Education vouchers. Some crackpoint idea devised by Milton Friedman, which the Tory right sniffed around years ago before giving up on as a bad job? No. The latest policy proposal for New Labour from Alan Milburn.

I have been racking my brains to think of other discredited or just plain dumb Thatcherite ideas the Blairite outrider could resurrect and present as fresh and courageous thinking.

But short of the poll tax, New Labour has already adopted most of them – from ID cards to the NHS internal market - and then some.

The reason education vouchers are a non-starter is simple. For every London Oratory School, there are many of the establishments Alastair Campbell famously derided as Bog Standard Comprehensives.

And even with a voucher, few parents would be able to afford £10,000-a-year private schools of the kind favoured by Diane Abbott.

The real alternative is not bogus parental choice, but to make every school a good school.

If you really want to think the unthinkable, Alan, what about bringing about that goal, paying for it with progressive taxation? Radical or what?

Anybody would think that New Labour is frightened of something. Like getting its arse seriously kicked in the Scottish Assembly elections next year, for instance.

It was interesting to hear Uncle Joe describe the SNP as 'not fit for purpose'. That's exactly the way he described the Immigration Service in May this year. Obviously it's the insult du jour.

But Reid's logic is seriously flawed. Of course an SNP-led Scottish Assembly will push for Scottish independence. Why? Precisely because Scottish independence is actually the SNP's 'purpose', John. And it wants to show it is fit for it. Natch.

The attitude of the British left on this issue has long been divided. Some argue Scottish independence would weaken the historically constituted unity of the British working class. Certain groups, for instance, provocatively brand the Scottish Socialist Party 'national socialist' for its pro-independence stand. Others counter that independence would weaken the historically constituted unity of the British state ... possibly terminally.

Personally, I have never had a problem with the idea. I support the right of nations to self determination, as championed by politicians as diverse as Vladimir Lenin and Woodrow Wilson.

Usually an analogy is drawn with divorce. Just because the left supports the right of married couples to split if either one of them wants that, that doesn't mean it positively advocates divorce in any given marriage.

But on the latest polling evidence, a majority of both Scots and English people now favour Scottish independence. If the population of Scotland votes in an SNP-led Assembly next year, they will be making their opinion all the more clear.

It seems that party bosses are expecting all leader and deputy leader contenders to hand over a fairly hefty chunk of the funds they raise towards the costs of holding the ballots:

‘Under new rules which have been drawn up by the party, all candidates for the two posts must donate 15 per cent of any money they raise to central funds.

‘Any surplus at the end of the leadership contests must also be given to the party.’

So if I was to break open my cheque book and, say, send a ton to John McDonnell, £15 of it would end up in the coffers of 39 Victoria Street. Hmmm. Can I claim a rebate?

The Standard also reports that there will be no cap on expenditure. That, of course, works to advantage of candidates with wealthy backers.

Alan Johnson is apparently looking to Lord Sainsbury to foot his bills. I might just have to do my weekly shop at another supermarket chain.

Meanwhile, former soft leftist Peter Hain is being supported by another New Labour multimillionaire, the former Tory Shaun Woodward. Jon Cruddas is getting cash from the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

[Hat tip: The Daily]

Camden council’s Kentish Town ward used to be classic safe Labour territory. Not any more. The Lib-Dems picked up two of the three seats last May. Last night they secured the third, topping the poll by a healthy margin. The Greens - represented by principle speaker Sian Berry - pushed Labour's Sam McBratney into third place. Here’s the full result:

Ralph Scott (Liberal Democrat) 1093
Sian Berry (Green) 812
Samuel McBratney (Labour) 808
Richard Merrin (Conservative) 198

The once impregnably Labour inner London borough remains in the hands of a Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition, which now tightens its control. Why?

As McBratney makes plain in the above video - recorded before the vote - the swing away from New Labour locally is a result of the policies pursued by New Labour nationally. He even names them: Iraq. Foundation hospitals. City academies.

‘I think people wanted to give Labour a bit of a bloody nose, and ended up giving us a good kicking,’ McBratney notes. But he optimistically argues that voters have since come to their senses and want Labour back in charge of the authority. Wrong.

Instead, Labour lost another seat. And it will keep on losing wards like Kentish Town, time after time after time, unless it really does reconnect with the many, not the few.

Financially speaking, New Labour remains a long way up a well-known creek without any paddle. Fortunately for the Blairites, the unions have come to the rescue with a £500,000 bail-out. Today's FT reports:

'The need for an emergency cash boost underlines the scale of the party's financial problems. Saddled with debts of £23m, owed for the most part to a dozen businessmen who financed its election campaign and commercial bankers, Labour has been struggling to meet daily running costs, insiders say.

'Analysis of Electoral Commission filings shows that donations from the rich who bankrolled election campaigns in the past have all but dried up this year.

'Individual donors who once gave generously have been deterred by the negative publicity surrounding the police investigation into whether Tony Blair re-warded lenders by nominating then for peerages. They have given just £1.4m in the first nine months of this year, compared with £7.6m for the whole of 2005, an election year.

'Trade union donations have also fallen in 2006, but not by as much. They accounted for 78 per cent of the total in the first nine months, a far bigger proportion than the 57 per cent for 2005. When Mr Blair became Labour leader in 1994, unions accounted for a third of overall annual income. Now they contribute nearer half.'

Sir Hayden Phillips' review of party funding is now expected in the early part of next year, and is likely to recommend further state support, on top of the already generous amounts the taxpayer already hands over. This is something the left should oppose politically.

For a start, state funding could only tackle sleaze if all other donations were banned. Otherwise, it would amount to little more than a handy little top-up. But party members and supporters should have the right to put their money where their mouth is.

So should trade unions, if their memberships mandate them to do so. And - let's be consistent here - businesses should be allowed to make political donations too, provided they ballot their shareholders before doing so.

State funding would in practice be tantamount to state licensing of political parties, based on past electoral performance. Legitimate newcomers would be severely disadvantaged.

Worst of all, state funding infringes basic democratic principles. Political parties are voluntary organisations. They do not have any preordained right to exist. If people want to support them, they do. If they don't want to, they don't.

This is how it should be. There can be no justification for forcing taxpayers to pay for parties they are at best indifferent towards, and at worst heartily despise. That is tantamount to extortion. There is no good reason that a single penny that I pay in taxes should end up in Tory coffers, or any good reason why Tory taxpayers should subsidise Respect.

A democratic socialist party with an enthusiastic mass membership and labour movement affiliations could raise all the money it needed from people that actually support democratic policies.

If New Labour had a million members - Blair's stated aim ten years ago, and a goal that should not be unattainable - it wouldn't be forced cadge questionable loans off ex-Tory businessmen desperate for a seat in the House of Lords.

In other words, the prime minister is effectively off the hook, although somebody further down the food chain may end up taking the rap. But – as was asked of Richard Nixon – what did he know and when did he know it?

Lord Levy approached something like a dozen leading business figures and secured secret financing to the tune of £14m. Did Blair know?

Describing these massive sums of money as ‘loans’ in the first place was a deliberate attempt to get round the law. Did Blair know?

Lord Levy also acted behind the backs of Labour officials, including the party’s elected treasurer. Did Blair know?

And what role did Blair play in the subsequent nomination of four of the lenders for peerages?

I think that clause about ‘bringing the party into disrepute’ is still in the rulebook, you know.

But not to worry. Labour chair Hazel Blears was quick off the mark on Boxing Day, reassuring us all that Cruddas was using statistics she could not dispute in ‘a sensational way’.

That stance seems somewhat complacent for a senior official in an organisation that has lost one member every 20 minutes since 2000. Whatever became of the Blairite vision of a ‘million member party’?

The fact is that the number of card-carrying Labour Party members has fallen from 405,000 when Blair took over in 1997 to just 198,026 at the end of 2005. The real activist base is far, far lower than that.

If the bottom line of a major business slid by a similar proportion over a similar period, the chief executive would be toast. And rightly so.

Blears points to a global trend in participation in mass political parties. But much of the reason for that - at least as far as social democratic parties are concerned - has been their move to the right in every major capitalist country.

New Labour has kept Tory anti-union laws, Tory public spending limits and Tory privatisation policies. Cuts in corporation tax have been paid for with tuition fees, benefit cuts for single parents and the disabled and draconian measures against asylum seekers.

New Labour has reduced British politics to 360 degree small c conservativism, without opposition, without any possibility for radical change.

It is reduced to selling itself as a more efficient administrator of capitalism that the Tories. That much, at least, is true. This is the politics of managerial reductivism.

Labour has effectively been delabourised. Yet Blears wonder why what should be natural supporters cannot drum up enough enthusiasm to sign up.

It doesn’t have to be this way. Labour’s natural constituency – working people and their families – remains the largest sector of British society. The key to resolving Labour’s multiple problems, financial as well as political, lies in giving them reasons to support us.

In turn, that implies genuine political differentiation from the variants of neoliberalism on offer from Cameron and Campbell.

There is no reason why Labour’s membership must continue to shrink. But unless there is a change of direction at the top, continue to shrink it will.

Radovan Karadzic’s non-drinking buddy is clearly convinced that the Blair project does indeed require a continuator. Here’s how the BBC reports his remarks:

’If we remain true to the New Labour approach then we can, we should, and I believe we will secure and deserve another, fourth term in government."

‘The Tories will try to argue that Tony Blair equals New Labour. They will say that when Tony Blair goes New Labour goes with him. That is not the case and we must show that it is not true.’

No prizes for guessing who the Stirling University Stalinist deems worthy of the apostolic succession, either. But does Labour still need Blairism? Indeed, did it ever?

There is little point in disputing the doctrine’s electoral efficacy over the past decade. The fact is, Labour won the general elections of 1997, 2001 and 2005 on a New Labour platform.

But it was never the only platform on which Labour could have succeeded. So discredited were the Tories after Black Wednesday that John Smith would surely have secured a parliamentary majority on a manifesto that would have been recognisably social democratic.

Equally, New Labourism is now sufficiently unpopular to constitute more of a hindrance than a decisive vote-winning advantage.

Labour’s problem is not that a Brown government would be seen as a dramatic departure from New Labour. The difficulty is that it would not be seen as a departure at all.

Now Levy has again been arrested, this time on suspicion of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. It’s not often this blog quotes Lib-Dem soundbites approvingly. But Ed Davey is right. From fortuitous office fires to burgled laptops, this business increasingly does have the whiff of Watergate about it.

As an avid student of political funding for some years now, I have come to the conclusion that the public is not best served by the current system flogging seats in Britain’s legislature off the back of a lorry.

Simony cannot be allowed to remain Britain’s last nationalised industry. New Labour should act in a fashion consistent with the political principles that have won it the last three elections, and privatise all public offices currently held by Labour Party members. Just think of the many advantages.

The use of market mechanisms would surely lever up the price of a ‘K’ or a ‘Big P’ from the present nugatory levels. Andriy Shevchenko cost Chelsea £30m, remember. It considerably devalues the prestige of a rent-a-peerage to know that they can be had for as little as a £1m loan.

That kind of money is probably a suitable flat-rate tariff to enjoy, say, a seat on Hackney council Labour group for a set four-year term. For many private sector concerns, such investment would be eminently commercially justifiable to shareholders.

Local government outsourcing providers, for instance, might consider buying a majority of the places on selected New Labour local authorities, simply to be able to award themselves all available contracts.

Existing Labour members of the House of Commons should be granted the right either to retain or to sell their seat at each general election, thereby allowing the market to establish the correct price level.

This would have the additional advantage of ensuring that each seat would go only to the consumer able to derive the maximum marginal utility from buying the constituency.

That buyers might have ideologies incompatible with the traditional beliefs of the Labour movement need not be a disqualification. After all, a number of former Tory MPs have already made the switch.

And when you throw in savings from not having to hold elections – including such overheads as Tower Hamlets Labour Party’s hefty outlay on buying postal votes – then the taxpayer is quids in, too. What’s not to like?

An outrageous idea? A little far-fetched? Maybe. But not too different in principle from the way places in the House of Lords have been dished out for the last decade. At least this way it would all be above board.

Leading psephologist Anthony King takes one look at the results and declares:

'Neither Michael Meacher nor John McDonnell, who have said they would like to stand, has any significant support among the rank and file.'

Asked ‘in any contest for the Labour leadership, who would you vote for if the following candidates were nominated?’, the punters put Brown on 52% and Miliband on 14%. Meacher and McDonnell scored 6% apiece, while 18% were not sure and 5% would not vote. That’s sobering stuff, although at least the combined left candidate score reaches double figures, which is better than it could have been.

Oh well, look on the bright side. At least Clarke and Milburn will be seriously pissed off. And 35% disagreed with the statement that ‘to go one winning elections, Labour needs to govern from the centre, not to adopt more leftwing policies’. That said, 55% agreed.

For the deputy job, first preferences go 25% for Benn, 16% for Johnson, 11% for Harman, 9% for Hain, a disappointing 6% for Cruddas and just 5% for Blears.

Update: Thanks to Tim in the comments box for pointing out that the figures as published by the Torygraph do not break down the results between party members and affiliated trade unionists. But the YouGov website does, revealing:

’Amongst party members 69% would vote for Brown to 20% for Miliband, 8% for John McDonnell and 3% for Michael Meacher. In a straight fight between Brown and Miliband, Brown would win 70% to 30%. Amongst trade unionists the two left-wing candidates have more support, but Brown remains the runaway leader - Brown 63%, Miliband 15%, Meacher 13%, McDonnell 10% - in a straight fight it would be 64% to 36%.’

http://www.ukpollingreport.co.uk/blog/archives/951

Three to one sounds more like the ratio of support for McDonnell and Meacher that I would have expected among individual members.

But the maths don’t quite stack up. Surely John is averaging 9% between the two sections of the electoral college? Presumably – for whatever reason – the pollsters have stripped out the don’t knows, and the newspaper hasn’t.

The ballot for places on the executive of the recently relaunched Black Socialist Society, which is affiliated to the Labour Party, closes on Friday.

Effectively it will be a contest between two factions, one headed by interim vice chair Ahmad Shahzad, the other by Lambeth councillor Kingsley Abrams.

I’ve yet to hear of any real underlying political differences, so I’ll continue to assume that this time it’s personal.

Abrams has branded his group ‘the progressive slate’ – well, nobody calls themselves ‘the reactionary slate’, do they? – and established a website.

Meanwhile, Abrams has been talking up the idea of all black shortlists, after Bristol West selected a white former councillor, Paul Smith, over three black candidates, namely Floyd Millen, Patrick Vernon and Marianne Alapini.

The winnable marginal includes the mainly-black St Pauls district of the city. You can read a highly one-sided – as in borderline libelous – account of the proceedings here. Not knowng the political reputations of any of the wannabes, I’ll personally not take sides.

What of the wider issue of all black shortlists? Despite the obvious drawbacks, I’m not against them in principle, just as I am not against all women shortlists in principle. Labour has to do something to ensure greater representation of women and ethnic minorities among its MPs, and nobody seems yet to have come up with any better ideas.

The danger is, of course, how they are used in practice. There have been plenty of cases of the New Labour machine using all women shortlists purposely to exclude leftwing men, and there’s no reason to doubt it would use all black shortlists to exclude leftwing whites.

Any mechanisms of this nature have to be under the democratic control of activists themselves, and not subject to manipulation from regional officials.

Jack Straw is to manage Gordon Brown's leadership bid. That is (a) the first formal confirmation that Brown is running and (b) acknowledgement that Straw is ruling himself out for the job. Meanwhile, Blair reportedly reckons that the Boy Miliband could beat GB if it came to a contest. Doubt it, personally.

Leftwing leadership challenger John McDonnell admits that he only has around two dozen backers signed up so far. That’s the same figure he has been touting for several weeks now, so the assumption must be that he is not making much progress in securing the 44 nominations from MPs he needs to be able to run.

Accordingly, he desperately needs Michael Meacher to step aside, so that he can bag his rival’s Westminster support base:

‘Mr McDonnell said that he was "about halfway" towards getting the necessary nominations, adding: "I don't think Michael's got much support.

‘Mr McDonnell also warned that the Labour party was "dying on its feet", with membership as low as 120,000. "People are walking away from us in protest," he said.’

Meanwhile, deputy leadership hopeful Peter Hain is obviously keen to ingratiate himself with the Brownites. The grovelling is almost embarrassing:

‘Mr Hain said: "People in the Labour party are entitled to want a contest if they wish."

‘However, Mr Brown was the "outstanding" successor to Mr Blair and the only contender with international reach and a clear agenda, he argued. "There's nobody else with his vision and, frankly, his brilliance …’

Or, to use an early eighties catchphrase: gissajob.

A wide swathe of the Establishment obviously no more relishes the prospect of a Gordon Brown government than the political left does. It’s almost enough to make you want to back him on grounds of class solidarity alone.

After last year’s ‘political autism’ whispering campaign and Lord Turnbull’s more recent ‘Stalinist ruthlessness’ outburst, the Sunday Times has now dredged up some civil service memos from ten years ago on a policy debate surrounding the abolition of a tax break for pension funds.

In the surrounding controversy, the Confederation of British Industry – a constituency New Labour thought it had triangulated into neutrality years ago – gleefully waded in to call the chancellor a liar.

What we are seeing has all the hallmarks of a co-ordinated campaign from the hard right to undermine a future Labour prime minister. Expect more to come in the weeks ahead.

If you walk into your local newsagent next Sunday morning and find a Murdoch paper splashing on Gordon Brown’s drug-fuelled six in a bed romp with Mark Oaten’s rent boys, both the Cheeky Girls and some underage Thai sex slave hired from the nearest massage parlour, don’t be entirely surprised.

New Labourism in its Brownite variant is nothing for the very wealthy to fear, of course. The idea that Brown - once safely ensconced in Number Ten - will rip off his business suit like some mild-mannered Clark Kent and reveal himself as a clandestine socialist superman is patently a non-starter.

No, this is tribal politics. However business friendly New Labour tried to be, business was only ever going to be New Labour friendly while electoral politics left it with no other option. At last it has a meaningful choice.

With the Conservatives starting to consolidate their lead in the opinion polls, the only task that remains is to ensure that Cokehead somehow doesn’t miss the open goal. That can best be achieved by wounding Brown again and again. And then again, just for good measure.

The rights and wrongs of what happened to the tax treatment of pensions an entire decade is a debate for the specialists. But never mind the small print. The real political point is that New Labour’s pension policy has been one of the major failings of its time in office.

More than two-thirds of private sector final salary pension schemes are now closed to new employees. Today there are just 4m people entitled to such pensions, compared to 11m ten years ago.

