least three - or was it four? - Conservative MPs from the Thatcher period signed up with New Labour under Blair, with two of them picking up ministerial appointments in the process.

My guess is that no more will be coming over, and that the traffic will now be in the other direction. Funny how the one way street always seem to run from the party on the wane towards the party in the ascendancy, and never the other way round.

The early parliamentary ship jumpers are the opportunist canaries in the political coalmine, although instead of dropping dead, they get to chirp on merrily in their new home after the roof of the pit caves in on those they leave behind.

On behalf of ordinary local level activists of all affiliations everywhere, can I just request that these specimens spare us all the anguished soundbites about their gradual realisation that Party X now represents the continuity of the true political principles of Party Y, typically delivered with all the sincerity of a badly faked orgasm?

Obviously, people’s political analyses and prescription can alter over time; after all, the world alters over time. As John Maynard Keynes famously remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’

I have been a member of parties to the left of Labour as well as the Labour Party. But, in ideological terms, the apostasy involved is minimal. My belief system has actually changed little; it’s just that I now have rather different ideas about how it can best be enacted.

What, by contrast, can have been going on in the head of that councillor in Tower Hamlets who leapt the tall building that separates the Socialist Workers’ Party from the Tories in a single bound?

Fortunately, crossing the floor is rather rarer at Westminster than it is in municipal politics. But surely the day on which the first Blairite to see the Cameroonian light cannot be far away.

In its way, it will prove a fitting tribute to the way in which the politics cartel has rendered party identification almost meaningless.

A central aspect of David Cameron’s message is that the Conservative Party has changed. It is now, we are told, environmentally friendly, socially liberal and completely at ease with multiculturalism.

Yesterday – as part of a conscious attempt to appeal to progressive voters – the multimillionaire Old Etonian grandson of a baronet was even claiming that the Tories are now more committed than Labour to the eradication of childhood poverty. Welcome to the new cuddly centre-right.

And even speaking as someone who came out of the 1980s with a visceral loathing for Conservatism and everything it represents, it seems idle to insist that there are no differences between then and now.

Perhaps I shouldn’t too surprised. An ability to move with the times is one of the characteristics that distinguishes a living political organisation from a cult.

Being an openly gay Tory MP during the Thatcher years would not have been an option, for instance. Nowadays, nobody is bothered about Alan Duncan’s civil partnership.

There are even signs are that the once substantial minority of rather nasty racists present among the Tories’ local level activist base are much diminished. I have no reason to disbelieve the official assurances that the leadership was glad to see the back of Bob Spink, the clearly racist MP who recently defected to UKIP.

Yet clearly the old class instinct is still there. Even as his boss was pushing his credentials as the only true friend of poor kiddies, his sidekick George Osborne announced that the Tories are considering a further toughening of employment law following the recent spate of industrial action.

Workers, Osborne insultingly claimed, go on strike ‘at the drop of a hat’. This is nonsense, of course. Indeed, the degree of detachment from reality inherent in this statement is quite remarkable for a serious politician.

For a start, thanks to the anti-union laws that formed a key plank of Thatcherism’s offensive against the working class, it takes weeks to go through all the legal hurdles necessary to take lawful industrial action.

You can see the impact in the statistics. The total number of strike days taken last year, at just over 1m, is minimal compared to the average of 12.9m in the 1970s and 7.4m in the 1980s.

The truth is, Britons have substantially fewer rights at work than workers in any other industrialised country. When Labour was elected in 1997, employment rights were a national disgrace. Even after Labour’s introduction of a national minimum wage, the European social charter, union rights at GCHQ and the Employment Relations Act, they remain arguably the worst in the EU. Welcome to UK plc, where workers can be sacked by text message.

Unions are marginalised, little more than one lobby among many others, with the auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors. Rather than extending existing restrictions, there is a need to repeal the 1980s class war legislation and replace it with a charter of positive employment rights.

However much the Tories try to present themselves as the human incarnation of the Care Bear Bunch, their project remains that of providing a political voice for the minority of wealthy people that control society.

That’s why they have opposed everything in history that has helped the poor at the slight expense of the rich, from the abolition of slavery and the Factory Acts right through to the minimum wage. However slick the marketing, they remain at bottom the nasty party.

Two recent politic stories highlight just how rapidly remaining differences between the only two political parties in Britain capable of forming governments continue to erode. That can only be to the detriment of voter choice.

First off, we read that the Smith Institute - a thinktank linked with Gordon Brown - and the Centre for Social Justice - a thinktank linked with Iain Duncan Smith - are to publish a joint strategy on how to get children out of poverty.

As Guardian reporter Andrew Wintour notes, accurately enough: The joint initiative suggests the differences between the two parties are much smaller than they pretend.

Indeed, the whole exercise is being dressed up as an attempt to ‘take the issue out of party politics’. This, we are supposed to believe, cannot be other than a Good Thing. But is this necessarily the case?

Obviously one must await publication of the report before offering any assessment. But it seems inconceivable that it will come up with proposals that represent anything other than further ideological capitulation by Labour to centre-right ideas.

After all, it is not as if the Tories – who throughout their history have upheld but one unrelenting purpose, namely to represent the minority of wealthy people that control society - have become converted to anything even vaguely resembling social democracy.

Of course it is legitimate to argue about the relative merits of different anti-poverty approaches. But in acting in this cartel like manner, Labour and the Conservatives surely merit reference to the Office of Fair Trading. What they are doing is closing down the debate before it can evan be had.

Meanwhile, Ken Livingstone has promised that he will offer Boris Johnson a job in a Labour administration if he wins the London mayor election on Thursday, and will virtually train up his Conservative opponent for a second shot in 2012:

Certainly if I get elected this time, I will phone people up and say "I want you to come in and do this [job] for the benefit of London". If Boris doesn't win, I am not certain Cameron is ever going to put him in one of the great offices of state, so I suspect he will be back for another go. He would be a better mayor [for having worked in the administration].

I think Boris is a person of huge potential, but he's never been involved in detailed administration of anything. I would genuinely want Boris to come in, take a job and get some experience.

This, after building an entire campaign on painting Johnson as a rather nasty racist. I’m confused, Ken … who do I vote for if I want to see Johnson clear off back to Henley where he belongs, rather than sitting behind a desk at City Hall? Not you, it seems.

Gestures like this can only feed public cynicism, enhancing suspicions that the political class is a narrow clique that looks after its own through an all-inclusive popular front. Win or lose, Boris wins.

Such practices ape some of the worst aspects of US municipal politics. I’m still occasionally in touch with an old college buddy who is a leftwing Democrat with big time political ambitions.

He holds an important job in a major American city, which he got more or less as an explicit trade-off for withdrawing from a run for Congress and throwing the Irish vote behind the mayor’s preferred candidate. But at least that was a Democrat-Democrat in house transaction.

Livingstone’s enthusiasm for non-Labour forces has driven him to agreeing a vote transfer pact with the Greens and making remarks just short of a de facto endorsement of George Galloway’s bid for an assembly seat at the head of the Respect Renewal list:

I would like to think we could work together and [Galloway would] form part of a broad coalition with the Greens and us against the Tories and Islamophobes,

It looks like Livingstone is running his own mini version of the Big Tent strategy that has not worked particularly well for Brown.

Ironically, this is the man who once wrote a book with the title ‘If Voting Changed Anything, They’d Abolish it’. It’s a shame to see him provide further confirmation.