And between 1997 and 2005, an estimated 85,000 people lost all or part of their pension when the sponsoring company went bust or the scheme was wound-up.

Workers earn their pensions with their labour and their contributions. They are deferred wages. Shamefully, three successive Labour governments have not forced employers live up to their side of the bargain. And no Tory government ever will.

We are now just one month away from elections for the Scottish Parliament, Welsh Assembly and many local authorities. Opinion on the prospects for New Labour are deeply divided. Some commentators think that May 3 will be catastrophe for the party. Others argue it will be far worse than that.

Here’s today’s Financial Times on the question:

‘[Ministers] are privately braced for a drubbing in the May 3 elections for 10,456 seats across 312 local authorities in England. Labour is starting from a relatively low base, following previous poor local election results. But local government experts warned yesterday the party could still lose 600 to 700 seats.

‘"After you've been in power at the national level for 10 years, you will inevitably find that a huge amount of your councillor base has been eroded and Labour is in that position now," Tony Travers of the London School of Economics told the BBC. "Having said that, it's still possible for Labour to lose hundreds of seats … in these particular elections and it's inevitable that they will suffer losses, particularly in the south."'

Sorry, but I don’t quite see how Travers’s argument – and to be fair, it is simply reiterating accepted political folk wisdom – stacks up. There is nothing ‘inevitable’ about this process. Nothing inevitable whatsoever.

If Labour governments and councils were consistently to carry out policies in the interests of the majority of people in this society, they would consistently find themselves re-elected.

But if instead they insist on deeply unpopular measures such as the invasion of Iraq, the renewal of Trident and the de facto privatisation of education and the NHS, they pay the price at the ballot box.

These days, that means not just allowing the Tories to return to office, but allowing the British National Party to build a permanent base in working class areas.

What New Labour needs to remember is that while the ‘business community’ it has drooled over for more than a decade can deliver millions of pounds in donations and loans – especially when bribed with the odd peerage – it cannot deliver millions of votes. And millions of votes is what wins elections.

The likely outcome will - but of course – also have an impact on the ongoing internecine struggle on the Labour right, according to the Independent:

‘"Senior members of Gordon Brown's camp want Tony Blair’s resignation to be announced within 24 hours of a Labour meltdown in the local elections.

‘Mr Blair has told his allies he wants to delay any announcement about his departure until 9 May, the day after the Northern Ireland peace process is completed with the resumption of power-sharing between Sinn Fein and Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party in the Stormont Assembly.’

That’s right. Blair and Brown are even capable of fighting over a few days’ difference in the timing of the prime minister’s resignation announcement. By acting like that, the chancellor is behaving like a petulant six-year-old schoolgirl who wants her birthday presents the week before her birthday. Thank goodness Daddy’s Little Princesses are more mature than the leadership of Britain’s governing party.

Responsibility for energy policy would be shifted to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which would be boosted to ‘superministry’ standing, under the charge of David Miliband.

That, of course, has some obvious political implications:

’Mr Miliband is under mounting pressure from Blairites to challenge Mr Brown for the Labour leadership, once the prime minister resigns next month. Insiders rejected any suggestion the offer of a bigger cabinet role as the new energy and environment secretary would be used to persuade Mr Miliband not to run.

So that’s alright then.

cynics point out the wording isn’t quite watertight. Never say never. But it does seem as if Brown’s offer of the chance of running your friendly neighbourhood superministry – see yesterday’s post – has proved irresistible, especially as the reportedly cerebral environment secretary must know he cannot win.

So what are the Blairites going to do? Cometh the hour, cometh the man. This must increase the odds on a martyrdom operation from Charles Clarke, the fanatical New Labour jihadist in chief.

Don’t do it, Charles. It’s not even as if there are 72 virgins in store for you at the end of it.

The last period of Conservative hegemony in this country came to an end not on election day 1997, but on one particularly Wednesday in September five years previously.

And May 3 this year might similarly come to be seen as New Labour’s Black Thursday, the exact moment the wheels came off the The Project and a David Cameron government – after a brief Brownite interlude - became unavoidable.

Acting as a catalyst will be elections for local authorities up and down the country, as well as the Scottish Parliament and the Welsh Assembly. At the time of writing, Labour seemed certain to lose 600-700 council seats, and quite likely to kiss control of the Scottish Executive goodbye.

North of the border, the Scots Nats topping the polls. It’s not immediately clear whether a switch from New Labour-Lib Dem coalition to an SNP-Lib Dem coalition would, in and of itself, constitute a move to the right. But what is certain is that if Labour does lose its longstanding political domination in Scotland, it cannot hope to retain Westminster.

Meanwhile - following the split between the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity - the likelihood is that the hard left will either win only one or two seats, or else will be wiped out altogether.

Today’s Financial Times sets out its view of Labour’s municipal prospects in notably gloomy terms:

’Labour-controlled councils could almost entirely disappear from southern England outside London with the party bracing itself for up to 600 net losses in next month's local elections, experts have predicted.

‘Net losses of 600 councillors would take Labour's tally of councillors to 5,500, its lowest for 35 years, and half the 10,900 peak of only 11 years ago.’

Of course, local councillors like to think that they are judged primarily on the policies they introduce locally. They aren’t. Local elections are nowadays an opportunity for the more motivated electors to offer a thumbs up or a thumbs down to the track record of the mainstream parties at national level. New Labour is about to get that thumbs down.

To cap it all, Searchlight is predicting that the British National Party could treble its local government representation, from 32 to over 100 seats. The manifold weaknesses of the left and the political climate created by Blairism are enabling fascism to build roots in white working class communities.

Not the best climate in which to launch a polarised and personalised but politically pointless leadership contest, then. But Blair’s resignation seems certain within a week of the vote at most.

Unless the fixers somehow still manage to rig a coronation, this will sound the starting pistol for a fiercely-fought battle between Brown and whoever draws the short straw for the apostolic succession.

New Labour is not a party used to losing elections. Much of the current membership cannot even remember the dark old days of recurrent humiliating defeats. Once the myth of invincibility shatters, the psychological impact cannot help but be severe.

Yes, this is essentially an expanded version of an earlier satirical post. But it's three times as long, so most of the jokes are new. Read it anyway.

New Labour could act in a manner consistent with the free market principles that have secured three successive election victories, and build on the leading position already achieved in the sale of peerages, simply by privatising all public office from the monarchy downwards.

In addition, honours that do not come with political positions attached - from gongs to knighthoods - could openly be flogged off on the basis of a published tariff, for the benefit of the public purse. Together, these money-making ideas could generate revenue on a scale sufficient to pay for Britain’s participation in the invasion of the next Middle East country Washington decides to take on.

Meanwhile, such a radical market-driven democratisation of the entire honours system could be sold to the public as an extension of choice, much in the same manner as New Labour justifies the privatisation of the NHS.

New grades of honours could be made available to the public at a range of prices within the reach of all, empowering those in all walks of life and thus ensuring the popularity of the scheme.

It is already clear that there can be no argument against the propositions above on grounds of general democratic principle, as a precedent has already been established. New Labour has been flogging the right to wear ermine for some years already.

Sir Christopher Evans - the biotech entrepreneur who lent the Labour Party £1m in the run-up to the 2005 general election – made a contemporaneous note of a conversation with Labour fundraiser Lord Levy, as follows: “Wd you like a K or Big P?” The initials, he has since confirmed, stand respectively for knighthood and peerage.

Yet Levy has twice been arrested in connection with the cash for peerages affair. If he were to face trial for his role in implementing what has been standard practice for governments from the days of Lloyd George onwards, there is grievous danger that the British political class will be lowered in the public esteem. How much better, then, to recognise reality and put existing practice onto a regulated footing.

But the question then arises, why stop at Ks and Ps? Why not sell seats in the House of Commons, too? Why not sell seats in Town Halls across the UK? In line with established New Labour thinking that it does not matter whether a service is delivered by the public sector or the private sector, so long as it is free at the point of use, why not privatise the role of the monarch, who remains Britain’s head of state?

Finally, why not sell honours in all shapes and forms? In line with this populist vision, the whole honours system could be deepened and extended in a transparent fashion, on the basis of a new ‘diffusion range’ of lower-level honours, inspired by the lower-price mass production ranges produced by leading fashion designers.

Social cohesion would thus be massively increased. The ‘right to buy’ council housing and the de facto giveaway of shares in nationalised industries through underpricing won the key c2 demographic for Thatcherism by allowing it to take ‘a stake in society’. The principle of triangulation suggests that New Labour should go one further in introducing the right to buy honours, allowing many more people to ‘buy in’ to the system.

At the top end of the scale, the use of market mechanisms would surely lever up the price of a ‘Big P’ from present nugatory levels. Footballer Andriy Shevchenko cost Chelsea £30m, remember. It considerably devalues the prestige of a rent-a-peerage to know that they can be had for as little as a £1m loan.

That kind of money is probably a suitable flat-rate tariff to enjoy, say, a seat on Hackney council Labour group for a set four-year term. For many private sector concerns, such investment would be entirely commercially justifiable to shareholders.

Local government outsourcing service providers, for instance, might consider buying a majority of the places on selected New Labour local authorities, allowing them to award themselves all available contracts. Why let political activists have these valuable positions free of charge, simply because they have convinced people to vote for them?

Private companies are encouraged to own ‘academy’ secondary schools and Private Finance Initiative hospitals and prisons. So why should they not own councils themselves? Not only would the scheme pay for itself, but sweeping reductions in council tax would thus be made possible.

Let us consider central rather than local government. Let existing MPs either retain or sell their seat at each general election, thereby enabling the hidden hand of the market to establish the correct market-clearing equilibrium price.

This would ensure that each seat would go only to the consumer who derives maximum marginal utility from buying the constituency, thus ensuring allocative efficiency through Pareto optimality.

All this should be entirely acceptable to the Conservatives, as it is organically rooted in British political tradition prior to the first Reform Act of 1832. Many of the great figures in the Tory tradition entered parliament to represent rotten boroughs.

Old Labour diehards may object that purchasers of Labour seats might have ideologies incompatible with traditional Labour values. This need be no disqualification. After all, a number of former Thatcherite Tory MPs have already decamped to New Labour. Shaun Woodward and Alan Howarth have been entrusted with ministerial office.

Remember also the savings to be had from not having to hold elections, including such overheads as the Labour Party’s hefty outlay on buying postal votes. Both the taxpayer and the parties themselves will be quids in.

As we have established, the Lords has partially been privatised already. The practice needs simply to be generalised. That leaves only the royal family, which for hundreds of years has operated on the hereditary principle. And where has this gotten us? There is a real risk that the next monarch will be a man who talks to plants and wishes he was a tampon.

Yet as the historical precedent of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 underlines, there is an alternative. We can look elsewhere, even outside the country, for a new head of state.

This, obviously, is a premium product, for which a premium price of double figure billions could be expected. In practical terms, such sums mean that applicants will be restricted to businesspeople of proven ability, such as King Richard Branson IV or easyKing Stelios I.

Remember that Roman Abramovich – who has transformed Chelsea into a world class football team by throwing money at the club – has already purchased the governorship of the Chukotka autonomous okrug in the Russian Federation for himself. Perhaps he could be retained as a consultant, in order that Britain can benefit from his knowledge of ‘best practice’.

Alternatively, Abramovich may wish to gift the job to a suitable younger member of the Romanov dynasty. As the experience of the Hanoverian dynasty shows, lack of English language ability is not insurmountable.

It would probably be advisable to put the job of heading up the Church of England out to separate tender, in order that equal opportunities policies can be seen to apply. After all, the established church slot brings a number of House of Lords seats with it. This could provide an opening for some wealthy third world Pentecostal sect to underpin its social standing in the UK.

Let us deal with some objections that the curmudgeonly will surely raise. Some might argue that this privatisation programme is an affront to democratic process. Yet as things stand, the House of Lords and democracy have not even nodding acquaintance. Direct sale of peerages is surely neither more nor less undemocratic than either patronage or the hereditary principle.

Making Lords appointments transparent – perhaps under the oversight of a regulator on the OfCom model – will actually render the process more democratic than at present.

Not one single MP is elected with the backing of the majority of his or her constituents. This is even more so the case with councils. Turnout in municipal by-elections is often less than 10% of those on the electoral register. So not a single MP or councillor in Britain can properly be said to have a mandate.

Others will object that the privatisation of political power delivers too much power into the hands of the rich. Again, this criticism falls. All mainstream political parties currently defend the political interests of their wealthy backers anyway. What I am proposing is simply to make the wealthy pay directly for a system that already operates largely for their benefit.

Finally, to counter any accusations of elitism, I also advocate the democratisation of the honours system. As well as existing honours, let us create a new entry-level honour, awarded to all British citizens as of right.

As the British Empire now exists only formally, there is no practical reason why what is officially known as the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire cannot freely be conferred to all and sundry.

Any cost could be defrayed by seeking commercial sponsorship. Everyone would thus be entitled to call themselves, say, a Carling Black Label Milk Monitor of the British Empire.

Higher up the food chain, new honours could be made available for as little as £50 - preferably in used fivers - to become an Barclays Premiership Under Assistant West Coast Promotion Person of the British Empire. For the status conscious, similar titles could be made available at numerous pricing points, from £500 upwards.

For £50,000, people could even be allowed to select their own title. So if anyone would like to be made, say, an Official Fag Hag of the British Empire and is willing to spend some of the gains made on her former council flat during the recent housing boom, why not?

Maybe New Labour could strike a deal with Daily Express boss Richard Desmond. They could give him a dozen of these bespoke titles to use as competition prizes ... provided only that the pornography billionaire makes another six-figure donation to New Labour funds.

The announcement of the New Labour shortlist for Bethnal Green & Bow - and hence almost certainly the name of the next MP - is imminent. My sources tell me that Lutfur Rahman and Rushanara Ali have secured sufficient nominations to make the cut. As women, Rupa Huq and Shiria Khatun will also qualify under the 50% rule.

There will be a further two names from among the following blokes; Ayub Korom Ali; Helal Abbas; John Biggs; David Edgar; Abdul Asad; Moti Uzzaman; and Shirajul Islam. As ever, readers' opinions on these guys welcome. Hey, badmouth 'em if you want. We like a bit of controversy here.

Bethnal Green and Bow Constituency Labour Party has named its prospective parliamentary candidate shortlist, according to East London Advertiser. The eventual winner will almost certain become the next MP once George Galloway steps down:

‘Former Tower Hamlets council leaders John Biggs and Helal Abbas have been named alongside four previously selected contestants.

Observers predict the final vote will come down to a choice between Biggs, Lutfur Rahman and Rushanara Ali.’

‘Rushanara Ali grew up in Bethnal Green and Bow arriving from Bangladesh at the age of 7 with her family. She studied at Mulberry School and Tower Hamlets College. She lives and works in the East End and is currently an Associate Director of the Young Foundation.

‘She is a Commissioner for the London Child Poverty Commission; Chair of Tower Hamlets Summer University and Summer University London; Board Member of Tower Hamlets College; Trustee of the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and an advisor to the Spitalfields Festival. Rushanara has a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University.’

Gone are the days, it seems, when Labour PPCs would list anything like trade union membership or a track record of labour movement activism at times like this. What does Ms Ali actually stand for? I haven’t a clue.

Among the disappointed Westminister hopeful was the former leader of Tower Hamlets council, Helal Abbas. Not even the backing of Dobbo - the man Londoners decisively rejected as mayor in 2000 - did the trick:

‘FORMER Health Secretary Frank Dobson has endorsed an ex-council leader’s bid to become an MP to oust George Galloway's Respect Party in the East End.

‘Veteran Mr Dobson, MP for Holborn and St Pancras, told a press conference [in] Brick Lane in the heart of the East End's Banglatown: "We've known each other for longer than both of us care to remember. I don't think the people of Tower Hamlets have a better person standing up for the people than him."’

‘A YouGov poll of more than 1,100 Labour Party members suggests that Gordon Brown [pictured], who is waiting on Blair’s announcement, does not face any serious groundswell of opposition from within the party. Asked who they would vote for in a leadership contest, 80% of members who said they would vote backed Brown, followed by 9% for John McDonnell, a left-wing challenger, 6% for Michael Meacher, a former environment minister, and just 5% for Charles Clarke, the former home secretary.

‘A closer contest is in prospect for Labour’s deputy leadership, according to the YouGov poll. Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, is ahead on 36%, followed by Alan Johnson, 19%; Peter Hain, 15%; Harriet Harman, 13%; Jon Cruddas, 10%, and party chairman Hazel Blears, 9%.’

Conclusions for the left? Realistically, 9% support is nothing to be turning cartwheels across the floor about. But another way of looking at it is to note that the hard left is considerably more popular than the soft left, and has almost twice as much backing as ultra-Blairism.

What’s more, 9% represents the irreducible minimum core constituency. We can build on that layer. By contrast, unless Blairism can find itself a credible standard bearer – and neither Clarke nor Milburn can realistically be called that – it may well be on its deathbed.

What the poll tells us about the deputy leadership contest is difficult to discern. If, say, it did come to a Benn vs Johnson race, there’s no telling how the second preferences of the lower-placed hopefuls will redistribute.

[Hat tip: Luke Akehurst]

From Hazel Blears MP.

Labour Party Chair

Much of the content comprises catchphrase bingo a go go; ‘aspirational hard-working class families’, indeed. Aren’t they what we used to call the working class?

And some of the dog whistle stuff – ‘tackling the unsettling effects of immigration’ - leaves a slightly bad taste in the mouth.

But what of the underlying political argument here? Surely New Labour has been doing all the things Blears lists, or at least thinks it has. And it is precisely these policies that have driven Labour’s opinion poll standing to the lowest ebb for a quarter of a century.

Voters are judging Labour on the basis of its record in office for the last ten years, a decade when the political influence of the left has been zilch. ‘More of the same’ is not the key to a fourth term; it’s a sure recipe for defeat.

Nobody on the left – least of all those of us that come from working class backgrounds - is suggesting that Labour antagonise the AHWFs. The task is to put forward relevant democratic socialist policies that appeal to the majority of the electorate.

In my book, they would include boosting job security by curbs on private equity. How many votes could Labour win in Kent commuterland by taking the railway network back into public ownership and then spending the money to make the system reliable?

And – pace Blears – the housing market has not been ‘volatile’. It’s been going up and up and up. The only answer to what is increasingly becoming a crisis is the provision of vast amounts of accommodation on a non-market basis.

Thatcher’s dogmatic proclamation that there is no such thing as society has been replaced by New Labour’s idee fixe that there is no such thing as market failure. If obeisance before market forces remains central to its political outlook, it can kiss Dartford - and dozens of seats like it - goodbye.

And despite his wish to reduce the union block vote at party conference, it’s quite clear that the unions themselves are lining up behind the bloke, as the Financial Times reports this morning:

The FT has been told that Unite, formed by the merger of Amicus and the Transport and General Workers' Union, has been putting pressure on MPs to back the campaign by Jon Cruddas, the Labour MP for Dagenham and a former No 10 adviser, to become deputy leader. It has ploughed tens of thousands of pounds into his campaign. An Amicus official has lobbied MPs in parliament to support Mr Simpson's preferred contender.

The aim, according to union insiders, is to get a left-leaning MP into the cabinet to articulate the union agenda in a way that was not possible under Mr Blair. Mr [Unite joint general secretary Derek] Simpson has complained that ministers have been slow to implement the Warwick deal and has called for stronger employment protection for workers.

If Mr Cruddas were successful, his presence in the cabinet could make life difficult for Mr Brown. The MP has said the deputy leader should not have a ministerial portfolio and act as a "transmission belt" with the party, voicing its views within government.

I don’t quite follow the reasoning in that last paragraph. Given his political track record until now, it not immediately plain to me that Cruddas’s presence would in any way ‘make life difficult’ for the next prime minister.

Then again, John Prescott got the number two job on the basis of – among other things – his background as a trade union militant, as Old Labour personified. He proceeded to acquiesce with Blairism, every step of the way.

Maybe – just maybe – Cruddas has sufficient independence of mind to at least voice some pro-trade union soft left criticisms now and again. That alone would be an advance on the last 13 years. And yes, in case you were wondering, that is a grudging endorsement.

UPDATE: That said, I've just noticed another FT story based on a BBC poll of Labour MPs. Seems that deputy leadership hopefuls Peter Hain, Hazel Blears and Harriet Harman all have the necessary 45 nominations or more, while Alan Johnson will announce tomorrow that he has more names in the bag than any of his rivals.

Cruddas, meanwhile, has just 24 backers. That, in other words, is the most support the unions can rustle up in the Parliamentary Labour Party, which says a lot about the state of play. And if anyone other than his dad is interested, Hilary Benn has only 16 MPs behind him.

The shadow chancellor will then proceed to make a complete fool of himself with the charge that under Gordon Brown, Labour will "lurch to the left", as if this were the early eighties revisited.

It plainly isn’t. New Labourism remains completely hegemonic, as the Newsnight debate between the six Labour deputy leadership contenders last night made perfectly plain. The dirty half dozen reportedly struggled to differentiate themselves.

Within the narrow spectrum that makes up mainstream politics, it would probably be impossible for them to come up with six distinctive platforms.

Yes, there are still differences both within and between the major parties. But these are differences of emphasis rather than differences of substance. The electorate is certainly not being presented with coherent alternative directions for the country.

With that in mind, I was not surprised to read that former New Labour health secretary Alan Milburn has taken a £25,000-a-year part-time job to help PepsiCo build a healthier image for its particular brand of sugar-laden soft drinks, which tastes all but identical to all the other brands of sugar-laden soft drinks on the market.

Welcome to a world where political choice reduces to New Labour's taste for Pepsi and the Tory taste for Coke.

The leftwinger Jon Cruddas has jumped to second place behind Hilary Benn in the running for the Labour deputy leadership after a hustings appearance on Newsnight last night, according to the party's latest figures …

Mr Cruddas also has the support of the two largest unions, Amicus and the TGWU, which are still operating separately after their recent merger as the new Unite trade union.

Another reason to give the guy critical support, I reckon.

There is one "known unknown", however, that could be the biggest surprise of all. Something the Chancellor mentioned at his proleptically victorious campaign launch. Just what did he mean by wanting to form a "government of all the talents"? Some of his loyal assistants, the sort who already regard the prospect of Blairites in a Brown government as a gesture too far, have been quick to play down the plans. They suggest that Brown simply means consulting more widely and appointing the likes of the Tory lords Sebastian Coe and Chris Patten to public positions.

Brown could claim to be completing the plans for "a progressive century" of centre-left government, abandoned by Blair when his landslide meant he didn't need Liberal Democrat votes in parliament after all. Things have got a lot tighter in the division lobbies since then. Rebellions are habit-forming, and a decent quota of Lib Dems would at least cancel out the "John McDonnell" faction.

Far-fetched? Silly, even? Possibly. But food for thought to those that hope against hope that Brown is some kind of closet Old Labourite.

And remember how Sarkozy surprised many recently with the appointment of Bernard Kouchner – one of the most popular politicians in the Socialist Party – to the foreign minister portfolio. Brown would not be above taking a page from the French president’s playbook.

In addition, one factor that Boulton doesn’t mention is that such a move would be a good way of neutralising ludicrous Tory claims of a ‘lurch to the left’.

And if we are talking about reviving ‘The Project’ of the mid-nineties, suggestions of severing ties with the unions could be about to join The Police in staging a comeback tour.

That may well crop up on the agenda anyway after Sir Hayden Phillips finally publishes his report on party funding.

Sure, it’s all speculation. But I’m still convinced that the political action for the left in the period ahead will be inside the Labour Party, and not outside it.

Still, at least emails are an inexpensive means of campaigning for the Labour deputy leadership. Some candidates seem to be better resourced than others:

Peter Hain - pictured - is spending about £60,000 on newspaper advertisements and mailshots in a 48-hour publicity blitz as voting for the deputy leadership begins.

[T]he Hain camp … has the largest war chest of the six, at £77,000, the bulk of which has been held back until now. Allies said that most of his financial backers were friends fr the anti-apartheid movement. His biggest donors are David Williams (£20,000), William Frederick Bottriell (£15,000) and Christopher Campbell (£10,000).

Bill Bottriell is one of the founders of SThree, an IT recruitment company, who made something between £60m-£70m when the business was floated in 2005. Anybody know anything about David Williams and Christopher Campbell?

The Sunday Telegraph gets in a little dig at Hain's polite request that City folk on 'astronomic' bonuses really, really should be nice and give two-thirds away to charity:

Another donor is Loughlin Hickey, the head of tax at accountants KPMG, a company which paid its staff some £80 million in bonuses last year.

There was also a £5,000 cheque from Aslef, the train drivers' union.

Just out of interest, exactly how big – how small, more likely - was the McDonnell budget?

UPDATE: It's just occured to me exactly why I am instinctively uncomfortable about all this. It marks another step in the creeping Americanisation of British politics.

Wealthy individuals giving donations that are substantial by the standards of the UK - although not the US, of course - to individual politicians seeking high office inevitably raises all sorts of conflict of interest issues.

Are these people Labour Party members? What are their business interests? Could those business interests potentially prosper while the deputy leader of the governing party is beholden to them for financial support?

I'm not accusing the Hain campaign of anything untoward, of course. But these are important points. After all, it's not a huge conceptual leap from the purchase of full-age ads in mass circulation tabloids to the eventual legalisation of attack ads on Sky, is it?

Blair’s complaints strangely reverse cause and effect. When aspirant prime ministers fly to Australia to abase themselves before News International executives, and then once in office effectively exempt its British interests from corporation tax and personally tout its wares to their continental counterparts like some glorified salesman, they inevitably send Rupert Murdoch a powerful message about just who wears the trousers in the relationship.

When a political party courts six-figure donations from Tory pornographers who run middle-market tabloids as a sideline but refuses to publish a serious political periodical of its own, it gets what is coming to it.

The problem is not that the media has gone wild in the country. Genuine scoops – such as the BBC/Guardian revelations on the cash-for-Saudis affair – are all too infrequent in comparison to the coverage of ministerial sex lives. Where it matters, the press is rarely critical enough.

Labour's membership has slumped to a new low, with more than 20,000 disillusioned supporters deserting the party in the past 18 months, it emerged today.

Membership has crept back up to 180,000 in the last three weeks.

Two questions. First, how many of the new recruits joined specifically because they wanted to vote for John McDonnell? At least half, at a guess.

Two, the leadership contest is, of its nature, a temporary boost. How long are the new members going to stick around following the coronation?

Gordon Brown is due to name his cabinet a week today. And it is looking increasingly possible that when the announcement comes, Britain will have a de facto Lib-Lab coalition government for the first time in three decades.

Late last month I commented on an article by Sky political editor Adam Boulton in the New Statesman, which hinted that Brown was thinking along these lines.

Turns out the guy was onto something. Today the Guardian website reports:

Gordon Brown and Sir Menzies Campbell, the Liberal Democrat leader, have held private discussions in recent days about a plan for one or two senior Lib Dems to join Mr Brown's first cabinet, the Guardian has been told by a well-placed source …

If Mr Brown was to go ahead with such an audacious plan the Lib Dem candidates might include Nick Clegg, the shadow home affairs spokesman, or Vince Cable, the shadow Treasury spokesman.

Newspaper columnists and bloggers of the political persuasion that never quite got over the tragic demise of the SDP will doubtless try to dress this up as a ‘progressive coalition’, maintaining that the Lib-Dems are in some sense part of the extended centre-left family who should be welcomed aboard.

In terms of the Liberal Democrats on the ground, that point is at best debatable. But both Clegg and Cable are de facto Thatcherite neoliberals, hailing from the Lib-Dems’ hard rightist and anti-union Orange Book faction.

Understand that this is not a move forced on Brown in the name of hanging on to office, as was the case with Callaghan in the late 1970s. It is a willful act expressly designed to isolate the Labour left and further insulate New Labour from any potential trade union pressure.

Its net effect will be to shift the political centre of gravity in this country further to the right. And the socialist left remains too weak and divided to do a damn thing about it.

UPDATE: Campbell has rejected the proposal and told his MPs and peers - not least Lord Ashdown - to turn down any job offers.

Nevertheless, recall David Cameron's recent attempt to draft Greg Dyke, not a member of any political party, into standing as a joint Tory/Lib-Dem candidate for London mayor.

The rigid party system is breaking down before our eyes. Good thing? Bad thing? Or just very postmodern? Comments, please.

New Labour leader Gordon Brown wants to reduce the influence of trade unions within the party, the BBC has learned.

He has recommended to Labour's National Executive that union-backed motions be replaced by debates on general issues.

This is, apparently, necessary in order to avoid ‘embarassing defeats’ for the leadership when union-backed resolutions occasionally carry the day at this increasingly state-managed event.

The reality is that no ‘damage’ greater than the odd adverse inside page headline results. New Labour governments habitually ignore Labour Party policy if they don’t like it, and usually brief friendly journalists to that effect within minutes of a vote going the wrong way.

Expect one or two trade unions leaders and the usual suspects on the Labour left to denounce this latest outrage. And then do nothing whatsoever to stop the scheme.

UPDATE: Press release from John McDonnell:

"This is the first step by the new Leader towards breaking the link between the party and the trade unions. This is a real kick in the teeth for all those trade unions who loyally nominated Brown to the leadership of the party. Many will now be wondering what hope there is of exercising any influence on the key issues of privatisation, public sector pay cuts, and trade union rights.

"We are launching a campaign within the Party and the trade unions to save the rights of trade unions within the Labour Party."

Gordon Brown finally moves into Number Ten today, maintaining radio silence towards the left and towards organised labour. The Lib-Dems have been offered – and have spurned – cabinet positions, and a leading Tory has crossed the floor.

Courting the business community has always been an integral aspect of the New Labour project, and Brown is determined not to disappoint on this score either.

The prime minister is setting up a Business Council for Britain to advise the government on all areas affecting business, including industrial policy, technology and state subsidies.

The line up of those invited to join might just as well have been expressly calculated to upset trade unionists. They include Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of retail monopolists Tesco, and television star and Amstrad boss Sir Alan Sugar.

But the most contentious appointment of all is private equity king Damon Buffini, currently the principal target of a concerted union propaganda campaign against that particular line of business:

The Permira managing partner already advises New Labour on education, as part of a new National Council for Education Excellence.

The names of those making up the Brown cabinet will shortly be unveiled, and appointments from outside politics are expected. It will be interesting to see whether or not any roles in ‘the government of all the talents’ are allocated to anybody identified with the trade union movement or the political left.

Prime minister: Gordon Brown
Chancellor: Alistair Darling
Foreign Secretary: David Miliband
Home Secretary: Jacqui Smith
Health: Alan Johnson
Schools and children: Ed Balls
Innovation, universities and skills: John Denham
Justice: Jack Straw
Commons leader: Harriet Harman
Defence and Scotland: Des Browne
Int Development: Douglas Alexander
Wales/Work and Pensions: Peter Hain
Northern Ireland: Shaun Woodward
Chief secretary to the Treasury: Andy Burnham
Cabinet office minister/Duchy of Lancaster: Ed Miliband
Culture: James Purnell
Olympics: Tessa Jowell
Transport: Ruth Kelly
Lords leader: Baroness Ashton
Attorney General: Baroness Scotland
Environment: Hilary Benn
Chief Whip: Geoff Hoon
Business and enterprise: John Hutton
Housing minister (attending Cabinet when needed): Yvette Cooper
Communities: Hazel Blears
Children and youth justice: Beverley Hughes
Africa, Asia and UN: Lord Malloch Brown

Although he will take the Labour whip in the House of Lords, he is reportedly refusing to join the Labour Party itself. That is a bit much to ask of a minister in a Labour government these days, I suppose.

I do hope the future Lord Jones doesn’t think I’m being impertinent or anything, but I’d just like to bring up some of the remarks he has made about trade unionism in recent years. For instance, here’s what Sir Digby argued in a speech to the TUC in 2003:

"Unions are tending to be a block to reform," he said.

"I only wish that trade unions, especially those who are adopting a more militant attitude to many things, would fight the battles of tomorrow, and stop fighting the battles of yesterday."

And here’s what the Digster told the Scottish TUC the following year:

"When there were millions of unskilled workers, vulnerable to exploitation, unions were essential to fight their corner.

"With unions representing just 19% of the private sector workforce, they become increasingly irrelevant every day."

One scarcely knows where to start. In a country where employees can be sacked en masse by text message, the bulk of people who work for a living - from Chinese cockle-pickers to highly-skilled but seriously undervalued public sector professionals, right up to those who can hired and fired on a private sector manager’s whim – would benefit from membership of collective organisations that ‘fight their corner’.

If unions are increasingly irrelevant every day, that it because successive governments for over a quarter of a century have purposely striven to bring about that situation, ensuring that Britain has the most lightly regulated labour market in Europe. And the most tightly regulated labour movement.

If they are marginalised - reduced to little more than one lobby among many others, with an auxiliary role of unpaid health and safety inspectors - that is a state of affairs that organisations such as Sir Digby's CBI have lobbied hard to bring about.

In an age of politics as symbolism, the message behind this appointment is all too clear.

Some political anoraks of my acquaintance had been actively looking forward to the publication of the Alastair Campbell diaries, in the hope that they would reveal as much about the inner workings of New Labour in office as Alan Clark’s diaries told us about Number Ten in the Thatcher years.

But if the extracts available in the press this morning are anything to go by, the biggest secret we are let in on is that Gordon once accidentally locked himself in the loo and had to be freed by Tony. That’s hardly in the same league as Edwina’s ‘my affair with Major John’ shocker, which made the nation snigger back in 2002, is it?

I’m personally not a tremendous fan of the genre to begin with. Many of these efforts are monumentally dull, and few establish themselves to be of lasting value. The Crossman diaries – which cover the 1960s Wilson governments – are essential reading for students of the period. I’ll have to confess to not having read Benn’s tomes, although I am aware they are highly regarded.

But on the whole, diaries strike me as the live double albums of political books. They are strictly for the diehard fans.

Gordon Brown has told an invited audience at the United Nations that there needs to be greater efforts to tackle world poverty. That’s hardly courting controversy.

Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a safer topic. Talking a good game on development issues is the easy option for any politician who wants to wear his conscience ostentatiously on his sleeve.

The only way the rest of us can judge the sincerity of those who make such speeches is to look at what they actually do, and what the politics they advocate actually achieve.

Brown is probably the chief backer of the International Finance Facility for Immunisation, a $4bn bond issue designed to pay for the immunisation of 25m children.

But funding under this scheme is financed by borrowing against future aid commitments. Because this is necessarily more expensive than direct public funding, it actually amounts to a reduction in aid spending, according to the World Development Movement:

WDM’s research finds that the IFF would increase aid flows by $209bn in real terms for the first decade (2006 to 2017) of the scheme but that flows would plummet after 2017 if aid budgets were used to pay back the bonds at a total cost of $316.6bn in real terms.

The interest that has to be paid on the IFF bonds, 5-6 per cent according to Treasury figures, would reduce the total amount available for developing countries over the 27 [year] lifespan of the scheme by $108bn in real terms.

In other words, IFF takes $108bn that should be spent on healthcare in the world’s poorest countries, and hands the money over to investment bankers – the richest people on the planet - instead. Breathtaking.

There’s a council by-election in Tower Hamlets on Thursday next week, following Shamim Chowdhury’s recent resignation from Respect. You can read an all-too-revealing interview with Respect hopeful Harun Miah in the latest Weekly Worker [downloadable here, but not yet online]

Labour is standing former leader Michael Keith, who – according to the East London Advertiser – is not universally popular on his own side.

Labour is trying to motivate the old white working classes to the ballot box by playing on fears of a 'Galloway takeover' ... as they did at Bow in last year's local elections.

Keith, with his intellect, experience and good Government connections, is Labour's own double-edge sword.

Duncan Crossey – former chairman of Cambridge University Conservative Association – is running for the Tories, while the Lib-Dem candidate is former parliamentary researcher Rosie Clarke.

If you’ve been out on the knocker for any of the parties, give the rest of us some feedback in the comments box.

Coronations are one thing. A hereditary monarchy is another. The Guardian website follows up a story in the Independent this morning, announcing that John Prescott is likely to step down as MP for Hull East at the next election.

The House of Lords is likely to beckon for Chipolata Boy, a one time trade union militant. But it was the concluding paragraph that caught my eye:

Two men rumoured to have their eye on Mr Prescott's Hull East seat are his son David, and Chris Leslie, former MP for Shipley and now director of the New Labour thinktank the New Local Government Network.

Something about the notion of politics as a family business, a la the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, leaves an unpleasant taste in the mouth.

I don’t know if the empirical research would bear this out, but it seems to me that the number of spouses, sons and grandsons of Labour MPs making it to Westminster has increased considerably in recent elections.

They range in their politics from Peter Mandelson and Lindsay Hoyle to leftwingers Ann Cryer and John Cryer, respectively widow and offspring of the late Bob Cryer.

Hilary Benn would not even have made it onto the ballot paper in the recent deputy leadership contest if his old man had not called in a few favours.

Of course one can always look at individual cases and argue that they made their way on their own merits. John Cryer used to be a workmate of mine, and I know that he ran basically as a Labour standard bearer in Hornchurch in 1997, seeing little chance of taking a Tory stronghold. Fair dos.

But inheriting a seat from your dad is something else entirely. Surely Hull East CLP has not degenerated into a wholly-owned subsidiary of Prescott & Sons?

The comments box is open for anyone with inside information on the contest, especially on any other potential hats in the ring.

Johan Eliasch, boss of sportswear firm Head, is to let his membership of the Conservative Party lapse - even though they still haven’t repaid his generous £2.6m loan - and will from now on be advising New Labour on climate change. This blog has had occasion to comment on the source of the Swedish businessman’s fortune before now:

The Sunday Times annual Rich List has Eliasch down at number 127, with an estimated worth of £345m. Much of that wealth comes from the surplus value produced by workers in sweatshops across the global South.

No chance of a donation to their hardship fund I suppose, Mr Eliasch? Or even a loan?

Of course, not even I would go so far as to suggest that Mr Eliasch’s change of allegiance may in any way be motivated by a wish for preferment. But then I don’t have too. Here’s what the BBC’s Nick Robinson – a former activist in the Federation of Conservative Students – has to say on this topic:

Friends and foes alike say that Mr Eliasch had hoped for a peerage …

The Tories claim that Labour has approached many other Conservative donors and MPs to switch sides. Team Brown deny that emphatically - pointing out that, if they had, one of those who snubbed them would have gone public by now. They do, however, say with a knowing smile that Mr Eliasch may not be the last.

I understand full well that Gordon Brown is intent on setting up a big tent in the centre ground of politics. But I can’t say I care much for some of the other occupants.

The idea that the split between Labourism and Liberalism was some sort of tragedy that has led to a ‘needless century-long division of the progressive centre-left’ still gets the occasional outing from the odd Blairite columnist.

Only this weekend, Martin Kettle was riffing on the theme in the pages of the Guardian. The piece was presumably timed to coincide with the Liberal Democrat conference taking place in Brighton this week.

This argument is ahistorical nonsense, of course. Organised labour, in the specific form in which it emerged in Britain 100 years ago, had nothing to gain from remaining a subordinate component of a bourgeois party whose free trade raison d'être was growing more irrelevant with every passing year.

The split was as healthy as it was inevitable. Liberal England suffered its famous ‘strange death’ only two decades later.

Yet what about today? Labour is no longer a class-based party in any meaningful sense, least of all in terms membership composition. One hundred years after Campbell Bannerman, what separates New Labour from what has ultimately emerged as the Liberal Democrats?

Where political differences have any real substance at all, Lib Dem policies are clearly more radical than current Labour orthodoxy. Their tax policy is more redistributionist; their proposal for a partial amnesty for illegal immigrants more libertarian; and their demand for proportional representation more democratic.

And they were of course the only mainstream party to question, however inadequately, the madness of the decision to invade Iraq.

Tack the Lib Dem core vote – some 15-20% of the electorate – on to Labour’s heartland support, and the Tories would never govern again.

That argument wasn’t lost on Blair and it isn’t lost on Brown, who seems to want to keep Ming & Co in reserve as a guarantee against any Tory resurgence, or the even more unlikely prospect of a viable formation emerging on Labour’s left.

The only coherent argument against a lash-up – whether that takes the form of alliance or full-blown merger – is that Labour can and should be more confident of its intellectual identity, and capable of developing distinctly democratic socialist policies that are relevant and effective in today’s world.

Not only does New Labour fail both tests, but nobody within its ranks is even making the case that it should try to meet these challenges. That’s why I think we will see de facto or actual coalition government, and perhaps even a unified Lib/Lab party, within five years.

‘I know that one must not be right against the party. One can be right only with the party, and through the party, for history has no other road for being in the right.’ – Trotsky at the thirteenth congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, 1924

Back in the early 1990s, the political conference season often used to see me embark on a four-week tour of British seaside resorts. TUC, Lib Dems, Labour, Tories. In some years I went to the lot.

What’s more, I actually enjoyed it. Genuine political debates took place. And in those less security conscious times, it was pretty easy to gatecrash some top notch evening bashes. I even managed to blag my way into a do that enabled me to meet most of the Major cabinet.

That included Michael Heseltine. A few months previously I had written something pretty insulting about him in Tribune. He clocked my badge and said to me: ‘Dave Osler of Tribune? I considered suing you. But I guessed you didn’t have any money anyway.’ Correct, sir.

These days I wouldn’t bother attending even if it was still vaguely relevant to the day job. I’ll be spending next week in Paris. This wasn’t a conscious to get out of the country so as to escape all media coverage the Labour conference. It’s just that the consideration of a clash didn’t even enter my mind when I was sorting out my holiday dates.

I doubt I will be missing much. The gathering has long been a dull stage-managed affair. On the rare occasions the line from the top is not endorsed, the leadership instantly announces that it has no intention of carrying out what is still technically party policy.

What’s more, with the latest set of changes put forward by Gordon Brown in the name of extending party democracy, the exercise is just about to become even more pointless. Tony Benn explains what is happening, and provides a bit of backstory, in the Guardian today:

This process began in the 90s, when New Labour came to power and most proposals were referred to the national policy forum in which the government had a permanent majority.

This would complete the New Labour project under which the conference becomes a platform for ministers and a few handpicked delegates - and, of course, a big trade fair. There would be no point in joining the party locally or affiliating as a union in the hope of discussing policy.

In short, party members will only have one campaigning function - to get councillors and a government elected with policies which they have played no part whatsoever in formulating. If this divorce happens, policy campaigning will revert to those outside the party and parliament.

The unions have secured agreement that the new arrangements will be reviewed in 2008, something they are trumpeting as a major concession. Sorry, guys. Don’t hold your breath.

And it’s not that either the Conservative or Liberal Democrat conferences are significantly more open-minded, either. In the end, democracy is the loser.

Indeed, his priority so far seems to have been to present himself as the partial negation of Blairism on the basis of Blairism itself. So 1000 troops are coming home from Iraq, the spindoctors have been reined in, and some typically British froideur has thankfully been injected into the ‘we both use Colgate toothpaste’ familiarity of the Downing Street-White House relationship.

But differences such as these are differences of tone rather than differences of substance. I’m not aware of any pollsters having asked the public what policies they automatically associate with Britain’s new prime minister. However, my guess would be that few voters could name even one. In that kind of ideological vacuum, the Tories are handed a free run for their ‘Bottler Brown’ playground name calling.

Part of Brown’s problem is that he was one of the two principal architects of New Labourism has she has been practiced since 1994. And as a body of ideas, that ideology has proven remarkably poor at conceptualizing such intellectual content as it may have.

For over a decade, we were repeatedly told that there was something called ‘Blairism’. What it constituted, exactly, was harder to say. But – in the words of the US Supreme Court judge asked to define hard-core pornography – you knew it when you saw it.

‘Stakeholder capitalism’ became a buzzword for a few brief weeks. Then there was all that talk about ‘communitarianism’, as the name Amitai Etzioni sent newspaper spellcheckers across Britain haywire. Finally, we were offered some sort of inchoate 'third way'.

But ultimately, Blairism couldn’t define itself in such high-falutin’ terms because its unique selling proposition was brutally simple; Thatcherism lite with a bit more dosh for the NHS.

Now the Tories have hit on a similar formula. If Gordon Brown is to invent a distinct Brownism - as he must - he will need to differentiate himself from Cameronism first. If he is unable to do so, British politics will slowly elide into one undifferentiated Bameronite mush.

Brown bottled a November election not because he was scared of losing to the Tories, but because he needed more time to set out his ‘vision of change for Britain’. Well, that’s what he said at the time, anyway.

Yet the most damning criticism most commentators have come up with after yesterday’s Queen’s Speech – the first of Brown’s premiership, and therefore the one that sets the tone for future editions - is the lack of what George Bush senior famously dismissed as the Vision Thing.

Hence Cameron was led to remark rhetorically: ‘People are asking, “is that it?”’. Yes, Dave, that was it. For the Lib Dems, Cable waded in with the observation that ‘the anti-climax is deafening’. Isn’t it only climaxes that tend to be noisy, Vince?

Much as I would love to launch into a virulent full-throttle Marxist-inspired hatchet-job on the words Gordon put into the mouth of Her Maj, most of it was so pragmatic that it is difficult to disagree with, wherever one stands in the political spectrum. Welcome to the politics of competent New Labour managerialism.

The obvious exception the likelihood of a further extension of police powers of detention without trial in terrorism investigations. Yet this already stands at 28 days, so the mistaken underlying principle is established; the right of habeas corpus has in practice been scrapped for Muslims.

Pushing the time limit out to, say, 56 days only makes a bad law worse, but it is essentially an arbitrary step and its effect will be more symbolic than anything else.

Most of the rest of the QS contents were eminently sensible, and just to deaden their impact further, had in any case been trailed well in advance. They not only don’t frighten the horses, they are hardly likely even to generate mild heart palpitations among Daily Mail-reading floating voters in Kettering.

Post-ideological politics means pushing forward no ideas that would in any way alter the basic free-market tramlines along which Britain travels. The result is that the worst the Tories can find to say about a Labour legislative programme is that, well, it’s a little bit bland.

If the 1983 manifesto constituted the longest suicide note in history, the 2007 Queen’s Speech is the essentially an extended prescription for mogadon.

Take plans for the right to request family-friendly working hours, for instance. Not the right to be granted family-friendly working hours, you notice, but the right to request it. Who could object to that? Anybody in work should have the right to ask their boss anything, one would have thought.

The measures on climate change seem good as far as they go, which is nowhere near far enough. I can see practical difficulties with effectively raising the school leaving age to 18, but I’m not against it in principle. Building more housing is obviously necessary. Much of it should be social housing. But Britain clearly needs to renew and extend its housing stock.

I guess the measures for full employment, a higher minimum wage, expansion of the welfare state, repeal of the Tory anti-trade union laws, extended social ownership, redistribution of wealth and dramatic reduction of arms expenditure will just have to wait until next year, right?

Gordon Brown likes to style the government’s various taxpayer-funded ‘listening events’ and ‘citizen’s juries’ as genuine consultation exercises, designed to give the public a real input into major policy decisions. Yeah, right.

What's more, this sort of thing does not come cheap. Some £2.9m has been spent on various events of this type so far this autumn. Getting on for half of that money - £1.3m, to be precise - went on a one-day public consultation on nuclear power, according to analysis by the Financial Times:

The price tag for the nuclear consultation - nine "citizen deliberative events" held on September 8 - will fuel controversy over the exercise and raise questions about Gordon Brown's "new type of politics".

The Ministry of Justice also declined to reveal costing for consultative events culminating in a "citizens’ summit" on British values and a bill of rights, expected to be launched later this month. "The public can be assured that the government will look for value for money in carrying out this programme," an official told the FT.

So, is all of this worth nearly three million quid? I’m not so sure. For a start, exactly how are these ‘panels of 20 people chosen to represent their communities’ selected? The operative word here is ‘chosen’. Chosen by whom? On what basis? What possible democratic value do their opinions have if they are not elected?

But what ultimately devalues this extended series of catchpenny PR stunts is the realisation that whatever these ‘panels of 20 people chosen to represent their communities’ have to say, it makes no difference one way or the other.

Or does anyone seriously doubt that the government has decided to go ahead with a new generation of nuclear power stations, whether the public likes it or not?

Taken in isolation, the CDgate affair should not inflict much damage on New Labour. At worst, it should entail no more than a few days of embarrassing headlines and the discrete rolling of heads at HM Revenue & Customs.

No more would then be said, and the whole incident would be forgotten quickly enough as the nation enters fully into the permanent alcoholic stupor that dominates the Christmas and New Year period for the majority of the population. Shit happens, right? Can I get you a top up?

But coming so soon after the October election stumble, the shambles over foreign worker statistics and the Northern Rock bail-out, CDgate isn’t being taken in isolation. George Osborne’s ‘just get a grip and deliver a basic level of competence’ jibe hit damagingly home. Why should that be?

One reason is that New Labour has, since its inception, prided itself on its managerial abilities, especially on economic questions. Vote for the party of the Platonic form of half-way capable middle management made flesh; we don’t cock things up.

So it was that for more then a decade, nobody was reduced to singing in the bathtub or snorting coke in the Treasury as sterling suffered humiliation at the hands of the financial markets.

As chancellor, Brown presided over uninterrupted growth averaging 2.8% between 1998 and 2006, with none of the wild gyrations witnessed under the Tories from 1979 to 1997.

But the success has been built on weak foundations, including huge recourse to public and private debt, over-reliance on the City, and stagnation in manufacturing that has created a trade deficit of record proportions.

If the housing market hits the buffers – and that is a very real possibility, even on the most optimistic prognoses – the perception of perpetual economic competence will be destroyed. As John Major soon discovered, once the perception changes, so do the opinion poll standings.

By the end of the first quarter of 2008, last month’s decision to bottle a contest might just be looking like a singularly bad call.

The David Abrahams affair marks the third instance in less than 15 years that the Labour has purposely devised a new mechanism for keeping the names of political donors out of the public prints. Anyone would think they had something to hide.

The first attempt was the blind trust system of the early 1990s. These were funding conduits that allowed people to give to politicians via independent trustees, so that in theory the politicians did not know who their backers were. As such gifts were not deemed donations to the Labour Party itself, there was no requirement for public disclosure.

The trouble is, the trusts were not so much blind as partially sighted. The politicians inevitably found out who was writing the cheques. And two of the four known donors to Tony Blair’s blind trust were given peerages. Such was the uproar, use of blind trusts was made illegal in 2000.

But New Labour fundraiser Lord Levy was determined to keep bungs and backhanders on the QT. Hence try number two, an elaborate system of non-declarable loans that had no logical purpose beyond straightforward obfuscation. Yet again, the high correlation between loans and honours nominations forced the Electoral Commission to close the loophole.

Take three – revealed over the weekend - came in the use of individuals to channel donations on behalf of Mr Abrahams. The scandal is currently unfolding.

But what is already clear is that every time the rules change to prevent abuse, Labour simply develops ever more ingenious means of circumventing them. If the letter of the law has been observed, the spirit hasn’t.

Mr Abrahams, it seems, supported at least two runners in Labour’s recent deputy leadership contest. Backing a second horse at longer odds in the same race as a first choice - a practice known in punter parlance as 'having a saver on' - is generally motivated by a desire to make sure you back the eventual winner.

Of course everybody should have the right to put their hands in their pockets for causes and politicians they support. I myself have made three-figure donations to the campaign funds of Labour parliamentary candidates.

But I have done so either because they have been personal friends of mine, or because I admire their politics. I certainly have never seen the slightest need for either secrecy or subterfuge; why would anyone else?

Paul (pictured) was kind enough to contribute a foreword to Labour Party plc, my book on how Labour became a party of business. Yes, it's the ideal Christmas present for the New Labourite in your life, and can probably be found in a remainder bin somewhere near you.

After the events of the last few days, I thought I’d post a few paragraphs that sum up his thoughts on its transformation ‘from a social democracy into a party that has dropped every vestige of commitment to socialism or democracy’:

Shortly before the 1997 general election I was chatting confidentially to a senior politician in the Labour Party, who told me the following story.

Where there is no difference between the two big political machines paid for by big business, ordinary people’s interests in and involvement in politics collapse. Fewer people vote and fewer people care. All politics becomes contemptible, and the way is open for the racist and the dictator.

The Abrahams affair underlines just how right Foot was.

Surely the entire point of having an ostensibly left-of-centre political party is wealth redistribution; if it does not, when in government, act to reduce inequality by the time-honoured means of taking from the rich to give to the poor, what is the point of social democracy?

For many progressive voters, this is the crucial yardstick on which New Labour should be judged. They could forgive much else if the last decade had shown real progress on this score. But as a report published today by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation illustrates, the evidence is mixed.

Back in 1999 the-then Prime Minister, Tony Blair, promised to halve the number of poor children in 10 years and to eradicate child poverty in 20 years.

The report's authors say the most serious setback was an increase of 200,000 children living in poverty in 2005/6 - taking the total to 3.8 million, or one in three children, if housing costs are taken into account.

Whatever excuses Caroline Flint, minister for employment and welfare reform, stutteringly advances, New Labour should bear in mind that for many of its supporters, this sort of stuff constitutes the bottom line.

Central to New Labour’s poverty reduction strategy has been tax credits, of course. The policy has clearly been a partial success.

Yet there is no getting round the objection that it amounts to a massive state subsidy for low pay. In Marxist theory, of course, capitalism has to ensure that wage labour is sufficiently well-rewarded to be able to reproduce itself, that is, to bring up future workers.

Tax credits enable it to evade even that minimal responsibility, and thus drives wages below what they would otherwise be, dramatically increasing the rate of exploitation of wage labour.

Yet so much has the British state become a hand-maiden to the requirements of capital that this is no longer questioned. A realistic minimum wage would be a far more efficacious policy.

Nevertheless, it remains true that throughout its decade in office, New Labour has managed to reverse the non-stop growth in absolute poverty that commenced under Thatcherism.

The period 1998/1999 to 2004/05 saw six years of uninterrupted decline in poverty statistics, with improvements among pensioners and children particularly noticeable.

Even so, in 2005/06, that achievement slammed into reverse gear; the number of people in poverty grew by 750,000.

And the end result? Using the most widely accepted benchmark – household income at 60% or below the median household income – some 13m people, representing 22% of the population, are living in poverty.

Yet poverty can substantially be eradicated, even under a capitalist society. The comparable 2002 figures are 2.6% for Sweden and 3.9% for Norway. That’s the real difference between Stockwell and Stockholm.

New Labour has no more persuasive and literate defender in the mainstream press than Johann Hari. The Boy Wonder – who has now repented of his initial support for the invasion of Iraq – regularly uses his column in the Independent to make the case that however bad Labour social policies look on the surface, closer examination reveals them to be sotto voce social democracy.

Given that I carry a Labour membership card in my wallet, part of me wants to believe that Hari is at least half right. After all, as Tony Blair repeatedly reminded union audiences, this Labour government is still the best Labour government we’ve got, and the political alternative is the return of the Tories.

In his latest piece, Hari maintains that a Conservative win at the next general election would be seriously bad news for several particularly vulnerable groups, including part-time workers:

In 1998, the Labour government signed the European Social Charter. This gives part-time workers a package of basic rights – to parental leave when they have a baby, to proper sick pay, and to not be arbitrarily sacked. Most of the people enjoying these rights are women at the bottom of the pay scale, with nearly 40 per cent of them on the minimum wage.

David Cameron says it is one of his "highest priorities" to pull out of the Charter, and therefore end these rights. The effect? Women working part-time will lose big sums of money after giving birth, or when they are ill. It will be much easier to sack them. Their lives will become more stressful still.

Given the limits of my knowledge of social policy, I’ll accept this argument – and the similar claims Hari advances about the government’s stance on the treatment of drug addicts, sixth formers from poor families and single mothers – as further grounds to prefer the continuation of New Labour in office to the triumph of the Cokehead Conservatism.

But on the same day as Hari’s words were carried in the Indie, the Financial Times reported that New Labour’s take on EU-inspired social measures is not always so enlightened:

Gordon Brown avoided being outvoted on a European Union proposal to give full employment rights to temporary workers.

London argues that the law could impose extra costs on employers as well as making work less flexible. British business believes temps should receive full pay after a minimum of six months.

Temps are, of course, every bit as vulnerable and exploited as part-timers. Effectively, they can be hired and fired at will. They are overwhelmingly poorly paid, and my guess is that nowadays most of them will be foreign.

And why should workers who have put in six months in the same job be regarded as ‘temporary’ in any meaningful sense? They are in an entirely different category from, say, agency receptionists standing in for two days a staffer goes sick, or sub-editors putting in a week of day shifts on a magazine to cover holidays.

In seasonal occupations, a six month qualifying period means that many temps would never qualify for full pay, no matter how many years running they worked for the same employer.

If New Labour is still to merit the designation of half-way social democratic, at least on a good day, it needs rapidly to eliminate this anomaly.

A few more dodgy donor revelations, a few more fluffed PMQs, a 20% fall in house prices, and it's 'game over' for New Labour. What would the political landscape look like then?

Much will depend on the true nature of the Cameron project. Labour supporters are in the same position as the Tories were between 1994-97, when they were unsure whether New Labourism was for real, or simply apparent moderation that concealed a more radical 'demon eyes' agenda. We know the answer now, of course.

Either Cameron means all the touchy-feely stuff or he doesn't. So either we will get essentially a continuity Blairite government, or it is back to Nasty Party basics.

One specific difference is that the Tory right will be better placed than the Labour left were when Blair took office. There has been no Clause Four moment, and nowhere near the systematic attempt to extirpate the ideological true believers that Labour mounted in the years of the Mandelson Inquisition.

Once New Labour is back in opposition, there will of course be a post-mortem on the three terms it served in government, with the likely consensus that those 12 or 13 years could and should have been rather more social democratic than they were.

This is not to predict a swing back to trade union influence or the rebirth of Bennism. The institutional mechanisms are no longer there to enable that to take place. It could, nevertheless, bring about a qualified shift to the left.

After the defeat, there will be at least four identifiable factions within Labour. On the far right, we will find a Milburn Tendency of irreconcilable Blairite ultras, jumping up and down and screaming 'I told you so'. We might even find out for sure who made the prediction that Brown would be a 'fucking awful prime minister'.

Some could well defect to the Tories, making the same accommodation to prevailing winds as Shaun Woodward and Alan Howarth once did in the other direction. In truth, little separates them from the Cameroons, anyway.

On the left, the Labour Representation Committee is capable of making limited headway over the next period, especially if it follows its new stategy of linking up with campaigns outside the Labour Party. But that is unlikely to translate to internal influence.

In the mainstream, we will find the Brownites and the apparatchiks, probably in defensive mode. Finally, we could also have a fourth trend, with the emergence of a Compassite neo soft-left around Jon Cruddas.

The Labour Co-ordinating Committee de nos jours might well be able to point to the example of the US with a Democrat - whether Clinton or Obama - in the Oval Office, operating on a 'globalisation backlash' agenda that includes protectionism and greater receptiveness to the trade union bureaucracies.

If the New Labour project does prove to be exhausted - and all political projects do eventually come to an end - and the soft left can forge a coherant British cover version of the US chart-topper, they will have at least a chance of future dominance.

‘Happy new year’ – pronounced in alcohol-induced tones of cheery optimism - is something of a traditional greeting in early January. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve uttered those words over the past few days.

But from a Labour Party perspective, the political outlook for the coming months doesn’t seem to include too much cause for celebration. Indeed, 2008 could well turn out to suck.

For starters, almost every leading indicator is now pointing to a downturn in the British economy, and potentially a serious one at that.

Just how much politicians deserve the praise/blame (delete as applicable) for matters such as house prices or the employment outlook is open to question, of course. But cop the praise/blame they certainly do.

For a politician like Brown, who in a decade as chancellor won a reputation as a substantial politician on the back of exaggerated prudence, the first recession since the early nineties will wreak serious damage to his approval ratings.

Meanwhile, the scandals over the party’s dodgy funding mechanisms haven’t gone away. Police are still investigating David Abraham’s backdoor donations, totalling over £650,000. This is territory in which no serious democratic socialist party should ever find itself in the first place.

Will the Crown Prosecution Service decide to press charges? It sometimes does look as if New Labour funding arrangements are just as much above the law as BAE Systems. I remain cynical, for no particular reason other than ingrained cynicism.

But if anybody does find themselves in the dock on this one, the political effects could again be considerable.

Finally, Brown may also now face the prospect of opposition from hitherto quiescent quarters. Discontent with the public sector pay squeeze is obviously growing, and token industrial action looks certain. In and off itself, that will have little impact. But the symbolism may matter more.

There are even whispers of a Labour backbench rebellion against government plans to extend internment without trial for terrorist suspect from 28 to 42 days. A parliamentary defeat may even be in the offing.

The political period ahead is clearly delineated by a UK Mini-Super Thursday which will see elections in 143 English local authorities, all Welsh council and the London mayor and assembly contests.

I expect that Ken will hang on to City Hall. But major municipal losses are on the cards if the earlier potential setbacks come to fruition.

Throw in a few more curve balls along the lines of the Northern Rock fiasco and Lost CDgate, and the spin doctors will have plenty of opportunity to practice their art.

I don’t buy Jack Straw’s claim that the Old Etonian party is somehow ‘resonating’ with the public. But if the opinion polls are anything to go by, New Labour isn’t. That is something that has to be put right by the end of April at the latest.

Tony Blair was widely slated last November, after pocketing £240,000 to deliver a 20-minute speech in China said to consist of little more than a string of platitudes. Now the Pretty Straight Guy has lined up another overseas speaking engagement:

Tony Blair, the former prime minister, will this week underline his close rapport with Nicolas Sarkozy, when he speaks at a conference of the French president's centre-right party in Paris.

Mr Blair, now a Middle East envoy but still a Labour Party member, does not see the speech as a declaration of support for a centre-right political movement, his spokesman insisted. But the engagement at a conference to launch the UMP's campaign for local elections in March embarrasses France's divided socialist opposition, many of whom would like to borrow Mr Blair's election-winning prowess and modernising credentials, if not all his policies.

If Tony is doing this one for anything less than he got for the Dongguan gig, one would be tempted to suspect a certain degree of ideological sympathy as part of the motivation. The very least that can be said is that he damn well knows exactly what political message this is sending to the French electorate.

Still, look on the bright side; on some yardsticks the UMP are probably to the left of New Labour. And at least Blair hasn’t agreed to address Le Pen's annual Bleu Blanc Rouge shindig. Not this year, anyway.

Tony Blair is all over the media today, after taking up a £500,000 a year part-time job as an adviser JPMorgan Chase. The former prime minister expects this to be the first of “a small handful” of similar appointments.

Some idea of the centre of political gravity at the Wall Street investment bank can be ascertained by donations made by its employees to the current crop of presidential candidates. Support for Republicans totals $45,550; support for Democrats, zero.

The only surprise here is the relative stinginess of backing for the GOP. Some of those guys will presumably be running up annual cocaine bills higher than that.

And would it be unhelpful of me to mention that this is the very same JPMorgan that was in 2003 forced to pay the Securities and Exchange Commission a fine of $135m - as well as a further $12.5m to New York City and New York State – in connection with its involvement in the Enron scandal?

The SEC charged that, together with their rivals Citigroup, Blair’s new company helped the defunct Texas-based energy trader to disguise loans as cash, in order to rip-off investors. A prominent far left website in the US takes up the story:

In one deal involving JP Morgan, Enron sold to a company called Mahonia a long-term contract to deliver gas. Mahonia had a market capitalization of about $15. It was simply a mask for JP Morgan, which funded its operations.

According to a January, 2003 report by the Senate subcommittee investigating the banks’ involvement with Enron: “The evidence associated with the four transactions [known as Fishtail, Sundance, Slapstick and Bacchus] demonstrates that Citigroup and Chase actively aided Enron in executing them, despite knowing the transactions utilized deceptive accounting or tax strategies, in return for substantial fees or favorable consideration in other business dealings.”

If you’re reading this, Tony, here’s a useful bit of advice you can offer the firm; steer clear of obvious cowboys. It only brings you grief in the end.

Gordon Brown, Thatcherite? I wouldn't dream of saying that myself, of course; it's just too damn Dave Spart for me to get away with. Oh no, I'm simply quoting the succinct title of a chapter in Simon Jenkins’ recent book ‘Thatcher and Sons: a Revolution in Three Acts’.

Not being a particular fan of the man's newspaper columns, I don’t know whether or not I’ll get round to buying a copy. But according to the synopsis, the central thesis is that Major, Blair and Brown essentially constitute the apostolic succession in terms of the Iron Lady’s project.

Summarising the charge sheet against Britain’s current prime minister, Jenkins reportedly rails against ‘Brown's unbridled enthusiasm for the privatisation of public services and public investment, his aversion to the public sector ethos in favour of private profit, his crushing of union power, his introduction of workfare into welfare and his patronage of money making above all other virtues’.

None of this a particularly controversial assessment for much of the far left. But coming from Sir Simon – former editor of The Times and all-purpose member of the great and the good – it hasn’t gone down well among New Labour supporters.

In a review for the Independent, the strongly Blairite journalist John Rentoul splutters:

This sub-Trotskyite argument, currently reaching its full flowering among Unison and assorted leftists denouncing the "privatisation" of the NHS, requires a wilful aversion to reality.

Sub-Trotskyite? But John, you are talking about a former chairman of English Heritage here, not some grubby little donkey-jacketed oik selling papers outside the supermarket of a Saturday morning. Have some respect.

But how ironic that the 'Thatcherite' jibe comes just months after Lord Turnbull branded Brown a Stalinist. Can't the Establishment make up its mind?

Personally, whether or not to the use of the T-word for polemical purposes almost misses the point. What unites British prime ministers since 1979 – or more accurately, 1977 – is common adherence to neoliberalism; counteracting its ideological dominance is the challenge facing democratic socialists.

Thanks for inviting me to speak at your meeting. My name is David Osler, I’m a journalist and author and here today I think mainly because a few years ago I wrote a book called Labour Party plc.

It’s about the development of the Labour Party from what used to be called - in Marxist jargon - ‘a bourgeois workers’ party’ dependent on the trade unions for 90% of its funding to its current reliance on large cheques from the more unsavoury elements of the business community.

Although the book was published in 2002, this is an issue that just hasn’t gone away. Even over the last year, we’ve had the abortive Scotland Yard inquiry into cash for honours allegations, the David Abrahams affair of course, and just this week the resignation of a cabinet minister who somehow ‘overlooked’ his responsibility to declare over £100,000 of donations to his campaign for the Labour deputy leadership. So it’s as topical as ever.

Mostly I found writing the book a straightforward process; one of the few areas that presented me with any cause for concern was the indisputable fact that, at certain stages of the story, Jewish people figure prominently and probably disproportionately.

I was worried that tackling this issue would set me up for misrepresentation. It seems to dovetail with all the familiar anti-semitic tropes about - in quotes - ‘Jewish money men’. And indeed, the book has been quoted by far right websites and Arab newspapers to precisely that effect.

But ultimately I took the decision that if you are writing a serious political book for a grown-up readership, the only option is to tackle this question head on. Anything less would have been intellectually dishonest.

Historically it has manifestly been the case that a considerable proportion of Labour’s business support base - which has always been there, albeit obviously nowhere near as substantial has today - has been Jewish.

There is no need to resort to anti-semitic conspiracy theory to explain this. Large sections of the Jewish community - historically speaking, anyway - in both Britain and the US has tended towards the left. Moreover, many Jews who have succeeded in business been working class lads and lasses made good.

So even in the 1960s, one of Wilson’s closest associates was Lord Kagan, a Litvak émigré raincoat manufacturer to whom he gave a peerage. Kagan was subsequently jailed for corruption.

And of course, one of the Labour MPs of this period was a certain Robert Maxwell, a Czech Jew who went on to own Mirror Group Newspapers; in 1991, he met his death by jumping off his yacht, rather than face the music for defrauding MGN pension funds of over £400m.

1972 saw the formation of the Labour Finance and Industry Group, originally based on around a dozen Labour-supporting businessmen; it offered Wilson informal advice on industrial policy and continued to play an important role under Callaghan.

LFIG - which still operates today - was essentially an extension of the Kagan network. Leading lights include honorary life president Lord Haskel, another Litvak who is president of the Institute for Jewish Policy Research; Sir Sigmund Sternberg and Lord Gregson. Vice-chairman - their choice of designation - include the economist Stephen Gruneberg and Danny Bernstein of Monarch Airlines.

A fair few peers and knights, you’ll notice. Several of these men are known donors to the Labour Party; and it would be unsurprising if others gave money in the 1970s and 1980s, when donations did not have to be declared.

Move the story on now to the 1990s and the so-called blind trust system of fundraising that Labour then employed. The were essentially secret conduits that the rich could give money to, on the understanding that it would be passed on to leading Labour politicians. Beneficiaries of the system included John Smith, Margaret Beckett, Robin Cook and John Prescott.

But most media attention focused on a Sunday Times story from November 1996, outlining the workings of the Labour Leader’s Office Fund, which helped pick up the bills for Tony Blair.

Acting in the role of bagman was Michael Levy (pictured), an East End Jewish music business impresario who inflicted Alvin Stardust and Bad Manners on the nation’s youth back in my teenage years. After selling his record company for £10m, and was then devoting most of his time to fundraising for Jewish charities.

Following a meeting with Blair at a dinner party hosted by Gideon Meir, he began tapping the same milieu, effectively allowing the man who was by then very obviously Britain’s next prime minister to run a sizeable political operation independently of the Labour Party itself.

The Sunday Times named four prominent businessmen as backers of the Labour Leaders’ Office Fund. All four were Jewish, something that did not escape either the Jerusalem Post of the British National Party.

The backers included the late Sir Emmanuel Kaye, founder of industrial vehicles manufacturer Lansing Bagnall, previously known to have funded the Tories; Sir Trevor Chinn, who built up the Lex chain of garages and car showrooms, and who was knighted by Margaret Thatcher; printing millionaire Bob Gavron, now Lord Gavron of course and former husband of London deputy mayor Nicky Gavron; and Granada Television's Alex Bernstein. The Conservatives alleged that Maurice Hatter, chairman of IMO Precision Controls, also gave to the trust.

There are further Jewish connections. The trust's books were handled by London accountants Blick Rothenberg, which also looks after many major Israeli companies operating in Britain.

In other words, the financial support of a layer of individual wealthy Jews was instrumental in providing the independent means necessary for the Blair project to by-pass official Labour Party structures.

The subsequent results of this development included Levy - an avowed Zionist - becoming Britain’s de facto minister for the Middle East, and more recently, the appointment of Blair as Middle East envoy.

But it is crucial to stress that there is no need to resort to conspiracy theory to explain all this. As one source with close knowledge of Labour Party funding in the period told me:

The nexus is not sinister. It is probably the social relations that surround a particular reform synagogue in North London. If you crack that congregational network, you have probably cracked much of the cross-linkage. It may explain some of the anomalies in the fundraising and the unexpected sources of funds traditionally associated with the Tories.

Let’s also note that Labour is not the only beneficiary of Jewish financial support. Tory leader David Cameron’s Jewish supporters include casino boss Lord Steinberg; media executive Michael Green; Simon Wolfson, chief executive of the Next clothing retail chain; and Andrew Feldman, owner of the Jayroma clothing company. The latter is an old Oxford friend of Cameron, and reportedly does a job similar to the one Levy used to undertake for Blair.

So what are the political implications of all this? Are we seeing the emergence in Britain of something akin to the Jewish Lobby in the US, as recently detailed by the new book from Mearsheimer and Walt? Is Jewish support for British politicians influencing British foreign policy?

Sadly for the wingnut brigade, I don’t think there’s any concrete evidence for such assertions. British foreign policy is largely dictated from Washington, and would tend to be pro-Israeli anyway, irrespective of factors such as those outlined above.

Ultimately, I don’t think the issues raised are distinct from those raised by political donations in Britain generally. There is a suspicious correlation between writing six-figure cheques to a political party and receipt of an honour.

Although Lord Levy has ’emerged without stain on his character’ - as the euphemism has it - he might just as well have been flogging ermine off a barrow in Ridley Road market. It really was that blatant, and I do think the democratic left should push the demand for clean politics. After all, if we don’t do it, who on earth will?

If Gordon Brown’s timid continuation of the New Labour project has demonstrated anything, it has underlined just how far British politics has become deideologised.

No longer do the mainstream parties fight on the basis of competing visions for society, even to the limited extent that they did in the late 1980s, let alone the period of polarisation between Thatcherism and Bennism that immediately preceded the Kinnock years.

Instead, both New Labour and the Tories have cohered around a post-Thatcherite settlement, and are seeking to be elected on the basis of their greater managerial competence and the projection of the personalities of their respective leaderships in the mass media.

That such a state of affairs can have prevailed since at least 1994 does have some sobering implications for Britain’s political left. It implies that class politics can no longer be regarded as some sort of equilibrium state, or any kind of 'golden mean' to which politics inevitably reverts in the longer term.

Yet there are voices within the Labour Party who are unhappy with this situation, and not just unreconstructed Old Labourites, either. The clearest expression of this is support garnered by Jon Cruddas in his unsuccessful bid for the deputy leadership last year.

There is no organised Cruddasite current within Labourism; the potential figurehead seems almost anxious not to organise his base. But others appear willing to do it for him.

For instance, Neal Lawson - someone I remember as a swivel-eyed New Labour true believer in the mid-1990s - now seems to have founded the pressure group Compass expressly to act as the Church of John Cruddas of Latter Day Social Democrats.

Some of Lawson’s criticisms of New Labourism are on the money. The points he makes in his recent contribution to Comment is Free are all ones with which those of us left intellectually formed by Marxism would not demur. Lawson blasts Brown for his Blairism, and explains why that brand of politics is historically exhausted:

The reason Blair went was because his political project had ended in failure. A combination of the war, spin, sleaze, misguided public service and a refusal to face up to new challenges - like the growing loss of traditional Labour support - meant that the party had to change - not just the leadership but its direction.

Ultimately, Blairism will put the needs of the economy before those of society and therefore invert the principle of social democracy. Will Brown?

What Lawson doesn’t address, though, is how this political logjam can be broken. The entire history of the twentieth century indicates that established political consensuses can and sometimes do expire. But they tend to do so only rarely, and then almost always under the pressure of major historical events.

It is difficult to imagine what could bring about the sort of shift in the tectonic plates evidenced by the elections of, say, Attlee in 1945 or Thatcher in 1979.

Even if we were to witness an economic rerun of the 1930s - and one or two bourgeois commentators have speculated on just that possibility in recent weeks - the lack of a mass leftwing movement and the decline in elementary class consciousness would make the situation rather more likely to favour the nationalist right than the socialist left.

But the positive merit of politicians such as Cruddas and Lawson is their willing to reassert the basic point there is an alternative to neoliberalism. That is an important starting point.

In principle, I think that's an excellent idea. Incumbent Jack 'dunno, mate' Dromey's performance has clearly shown that he's not up to scratch.

First we had Dromey's insistence, in 2006, that he was unaware that New Labour had accepted millions of pounds of secret loans. Then came last year's revelation that his wife, Harriet Harman, had pocketed donations by proxy from businessman David Abrahams, again without his knowledge.

Clearly the missus was bang out of order on this one; one can only hope that any subsequent admonishment remained within the al Qaradawi stipulations governing such instances, which some white male leftists who should know better apparently feel marks the cleric out as a progressive.

McDonald is a member of Holborn & St Pancras CLP and the union Amicus/Unite, and stood for parliament against Ed Vaizey in Wantage in 2005. Here's what he has to say about himself in the press release that launched his campaign:

If elected, McDonald pledges to work with party management to provide a new standard of financial management. This will be done by instituting a new training regime, which will provide certification of qualified agents who will be allowed to run elections. There will also be new governance practices that empower the role of the NEC to scrutinise the party hierarchy.

Mark McDonald, candidate for Treasurer of the Labour party, said: "I am not part of the higher establishment of the Labour Party or indeed a union, I am an ordinary member who is passionate about the party and feels that there is a need for a new approach and I believe that I have the skills to achieve this.

I'm not formally endorsing the guy until I find out more about his politics. But short of him turning out to be a Kalashnikov-wielding paedophile diabolist, I probably will eventually. He seems a decent enough soft leftish sort. See what you think of him by clicking this link.

The post can apparently be contested every other year at Labour Party conference, with unions having a 50% card vote, so Dromey will obviously be reselected. But it would be nice to see a credible challenger record a decent showing.

Can any rulebook merchants out there enlighten us as to how ordinary Labour Party members can mandate delegates on this one?

If not positive discrimination, then what? An internal Labour Party report on increasing black representation in parliament – written by Simon Woolley of Operation Black Vote – is recommending that current law be changed to allow all black shortlists for parliamentary selections.

This is a proposal I am instinctively uneasy with, largely because I can remember the way positive discrimination worked in local government and the voluntary sector in the 1980s, before being subsequently outlawed.

In particular, I recall watching one young Asian woman – a pleasant enough human being, as it goes, who co-habbed with a pal of mine for a while – enjoy a string of rapid promotions to jobs that were on any fair judgement beyond her capabilities, until she predictably came rather spectacularly unstuck.

As the privately-educated daughter of an airline pilot, this was scarcely somebody forced to claw her way up from an underprivileged origins. Yet to all appearances, she was fast tracked over considerably brighter white male graduates from working class backgrounds; in effect, her gender and ethnicity became additional middle class advantages. Workplace resentment was certainly among the consequences.

OK, that’s just one example, and it is always wrong to generalise from the particular. But if there is a case that the positive discrimination as it was practiced a quarter of a century ago benefited ordinary black people rather than provide a further leg-up for a layer of careerists, let’s just say that I need to hear somebody make it.

Yet it remains true that blacks and Asians make up 7% of the population but only 2% of MPs, and on current trends, it would take 75 years for Britain’s ethnic make-up fairly to be represented at Westminster. Racism almost certainly has to be among the reasons for this.

The report concludes that all-black shortlists in four to eight constituencies, for the next four elections, should erode the gap in two decades. That is an aim to which Labour should certainly aspire.

Provided that the selections are carried out fairly, with all shades of Labour Party opinion able to put forward nominations, I am minded to give the idea critical support, even if the results are likely to prove a political disappointment.

But what I do know is that I cannot shove £4,000 of my partner’s taxi bills through on my expense account; if I were caught doing that, it would constitute clear grounds for instant dismissal.

Like most of us, I don’t get a ‘second home allowance’, either; my salary barely stretches to making the payments on my one and only gaff.

It is unclear if Martin has technically done anything wrong in pocketing the money from such a generous scheme for a property on which there no mortgage; perhaps Peter Mandelson or Tessa Jowell - given their special expertise in the field of how to finance home purchase the New Labour way - could advise?

But whatever the rulebook says, this action is morally equivalent to housing benefit fraud, without the ability to claim poverty as a mitigating circumstance.

Such are Mr Speaker’s misdemeanours that there are increasing calls for him to be sacked. Of course, most of the moral outrage that has been gotten up – some of it clearly on the basis of snobbery towards the man that public school-educated Daily Mail columnist Quentin Letts derides as ‘Gorbals Mick’ - is entirely synthetic.

Standards in public life have fallen a long way since the years of Tory sleaze in the early 1990s, and only deteriorated further during the tenure of Tony ‘whiter than white’ Blair and Gordon Brown. In that sense, Martin presumably feels that he isn’t doing anything that everybody else isn’t doing; the tragedy is, he is probably right.

At least he's not trousering brown paper envelopes stuffed full of cash from Mohamed al Fayed, as did certain MPs from the party favoured by Mr Letts.

Time was when the left was well aware of the dangers of people seeking to use elected office for their own financial gain, and raised the demand that MPs should be paid no more than the average wage of their constituents. The return of the slogan ‘a workers’ MP on a workers’ wage’ is long overdue.

Tribune reports that there is now a shortlist of three, and that the job is likely to go to a City boy by the name of David Pitt-Watson (pictured), who has the all important backing of Gordon Brown.

Pitt-Watson's double-barrelled name will ring a bell with New Labour watchers. Recall that in late 1997, he stood down as the head of the consultancy arm of Deloitte Touche - a job that paid over £300,000 - to take the finance director job on a salary of £38,500.

His first move in the post was to institute a drastic cost-cutting package. But after less than two years in the post, he upped sticks to become a director of fund manager Hermes.

Since leaving Labour's employ, Pitt-Watson has even become a writer of sorts, co-authoring a book called 'The New Capitalists', published by Harvard Business School Press. Its main argument is a rehash of the idea that 'the actual owners of the world's corporate giants are no longer a few wealthy families, but the vast majority of working people'. All you whining Trots out there should forget about paper sales and contribute more to your occupational pension scheme instead.

You can read a summary of his ideas - including a ten point 'capitalist manifesto' - here. But have a look at point eight; he has obviously decided to ignore his own advice. The House of Lords presumably beckons.

‘Rather than questioning whether huge salaries are morally justified, we should celebrate the fact that people can be enormously successful in this country,’ he will tell a meeting of the pressure group Progress.

‘Rather than placing a cap on that success, we should be questioning why it is not available to more people. Our overarching goal that no one should get left behind must not become translated into a stultifying sense that no one should be allowed to get ahead.

‘I believe a key challenge for New Labour over the coming years is to recognise that, far from strengthening social justice, a version of equality that only gives you the opportunity to climb so far, actually subverts the values we should be representing.

‘Instead, any progressive party worth its name must enthusiastically advocate empowering people to climb without limits, free from any barrier holding them back.’

OK John, I’m convinced. I demand that the highest paid executive at HSBC – and the bank declines to reveal his name – should be paid even more than the £9.9m earned last year. The bloody Trotskyites are unfairly stopping him from getting ahead.

A scanty £14.4m in salary and bonus is simply not enough for a man of the calibre of RAB Capital’s Philip Richards. To hold back the man trying to blackmail the government over Northern Rock would indeed represent clear subversion of everything for which progressives ought to stand.

I insist – nay, demand! - that Reckitt Benckiser immediately grant chief executive Bart Becht a generous increase on his stultifying £22m wedge. This is obviously the politics of class envy, Old Labourism of the most toxic kind. Thank goodness we have Hutton to reinterpret basic democratic socialism in the language of today.

Then again, just before the Labour Party members among us joyously raise our glasses to toast the men – and perhaps the handful of women – who selflessly do so much to enhance social cohesion by pulling down eight-figure salaries, perhaps we ought to think through the logical consistency of what Hutton is saying.

Nobody – certainly not any government of the last three decades – has done anything whatsoever to restrict these people. To get rich has been glorious; Deng Xiaoping would certainly have approved.

There are no legal limits whatsoever on executive pay; some bosses earn more than their companies are worth. That leaves moral opprobrium as the last remaining sanction; it is one that is widely ignored.

Top executives earn more not just than the prime minister, but than the entire cabinet put together. Yet there is no objective evidence that corporate performance is enhanced as a result. This is wholesale looting, without any commercial, let alone moral, justification.

In a Britain where people are empowered to climb without limits, some 13m people - representing 22% of the population - were living in poverty as of 2007. Some of us would prefer to see a Labour government that regarded that as a key challenge, and stopped acting like fawning High School cheerleaders with an embarrassing crush on the super-rich.

I suspect that, if ever implemented, Lord Goldsmith’s wheeze of getting the same age group to swear undying loyalty to Her Maj would enjoy no higher a statistical success rate. That’s what happens when you try to force, like, teenagers to, like, promise stuff, innit blood.

Indeed, if it wasn’t for the likelihood that this patently madcap plan is simply some spindoctor’s idea of today’s headline-grabber, I’d even aver that the suggestion is slightly sinister.

The last country I can think of that forced any given group of its citizens to pledge fealty to the head of state was, well, Germany after 1933. Obviously that is not a parallel that can sensibly be pushed, but the idea of trying to decree by government diktat the basic political values to which young people should adhere is surely creepy. What sanctions are contemplated for those who subsequently decide to diss the monarchy?

It was in late teens that I became a conscious republican - in the specifically English rather than Irish or US sense of the word – and I have remained a conscious republican all my adult life. In fact, this was among the first definite political stances I ever took, predating even my conversion to socialism.

Considering I have never knowingly met a royal, I am surprised just how deep and personal is the bitterness, animosity, enmity, spleen and pure class-based contempt I feel towards this hereditary caste of obviously somewhat thick state-supported billionaire non-entities.

Were I ever to be made to swear any oath towards them, I would consider it no more morally binding then whatever it was that Client Nine promised the chick from Emporers Club VIP.

Back when I was a snotty young punk rocker, pogoing away to the Sex Pistols’ anti-jubilee anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ – still my favourite 45 of all time, I should add - I had never heard of Tom Paine. But this man summarised the basic ethos of republicanism even more eloquently than John Lydon. Two centuries later, it is impossible to improve on Paine’s reasoning:

‘The idea of hereditary legislators is as inconsistent as that of hereditary judges, or hereditary juries; and as absurd as an hereditary mathematician, or an hereditary wise man; as absurd as an hereditary poet laureate.’

Quite. If demonstration be needed that Britain is a long way from being a meritocracy, the royal family certainly provides it in full. Their very existence – as an institution rather than as individuals, I should stress - is an insult to my democratic and egalitarian beliefs. I only hope that I live long enough to see this country become the republic I wish it had become decades ago.

New Labour’s sequel started with last year’s donations-by-proxy revelations, a few fluffed PMQs, and an election that never was. It could quite easily continue with Boris Johnson getting the keys to City Hall on May 1.

The man is 12% ahead in the polls, remember; if one were to combine the guy’s nickname with American slang for achieving political momentum, one could even say that BoJo has Big Mo.

As a Labour supporter, I hope that Livingstone - clearly on the backfoot after Jaspergate - can somehow still come through; fortunately, the possibility of Johnson saying something truly, wonderfully, monumentally stupid and seeing his entire campaign blow up in his over-fed Old Etonian face can never be ruled out.

C’mon Boris, just one more racist outburst. Please. You know you want to. But slip-ups aside, the hard-headed assessment has to be that the race is currently de Pfeffel’s to lose rather than Ken’s to win.

Let’s take a little bit of public sector industrial action over the summer, in entirely justified protest against the public sector pay cap, as read. The trouble is, a handful of sporadic 48-hour token stoppages - the most the Unison and PCS leaderships are likely to organise - are unlikely to extract a single extra penny from the Treasury, as Prentis and Serwotka surely know.

But the press will hype them up as two-day general strikes, marking the return of the winter of discontent. David Cameron will relentlessly recycle standard seventies union-bashing memes like so many classic punk rock guitar riffs.

Meanwhile, the economy is not going to get any better. Many commentators believe we now face the worst slump since world war two. Let’s say that over the next 18 months or so, the length of Britain’s dole queue doubles, while 30-40% gets knocked off house prices.

That takes us up to the autumn 2009, when - all other things being equal - Gordon Brown might be expected to call a general election. He has the option of holding on until 2010, of course. But if he chose to do so, the Tory taunts of ‘Bottler Brown’ would ring ever louder.

It is famously pointless to make concrete political predictions for two years’ time. But to remark that the prognosis does not appear outstanding would be entirely consistent with the British penchant for understatement.

A case in point is health minister Ivan Lewis’s piece on Labour’s electoral prospects, originally penned for Progress magazine before being picked up by the News of the World, not usually considered the left-leaning Hampstead intellectual’s Sunday read of choice. You can read it here.

Lewis - pictured - doesn’t promise to fight, fight and fight again to save the party he loves. He does not seek to persuade us that Labour is a crusade or it is nothing. Instead, we are treated to an inane expanse of buzzword boilerplate.

Remember how the Pornsec in Big Brother’s Fiction Department ingeniously creates newly-minted erotic novels by chopping up old plots and feeding them into a literary kaleidoscope? New Labour MPs must surely employ a similar device to recycle the same half a dozen speeches in endless combination. Sadly, the resultant output is not anywhere near as stimulating. Or maybe I am being unfair; being able to write this badly is actually kind of impressive, in its own way.

Mr Lewis informs us that the task facing Labour activists is to ‘show we are on the side of ordinary people’. As opposed to what, exactly? Issuing leaflets to inform the public that Labour regards them as objects of scorn, contempt and ridicule, and farts in their general direction?

In a democracy, claiming to be ‘on the side of the little guy’ must be what they teach ‘em in lesson number one at politico school. All politicians mouth this platitude. All the time.

Yes, make no mistake about it. Lewis wants Labour to appeal to ‘the mainstream majority who play by the rules’ and who ‘want reassurance that we are still on their side’. Labour favours ‘empowered citizens and communities’ and an ‘active state’.

Such rhetoric is no longer even party-specific; barring a few inveterate hard right anti-statist whackjobs, no Conservative MP would claim anything different about the Tories.

Media interest in what Lewis has to say has tended to focus on the small handful of dog-whistley soundbites that can be extracted from this dross. These are couched, quite oddly for a New Labourite, in rightwing Old Labour terms.

On the one hand, there is – in the name of ‘fairness’, you understand – a call for a spot of wealth redistribution. On the other, again in the name of fairness, there is a demand to lock up more baddies, especially darkie baddies.

It is only when you reach the final three paragraphs that you realise the entire article boils down to an attack on Brown for lacking the ostensibly broad appeal of Blair. Subtext: Labour are 13 percentage points behind the Conservatives in the polls, and those of us in marginal constituencies are starting to panic.

All of this could have been fully stated in two or three paragraphs, with no loss of meaning. But in the culture that has reigned over New Labour since 1994, simply saying what you mean, in unconvoluted plain English, is no longer a possibility open to the payroll vote, or even modestly aspirational backbenchers. Political debate is all the worse for it.

Inside the luxury vehicle, girlie mag and tabloid billionaire Richard Desmond - pictured - was readying himself for another day of the tit ‘n’ bum pic and Diana conspiracy theory publishing activities that have made him such a wealthy man.

Just another day at the office for the man who once famously proclaimed:

We’re all socialists. We all came from humble beginnings. We’re not Lord Rothermere, we’re sitting here. We’ve done alright.

By way of full disclosure, the first cheque I ever got for writing came from Desmond, when his musicians’ magazine Beat Instrumental paid me £50 for a review of an acoustic guitar back in 1988.

But good old BI – haven't seen it in years, surely it can’t still be going? – was not how the guy made his pile. That came from subsequent business ventures, including such doubtlessly wholesome publications as The Very Best of Mega-Boobs and Spunk Loving Sluts, and specialist interest websites featuring 78-year-old women with their kit off.

All of this brings me to one incident in the history of New Labour that I fear has been unjustly forgotten, and that is Desmond’s £100,000 to the Labour Party in 2000.

This was the year that Desmond launched his bid for Express Newspapers. Detractors openly questioned whether a pornographer was a fit person to own large circulation national newspapers.

After all, there was a precedent. In 1990, another porn baron, David Sullivan, tried to buy Bristol United Press, a sizeable regional newspaper publisher. The move was blocked on public interest grounds. Surely the Competition Commission would step in once again?

Yet within ten minutes of finalising the Express deal on 22 November 2000, Desmond was telephoned by Downing Street and invited to meet Tony Blair; the two men got together around Christmas time.

It was around this time – exact details have never been made public – that Desmond offered Labour free advertising in the Express titles. Labour asked for cash instead, promising to spend it on advertising.

Now here’s a coincidence. In February 2001, secretary of state for trade and industry Stephen Byers announced that he had decided not to refer Desmond’s takeover to the Competition Commission.

Within a week of the ruling, Desmond’s porno publishing vehicle Northern & Shell wrote a £100,000 cheque to New Labour, only days before new regulations on the disclosure of political donations came into force. Right. So nothing anybody wanted to keep hidden there, then.

The gift therefore remained secret until May 2002, when a disgruntled former employee suspected of leaking the news.

Both Express titles backed Labour in the 2005 general election, while the party made good on its word and effectively refunded the dosh by taking out adverts. Everyone was happy, and we all like a story with a happy ending.

The trouble is, the staff aren’t happy, as I am often told by a couple of friends who work there. There has been round after round of redundancies, and any pretence of serious journalism has been dropped in favour of any old rubbish ripped off from the internet. Officially, the NUJ action is over pay. But it might just as well be about pervasive demoralisation.

I know that all is fair in love, war and political fundraising, but Desmond’s donation was one that New Labour really should have had the good taste to turn down. I mean, isn’t it somewhat icky to accept cheques that stick together like that?

Indeed, for a man widely read in political history, his humiliation will be greatly compounded by the telling comparison the newspaper has chosen to draw:

But the biggest blow was delivered in the soundings on Brown's personal ratings -- they have fallen from plus 48 last August to minus 37.

"The collapse is the most dramatic of any modern-day prime minister, worse even than Neville Chamberlain who in 1940 dropped from plus 21 to minus 27 after Hitler's invasion of Norway," the paper said.

Moreover, Brown is said to be less trusted than any other major western European leader in terms of his ability to handle what is now looking like the worst financial crisis since world war two:

[Some] 68 percent of Britons said they were "not confident at all" in the ability of the government to steer the country safely through tough times.

In contrast, voter confidence in their government's abilities to ride out the financial crisis was 52 percent in Germany, 51 percent in the United States, 50 percent in France, 43 percent in Italy and 36 percent in Spain.

That, I think, is probably more a reflection of his unpopularity than his understanding of economic theory. Brown has read a few economics textbooks in his time and certainly knows what to do; whether or not he will do it is another matter.

Of course, it would once have been inconceivable for Labour support to drop this low. The party had a mass base, built on an individual membership of over a million, with real roots throughout working class communities.

But in little more than a decade, an irreducible bedrock vote that took generations to achieve was cheaply frittered away in the name of short-term electoral expediency. It can never now be won back. Well done, guys.

UPDATE: It seems that I am wrong on a point of fact. By 1994, John Major was picking up poll ratings even worse than those secured by Maggie in 1981. But that’s not going to come as any comfort for Gordon, who manages to be more unpopular still ...

This is a man who - throughout the decade-long sulk he maintained waiting for a job he always assumed was somehow his by right - seemed perpetually eager to instigate internal disaffection.

But, in line with the ‘Bottler Brown’ stereotype, he somehow never followed through. The pattern can be seen in the 2004 top up fees votes and the 2006 Round Robin fiasco, for instance. Perhaps the intention was always to wound rather than to kill.

Über-Blairites have certainly not forgotten all this. Hell hath no fury like a failed home secretary scorned, as the current orientation of Charles Clarke underlines. Speculation of a stalking horse candidacy from supporters of the King Over the Water persists.

For a strong and confident prime minister, sporadic sniper fire from yesterday’s men would matter little. But with a large scale backbench rebellion in the offing over the 10p tax band issue, the atmosphere is all of a sudden apocalyptic.

Jackie Ashley, writing in the Guardian this morning, argues that Brown could be toast by next week. The left, she believes, is actively seeking a contest:

Last week I did a television interview with John McDonnell, the leftwing MP who tried to challenge Brown first time round. He told me that "We are very close to the edge", and added: "I would like a leadership election now ... We should have the leadership election we never had. Let's ask Gordon Brown, what do you really stand for? Let the Blairites put up their candidate ... Let's have a contest now and clear the air." When I asked him whether he would stand, he unhesitatingly said yes.

This, avers Ms Ashley, is downright foolhardy in the run up to the local government and London elections on May 1:

[D]isaster is looming and the real parliamentarians have carefully to weigh in the balance what they now do, and ask how much likelier it will make a Tory landslide a year hence.

There are two problems with this line of reasoning. First, the 10p tax band is – or at least should be – a non-negotiable issue for anyone with authentic Labour values. Progressive MPs from across the party should back the Field amendment on principle; it is the government that must back down.

Second, the ‘it only plays into the Conservatives’ hands’ line amounts to giving the Labour leadership permanent carte blanche. In opposition, activists are repeatedly told, ‘nothing must be done to risk victory at the next election’. Once Labour is in office, the cry changes to ‘nothing must be done to disrupt the early days of Labour in power’. The cycle culminates in ‘nothing must be done to risk victory at next election’.

This is not to argue that the left should actively seek the immediate ouster of Brown, regardless of the consequences. Tactically, such a development would do little to help our cause right now.

Don’t forget, McDonnell did not get onto the leadership ballot paper last time because he could not find enough MPs to nominate him. There is little to indicate he would have any greater support at Westminster this time round.

Nor are any of the likely replacements for Brown – who reportedly include David Miliband, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls - of any redder hue.

It is not as if the Labour left is in a position to shape developments, anyway. All we can do is watch them as they unfold.

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.

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.

If 2007 had not seen the grotesque chaos of a Labour government – a Labour government – bringing in a budget that made over five million of Britain’s poorest taxpayers even poorer, 2008 would not have seen it reduced to this embarrassing resort to make it up as you go along fiscal policy.

Normally a chancellor that puts a windfall £120 into the pockets of the majority of British adults could at least expect some favourable headlines as a result. But the U-turn hasn’t even generated that.

The fiasco of the last few weeks should at least force reconsideration of such obvious questions as what the taxation system is all about. Much as we all groan when we open our payslips each months and look at the size of the chunk that goes to the Treasury, nobody who believes that there is such a thing as society can object to taxation on principle.

What is important is the way that the money is raised and on what it is spent. Is it socially just to make pensioners pay VAT on fuel so that Britain can have nuclear weapons it doesn’t need, for instance? And would it be wrong to claw back some of tax breaks both rich individuals and corporations have enjoyed under successive governments since 1979 in order properly to fund health, education and infrastructure?

After all, the top rate of income tax during the period of high Thatcherism 1979-88 was 63%. Under New Labour, it remains at 40%.The received wisdom is that the very suggestion that the telephone number salary brigade might part with a little more of their generous long term incentive plan-inflated remuneration is electoral suicide. In recent years, only the Lib Dems have flirted with the notion, and even they have now dropped the idea.

It’s not that all that many people really are on six figure salaries, we are repeatedly told. The thing is, lots of voter aspire to be on six figure salaries. But how realistic is this aspiration? Despite a quick Google, I haven’t been able to come up with the stats.

But I seem to remember that only around one in ten make it into the higher rate tax band, which kicks in at just over £40,000, so presumably only one or two percent of the population ever reach a wedge that has five noughts on the end of it.

It shouldn’t be politically impossible to sell a tax hike for top earners by stressing just how few people would be hit, especially if it was accompanied by tax cuts for professionals and skilled workers in unexceptional jobs who are currently being taxed at the same rate as billionaires.

Nor should highly profitable companies get off the hook. News International, for instance, has paid no net corporation tax in this country for more than a decade, despite profits topping £300m.

Big companies and their highly-paid executives do not live on another planet. It is not acceptable for them to pay little or nothing to the Treasury, leeching off the taxes paid by you and me while their representatives dish out homiletics about the scandal of Gallagher family Britain.

We build much of our society directly around the needs of business, from the education system to infrastructure spending to the state subsidies for low pay known as Working Tax Credits. So it is only right that the fortunate properly contribute to the arrangements that enable them to accumulate and hold onto their wealth.

And here’s the best bit, Alistair; they haven’t got nearly as many votes as those on the bottom of the pile. Even a reconstructed bearded Trot should know that.

Is that because – as some commentators have suggested – such themes are inappropriate in a country that thinks it’s so clever and classless and free? Hardly. Social mobility in Britain is in decline; class divisions are not only still with us, but actually hardening.

The alternative hypothesis is that a Labour Party in which the privately educated are over-represented among the higher echelons has a slight credibility problem in trying to pull this sort of stuff off anymore. After 14 years of consistent orientation away from the labour movement, it’s just that little bit too late to be playing the working class hero card, guys.

And what is fielding the offspring of the former MP if not a nod to the hereditary principle, anyway? A horny-handed daughter of toil Tamsin Dunwoody-Kneafsey most certainly is not.

These days, most mainstream party candidates are, one way or another, drawn exclusively from the priviligentsia; even the nouveau riche are more likely to be regarded as cash cows for academy schools, political donations and ‘loans’ than potential elected representatives.

Inter-class cross dressing reached its apex between 1997 and 2001, a period in which the Labour Party was led by a former pupil from Scotland’s leading public school while the Tories were headed by a man educated at a comp in Rotherham. Granted, the Old Etonians have since regained their rightful place within Conservatism, but you’ll doubtless get my drift.

Yet somehow those in charge of Labour’s by-election efforts in Nantwich have talked young supporters - pictured - into dressing up in top hat and tails, in a bid to brand Conservative candidate Edward Timpson a ‘Tory Toff’. It’s not even as if the super-rich dress like that any more.

Such behaviour is just embarrassing, even for those on the hard left who still assert the central salience of class to political understanding. This is not something that would be tried in a southern constituency; instead, some New Labour idiot has decided to patronise northern working class voters, effectively suggesting that they cannot make their minds up on the policy issues and asking them to choose an MP on the basis of crude caricature instead.

New Labour might just as well have gone the whole nine yards and got the hapless Dunwoody woman to don a flat cap and lead a whippet around throughout the campaign, while stressing her leisure time pursuits of pigeon fancying and growing marrows at every available press conference.

Or perhaps got her to pose wearing a shell suit while clutching a 24 pack of Royals instead, in a bid to move with the times. They have been touting her as a 'single mum of five', after all.

Unsurprisingly, the latest opinion polls are predicting a 14% swing to the Tories in a constituency in which the core has been solidly Labour since world war two. The moral is simple; those who have got no idea what class politics is all about should leave class politics well enough alone.

It seems that an obscure New Labour speechwriter – hyped up as ‘a key ally of Tony Blair’, in a failed attempt to sex up the copy - has attacked Gordon Brown in a most unoriginal manner in a small circulation pointy-head magazine.

A man called Phil Collins - not the slaphead who played drums in Genesis; that would at least have novelty value - has penned a piece for Prospect, arguing that ‘Labour’s faith in central government draws from the deep, poisoned well of its Fabian tradition … The only hope for the party is to excavate its liberal treasure.’

Collins’ ‘intervention’ is said to be ‘significant’ because after a stint writing speeches for Blair, he is now employed by work and pensions secretary James Purnell. He has also been sniffing around safe Labour seats. So what? Anything he writes remains essentially the private opinion of a glorified bag carrier.

But let me run his basic premise past you once again, in case you missed the full subtlety of the proposition. Mr Collins is here insisting that central governments are not supposed to have faith in … central government. Doesn’t that kind of go with the gig?

After all, central banks necessarily believe in central banking, central casting directors are most likely of the opinion that central casting has a vital role to play in today’s movie industry, and Birmingham central mosque would presumably enjoin Birmingham’s Muslim community to worship at Birmingham central mosque.

Granted, there is plenty to criticise in the Fabian tradition, not least its explicit advocacy of imperialism. But this is not the aspect of Fabianism Mr Collins seems to dislike. His target is rather Fabian advocacy of state action to deliver socialised healthcare, which he considers to be unaffordable:

The NHS can only survive through the use of liberal principles. The range of medical treatment is too large, the population too old and their expectations too great for the NHS simply to carry on as it is. Control over funding and treatment has to pass from the professional to the individual ...

Yeah right, Phil. I mean, what do all those poncy doctors with their fancy-schmancy medical qualifications know about effective treatment? If some dippy middle class cow wants to tackle her terminal cancer with aromatherapy, who is the nanny state to second guess such desires? If this is the policy output of New Labour’s finest, we are all pretty much stuffed.
And there’s more:

The key dividing line in politics is no longer between left and right but, increasingly, between liberal and authoritarian.

If that soundbite sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a straight lift from Sir Menzies Campbell’s leader’s speech to the Lib-Dem conference last year, in which he insisted that ‘the great divisions are no longer between left and right but between liberal and authoritarian’. Naughty boy, Phil. Talk about excavating liberal treasure, eh?

For Collins, New Labour under Brown too often finds itself on the wrong side of this divide. Writing as someone who sees no contradiction in being both a leftist and a libertarian, I happen to agree.

But will Collins – if only from consistency – now be calling for the introduction of ID cards to be scrapped, or for the government to drop proposals for internment without trial for 42 days? I very much doubt it.

Rarely can such mediocre ultra-Blairite tosh have enjoyed such a high profile in what remains the newspaper of choice for many Labour activists. I’m almost looking forward to reading the full length version of this man’s ramblings, if only on the basis that it will probably be so bad it’s good.

Over the next five weeks, Labour will need to come up with around £7.45m to pay off the loans from banks and wealthy businessmen secured by Lord Levy to pay for the 2005 general election, or face insolvency.

If that happened, Gordon Brown and the rest of the National Executive Committee would find themselves individually and severally liable for all debts.

Political parties are not businesses, of course. But given New Labour’s propensity to measure all things by business yardsticks, a performance like that hardly qualifies as an entrepreneurial success story.

In reality, it is hardly likely that Britain’s governing party will be allowed collapse. It may be that a private sector rescue package is being lined up even as I write.

Perhaps a football club-style sponsorship deal can be worked out, even if that involves a spot of rebranding; the Carling Black Label Labour Party has a certain ring to it, with Brown in future referring to himself as the Barclays Premier premier. Sorry, only trying to be helpful.

But it is rather more likely that the unions will step in. The real question is how far they will seek a policy payback. The Daily Telegraph reverts to type this morning, and predicts that the TUC is about to order a latter day re-run of the bolshevization of the Comintern:

Britain’s biggest unions are to demand a ‘lurch to the Left’ from Gordon Brown as their price for rescuing Labour from bankruptcy. The main unions, including Unite, the GMB and Unison, are drawing up secret ‘shopping lists’. Their push for new rights for workers and equal pay for women comes as Labour’s financial state has left it at the mercy of its traditional paymasters …

Among a string of demands that the unions will table at the July National Policy Forum are that rules on balloting for industrial action be changed, that companies are legally obliged to carry out ‘equal pay audits’ and that new rules are introduced to ensure employees in companies subject to private equity takeovers have their rights protected.

Mmmmm. Not quite nationalise the top 200 monopolies, is it? On a more sober assessment, arguing that employees should be treated decently in the workplace is not so much a lurch to the left as a lurch to doing what trade unions exist to do.

And after all, to use a phrase coined by one-time leftist union official Baron Sawyer prior to the lobotomy that is seemingly a prerequisite for elevation to the House of Lords, ‘no say, no pay’.

Union leaders will also be mindful of the potential difficulties in convincing activists, many of whom are not Labour supporters, of the case for spending political funds on a transparent bail-out, and for a party likely to lose the next general election at that. Unison, the Communications Workers Union and GMB all face disaffiliation motions at conferences next month.

My guess is that Labour will offer just enough to give the bureaucrats something to take back to the membership to sell the deal, pocket the cash, and then carry on in its own sweet way.

Meanwhile, we now know once and for all what motivated the succession of businessmen who have written seven-figure cheques to New Labour over the past decade. Forget all the protestations about sincere conversion to Blair-style social democracy lite; they really did just want passports, peerages and the right to advertise cigarettes on the side of formula one racing cars after all.

Until seven years ago, large scale donations were laughably recorded in political party accounts simply as ‘£5,000 plus’. And Robinson gave ‘£5,000 plus’ in 1997, 1998, 1999 and 2000. That might equate to £5,001 for each of the years concerned; on the other hand, we could be talking £50,001 or more. It's a little secret, just the Robinsons' affair.

But more important is the question of why he wrote those cheques, and why he has decided to stop writing them now.

This, remember, is the man who starred in a Labour party political broadcast just before the 1997 general election, grotesquely boasting of how he had backed the Tories throughout the years in which Thatcher crushed the miners’ strike and pushed through the poll tax.

‘I have always voted Conservative. I’ve been a Conservative voter all my life,’ he revealed. Now he had become a Blairite. Gee thanks, Gerry. Great to have you on board!

Who can doubt that the conversion of the guy who was then just a plain mister was sincere? But businessmen usually expect a return on their political investments, just as they do with any other kind of investments.

So when that deal – worth millions of pounds - to provide catering at the Millennium Dome coincidentally went to one of Robinson’s companies, maybe he felt that all those ‘£5,000 plus’ outlays had been well worthwhile. That job as head of the Arts Council – not to mention the knighthood – won’t have gone amiss either.

Now it looks like there isn’t going to be any money any more. All those Conservative-supporting businessmen who switched to New Labour once it was clear that Blair would win the next election are suddenly no longer interested now it is likely that Cameron will soon be appointing the quangocrats and drawing up the honours lists instead.

The guess has to be that criticisms of the prime minister’s leadership style would maybe not be quite so strident if only he were doing well in the polls.

Instead, New Labour is reduced to rescheduling its debt, in much the manner of a third world nation that has blown all the soft loans on stretch limos, call girls and an unnecessary presidential palace or two.

But where the International Monetary Fund would at least have the wit to insist on a structural adjustment program, the terms and conditions asked for by leading unions are lenient indeed.

This is unlikely to be enough to secure a recovery in Labour’s political fortunes. To top the humiliation of finishing behind the British National Party in Henley last week, there is even talk that the Scottish National Party will overturn its 13,507 majority to take Glasgow East in an impending by-election. No wonder that the Sir Gerrys of this world want out.

The shocking truth – and I write this as a Labour Party member - is that all the unions are doing is keeping the government on life support. The electorate are about to pull the plug.

The basic idea here was that the politics of Thatcherism could be boiled down to a single sentence, such as ‘the free economy and the strong state’, or even a pithy two-word designation such as ‘authoritarian populism’.

Now try this for an intellectual exercise; can you encapsulate what Gordon Brown is supposedly all about, in seven words or less? Difficult, eh?

Unfashionable as it is to discuss such foreign nonsense as ideology in a British political context, an inability to devise a straightforward bullet point actually does matter, if only because it makes it harder for the spin-doctoring classes to get the USP over to the public.

I’m not aware of any pollsters having asked a cross-section of the electorate what policies automatically come to mind when they hear the name of the present occupant of Number Ten. But I suspect that one little-credited reason for the prime minister’s woes right now is that most voters probably couldn’t come up with an answer.

Part of the Great Clunking Fist’s present predicament is his seeming inability to distil anything resembling a distinctive and coherent set of ideas of his own. This is curious, when you consider the man's undoubted intellectual ability.

Perhaps it is simply too difficult to pull off such a trick, given the paradox that while Brown was one of the co-architects of New Labourism after 1994, for presentational reasons he has to present himself as the negation of Blairism on the basis of Blairism itself. But Blairism minus the ‘pretty straight guy’ routine is not proving much of a vote winner.

Such ideological passivity gifts the opposition the chance to set the agenda. Cameron and the team around him may not be doing particularly well, but at least are making efforts in this direction.

Once Gordon Brown is gone - perhaps by palace coup over the summer, perhaps following ejection by the electorate in 2010, even perhaps in some manner not yet foreseen - we may have very little by which to remember him.

I’ve always argued that the main reason New Labour won the last three elections was not so much widespread enthusiasm for Blairism as the invincible inbuilt advantage it enjoyed simply by not being the Tories.

The problem is, with memories of Margaret Thatcher and Black Wednesday both fading fast in the public mind, the NBTT strategy is no longer the banker it has been for more than a decade.

This point was underlined to me recently while chatting with a bright 23-year-old guy - black, probably lower middle class - over breakfast. Given that the scene of the meal was a Cambridge University weekend school in modern philosophy, that’s ‘bright’ as in pretty bloody clever.

At first, the small talk centred on a spot of mutual joshing over the age gap, but soon gravitated towards the political events of the late eighties, the period in which Edward was born.

Maybe he was just being polite, but he seemed interested enough to hear about the campaigns against the poll tax and the Criminal Justice Bill. Indeed, the idea that a government seriously tried to ban house music he found uproariously amusing. Come to think of it, that was probably one of their better ideas ...

But, as I immediately reflected, the conversation must have been the equivalent of listening to some old git rambling on about the era of Macmillan and Douglas-Hume would have been to me back in 1983.

Now, I would rather play six successive rounds of Russian roulette with the same revolver than ever vote Conservative. I deeply and viscerally loathe the Tories with the same passion I did when I was a long-term unemployed youth, and I suspect that nothing could ever change that.

But having recently attended the funeral of a near contemporary for the first time, I am well aware that my generation is now firmly middle-aged.

People like Edward can have only the haziest memories of Thatcherism and what it represented. Within months, there will be people on the electoral role who were not even born during the Thatcher’s time in office.

I have heard it said that many young adults hated Blair as much as my friends and I hated Thatcher. I don’t really get that sense, to be honest. While the Iraq war and being landed with tens of thousands of pounds of debts after three years in a second rate university won’t have endeared them to New Labour, the intensity is thankfully lacking.

Depoliticisation is more common than activism, and if people are not radicals in their teens and early twenties, they almost certainly never will be radicals.

But I do know that some of my younger workmates backed Boris Johnson in the London elections, so presumably admitting to voting Tory is no longer so uncool as to automatically preclude getting a result on a first date.

Labour must either come up with meaningful policies that appeal to the youth vote, or watch them either abstain or turn to Cameron simply because ‘the other lot’ at least represent change. No amount of celebrity endorsements is going to counter that.

But given that Gordon Brown was once one of the best sympathetic chroniclers of radical Glasgow in the early part of the last century, the prime minister certainly realises the symbolic importance of Glasgow East.

A by-election to be held there in a fortnight’s time sees Labour at risk of losing a constituency it has held uninterruptedly since 1922. Forget the forgone conclusion sideshow in Haltemprice & Howden today; this is the contest that counts.

Labour’s majority in Glasgow East at the last general election was 13,507, making it the party’s eighth safest seat in Scotland and its 25th safest in Britain. The Scottish National Party would need a swing of 22% to take it. Astonishingly, it seems confident it can pull this feat off.

Labour officials are reportedly talking up the party’s chances of holding on, and journalists that have a better grip of Scottish politics than I do don’t rule that out.

Meanwhile, there’s a spat on the far left on this one. Both the Scottish Socialist Party and the breakaway Solidarity grouping are running candidates. But in such a polarised contest, neither is likely to do well. The stakes are too high for protest voting.

Respect MP George Galloway is backing New Labour rather than the Sheridan outfit, a development that has evidently discomfited some of his English supporters.

I’m simply too far south of the border to make a call on the result, although witnessing Labour’s difficulty in finding a candidate for what should be a rock solid weigh the vote stronghold, clearly it is not looking good for the government.

Let’s work from the premise that a SNP win is, at the very least, not inconceivable. Its platform, moreover, will be identifiably social democratic, topped up by opposition to both Trident and the Iraq war. What would such an outcome tell us?

Defeat could not simply be written off as another bout of the mid-term blues; it would represent, at the very least, a mid-term blues festival with an all-star bill, headlined by B.B. King and featuring Stevie Ray Vaughan back from the dead to play a support slot.

The Blairites have long theorised their project as constructing an alliance between Middle England and the heartland vote, with the section of the electorate formerly known as the working class expected to know its deferential place.

After the London and local government elections and Crewe & Nantwich, it is already clear that the Middle Englanders have upped and outed. If New Labour has in addition lost its traditional base, this will represent an implosion of neutron star proportions.

Labour MP John McDonnell has argued publicly that Labour might be sleepwalking into a meltdown on a par with 1931, a parallel that will mean nada to many of his colleagues. They should dust off the history books.

Some backbenchers have even suggested privately that the Liberal Democrats could form the next official opposition, although thankfully the opinion polls do not currently support that prognosis.

If Labour loses Glasgow East, the argument between New Labour and the socialist left within the party will have been definitively settled in the left’s favour. Unfortunately that conclusion may have come too late to do either side any good.

[Picture shows Labour candidate Margaret Curran and Scottish Socialist Party candidate Frances Curran. The two women are not related, but Labour fears it could lose votes as a result of the confusion.]

Or maybe not. Few can seriously believe that this discredited and deeply unpleasant little man - whose track record in influence-peddling as a glorified PR merchant in the early years of the first Blair administration will surely be exhumed in great detail over the next few days – will do anything to boost Labour’s fortunes.

Let me give you some idea of this guy's people skills. After all, I vividly remember our first meeting at a champagne party thrown by a Westminster lobbyist at some point in the mid 1990s.

Both he and I were members of Vauxhall Labour Party at the time, and our reputations preceded each other. I knew who he was, and he knew who I was. Moreover, it was a hot evening, and both of us had partaken fully of the hospitality on offer.

Although I tried to keep the discussion civil, within minutes of being introduced I found myself forced into in a high volume full-on public slanging match on the merits of Blairism and socialism.

Draper very early on began shouting and then aggressively initiated use of the crudest four-letter obscenities. This move – clearly designed to intimidate – appears to be one of his standard debating tactics. While things didn’t come to blows, they certainly could have done.

You can get some measure of the hubris of the man by some of his reported comments at the time his corrupt political introductions racket – which consisted of offering privileged access to ministers in exchange for cash - was rumbled by investigative journalist Greg Palast. ‘What I really am is a commentator-fixer,’ he self-importantly opined. ‘Your Mayor Daley has nothing on me.’

Nor were his actions inspired by any desire to make the world a better place, he candidly admitted: ‘I just want to stuff my bank account at £250 an hour.’ Clearly, his morality is about as dodgy as the tie he is wearing in the photo above.

Cash for access, as the affair became known, was to prove Draper’s downfall. He was, in short order, dismissed by the lobbyist for whom he worked, while his national newspaper column was axed.

As he ruefully relected in a subsequent radio interview: ‘I am a bit of a tosser’. That is one of the few things he is ever known to have said that found widespread popular resonance across the labour movement.

Hired by former Sun editor Kelvin MacKenzie as a Talk Radio presenter – that station certainly picks its Labour cast-offs carefully, right? - he was sacked from that gig after a prank on-air call, in which he claimed to be sitting in a Jacuzzi in an Amsterdam brothel with a prostitute called Claudia.

At a time when Labour urgently needs to reconnect with ordinary voters, giving this man any position of responsibility whatsoever is surely extraordinary. All we can do is keep our fingers crossed and hope he doesn’t have the opportunity to cause too much damage. He should stick to purveying the psychobabble by which he has earned his crust in recent years.

Come to that, how is it that those people singled out in pensions secretary James Purnell’s work for dole proposals are exactly the same people name-checked in Peter Lilley’s ‘I have a little list of benefit offenders who I'll soon be rooting out and who never would be missed’ speech to the Conservative Party conference in 1991?

Those who make up bogus claims in half a dozen names. Young ladies who get pregnant just to jump the housing list. You know the sort.

No wonder David Cameron has offered the Purnell plan unqualified backing; politicians of all major parties are singing not so much off the same hymnsheet as out of the same Gilbert and Sullivan operetta score. If you get the feeling you’ve heard it all before, that’s because you have.

The unemployed – sorry, I meant to say feckless workshy job cheats, of course – have been a popular target for cheap rhetorical shots since the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1832 and probably even before that.

I am not naïve enough to argue that nobody out there is claiming benefits to which they are not entitled. Nobody can have any trouble with the notion of rooting out systematic deliberate fraud, for instance. However, cutting already pitiful levels of benefit is hardly going to achieve that.

Frankly, one of the main reasons that numbers on incapacity benefit remains so intractable is that generations of the long-term unemployed have been deliberated coaxed onto IB, thanks to a tacit government policy designed to massage the headline unemployment figure ever downwards.

But one question is going unanswered in the current debate. If this problem is truly anywhere near as prevalent as Labour, the Tories and Daily Mail would have us believe, how come none of the huge range of initiatives over the last three decades has made a damn bit of difference?

Interestingly, the Purnell purge comes in the same week as Alistair Darling is set – in the words of the Financial Times – to ‘bow to pressure from business by scrapping contentious reforms to the taxation of foreign profits’. A whole raft of anti-avoidance measures will simply be dropped as a result.

It sometimes seems that New Labour does not push through its crackdowns on those failing to pay their way in society with equal determination in all cases.

But the late Sir Anthony John Charles Meyer, 3rd Baronet, sounds like quite an engaging character for a Tory MP. For a start, there was his longstanding affair with a black jazz singer, which was apparently all square with the missus. If the chanteuse’s intimate personal diaries – inevitably serialised in the tabloids - are anything to go by, he was certainly an active old cove.

More important for present purposes, though, is the footnote in post-war political history Sir Anthony (pictured) earned through his bit part in the latter-day re-run of the Glorious Revolution.

Back in 1989, Margaret Thatcher’s unpopularity had reached the point where, under her leadership, Tory defeat at the next general election was perceived as a certainty. The parallels with where we are now should be obvious.

Yet none of the leading figures in the Conservative Party had the courage to stick in the knife. Again, some might just see contemporary analogies here.

Cometh the hour, cometh the obscure pro-European backbencher. It was Sir Anthony who put himself forward for the leadership, in an explicit bid to destabilise Thatch. Inevitably he secured just 33 votes, as against 314 for the Leaderene.

The expectation was that one of the party’s so-called Big Beasts – Sir Ian Gilmour or Michael Heseltine were the names most frequently mentioned – would come forward to contest the second round. In the event, the Big Beasts didn’t have the bottle.

But the damage was done. It was Sir Anthony’s intervention that started the countdown to the departure of the woman to which New Labour has granted a state funeral. As a result, the phrase ‘stalking horse challenge’ entered the political lexicon.

Why raise this now? Well, there is currently speculation that David Miliband and Alan Johnson are considering a ‘dream ticket’ run for the Labour number one and deputy leader jobs.

However, just like Gilmour and Hezza, they are reportedly dithering and only likely to act if Brown can somehow be forced out of office. As Brown may well not agree to go of his own accord, that probably means that somebody has to step forward and do a Sir Anthony, with or without the jazz chick.

This is where a John McDonnell leadership challenge, if indeed it happens, would come in handy. I’ve got no problems with the political basis on which he would most likely stand, and if by so doing he contributes to rebuilding Labour’s hard left, the move has to be seriously considered.

But he’s not going to win. If the most likely outcome is a short-lived Miliband administration followed by several terms of Tory government, the tactical implications need to be thought through in full before proceeding. And anyway, Charles Clarke could just as well do the sacrificial honours.

It is unclear what McDonnell’s intentions are. The email motivating his potential candidacy was circulated by a former aide, who claims to be acting in a personal capacity. Yet McDonnell has notably not repudiated the suggestion.

I hear that some sections of the Labour Representation Committee – essentially the McDonnellite Tendency, to be blunt about it – think that there needs to be further discussion across the organised left. I think they are right.

Similar stipulations seem to apply to the current undeclared contest to replace the prime minister. It is inadmissible plainly to state that you are in the running.

Yet even though David Miliband’s piece in the Guardian this morning doesn’t mention Gordon Brown once, it is widely being interpreted as a subtle piece of positioning. Subtle is the operative word; as gissajob rallying calls to the progressive left go, few socialists will have found it inspirational.

The main contention of the article seems to be an assertion that Labour can somehow win the next election, despite the current evidence of the polls, because it has a defined project and the Conservatives do not.

For Miliband (pictured), there is nothing essentially wrong – bar one or two ‘shortcomings’, of course – with what New Labour has being doing since 1997. Its problem has essentially been one of getting the message across.

Does this man really not get it? Labour’s difficulty is not so much that the nuances of its policies are misunderstood, but rather that the main thrust is understood all too well and is deeply unpopular with the electorate.

Thus Miliband can maintain with a straight face that the government should be kicking itself for not pushing NHS privatisation harder and faster and for not having an exit plan for Iraq.

The reality is that millions of people object to British participation in the US oil grab on principle, while widespread clamour for greater private sector involvement in the health service just does not exist. You’ve obviously been listening to the wrong focus groups, Dave.

Nor will it do to blame a reified ‘Wall Street’ for the economic situation, after a decade of repeated insistence that Britain’s recent prosperity has been the result of the prudence with a purpose emanating from Number Eleven. Cock-ups such as the 10p tax band fiasco are still fresh in the public mind.

Most worrying of all is to hear Margaret Thatcher praised as a radical not a conservative, and then be told a few paragraphs later that the times demand a ‘radical new phrase’. That may have been a Freudian slip, but it says a lot about Mr Miliband’s instinct.

The Blairite 'radical centre' – the intellectual heritage that our prime minister regards as his rightful legacy - is not the negation of Thatcherism, but its completion.

If Miliband does get the gig he so plainly covets yet sticks to the limitations imposed by neoliberal orthodoxy, he’ll find out that it isn’t enough to belittle Cameronism intellectually as little more than the detoxification of the Tory brand.

Right now, the Tories are poised to take office by the cunning but effective expedient of not being the Labour Party, and that is all they need to do. At a time when even the British National Party can outpoll Labour in a by-election, surely a little detox wouldn’t hurt New Labour either.

It can’t have been easy being the son of Ralph Miliband; I wouldn’t be at all surprised to hear that the adolescent David had to sit through lectures on dialectical materialism instead of getting the standard dad talk on the birds and the bees.

At any rate, given his Oxford first in PPE, Britain’s next prime minister will of course be familiar with the concept. The basic argument is that movement and change result from the internal contradictions within all things, which are in their nature a unity of opposites, bound together in a relation of mutual dependence.

I’m not sure how much I buy that argument these days – the more I study philosophy, the more I lean towards Analytical Marxism – but it would seem to have a certain plausibility as a description of the development of New Labourism.

It’s worth remembering that when the doctrine first emerged in the early 1990s, it had to fight hard to gain ascendancy inside the Labour Party. The working assumption of those of us who unsuccessfully tried to oppose it was that Blair and Brown were in political terms a single indivisible unit.

Sure, each obviously had political ambitions. But after the death of John Smith, it fell to Blair to carry to act as New Labourism’s Middle England-friendly standard bearer. Surely Brown could live with number two status, in the interest of the greater good of the project?

For outsiders, perhaps first hint of just how deep the rivalry ran between the two was the mysterious mention of a certain ‘Bobby’ in Blair’s victory speech. Bobby – short for Bobby Shaftoe, hero of a Geordie folk song – was a reference to Peter Mandelson. This not-particularly-funny joke was at Brown’s expense; the other half of New Labourism had been shafted.

That was in 1994; all developments within the Labour Party since that date have essentially been shaped by the dialectical interaction between Blair and Brown. Despite there being no substantial difference in what they represent in political terms, in a personal sense the rupture has been all the deeper for the proximity.

Even after Blair’s departure, irreconcilable has-beens of the Clarke/Milburn stripe have continued fighting the war, much like stranded Japanese soldiers in the jungles of Borneo.

Dialectics are never static, and are said to be constantly in the process of working themselves out. Miliband, as the apostolic successor to Blair, should at one level by able to resolve the contradiction in a new synthesis.

After all, what would be the purpose of continued conflict between acolytes of Blair and Brown in a new dispensation in which one of them is out of parliament and the other is brooding on the sidelines?

New internal contradictions would instead emerge. The most likely possibility is a face-off between a unified post-New Labourism led by Miliband and Cruddasite social democracy, arguing from within the obscurity of opposition.

From the Financial Times this morning:

Two union sources told the FT that Unite and the GMB would - in the event of a leadership contest - support Mr Cruddas, MP for Dagenham East, the unions' favourite in last summer's deputy leadership contest.

But concerns remain within these unions that Mr Cruddas is too unfamiliar to the voting public. He also antagonised some officials while he was deputy political secretary for Tony Blair during Labour's first term.

The paper adds:

Some activists from the hard left dislike Mr Cruddas because of his support for the Iraq war, foundation hospitals and the extension of 42 days' detention of terror suspects.

Discuss.

Waste boy Brown and his man dem not bin givin’ XPM nuff respec’. So ultrablairites gonna go down his ends and shank his ass in da yard, check me? Or something like that, anyway.

When white middle-aged public schoolie senior politicians revealingly resort to gangsta argot, you know all you need to know about the mentality with which you are dealing.

Blair’s comments display the mindset of an excitable coked-up adolescent wielding the blade he has just plunged into a schoolmate. The muthafucker dissed me, know what I’m saying? So I had to show him who da man.

This isn’t about the politics, stupid; it’s all down to which crew rules OK. South Central Los Angeles, eat your heart out.

The leak of the memo from which the opening four words are taken – purportedly written by Tony Blair, even though refers to himself in the third person throughout - constitutes a deliberate attempt to undermine the Brown administration.

Such bitterness is born of purest factionalism rather than ideological differentiation. The notion that Gordon Brown has somehow ‘junked the TB policy agenda’ is laughable; it has been continued in all its New Labourite essentials.

Brown, meanwhile, has singularly failed to live up to his Clunking Great Fist soubriquet. Taking out a disciplinary against David Miliband – whose sneer gets more visible in every photograph I see - would at this juncture precipitate the bloody denouement of the 14-year Blair/Brown feud. How the Blairites must revel in their enemy’s weakness!

Unfortunately for the prime minister, the other mob haven’t even gotten warmed up yet. Stephen Byers – yo, Railtrack Boy! Gimme five! – and several close associates are drawing up their own alternative platform of four or five big ideas designed to demonstrate the ‘policy vacuum’ in which Brown is said to operate. Nationalisation of the top 200 monopolies is unlikely to figure strongly, I gather.

For those Labour Party members who still believe that any conceivable Labour government is better than any conceivable Tory government, the lesson is clear; the party needs a leadership that is prepared to put the interests of a fairer society ahead of personal ambition. Neither the Brownites or the Blairites are capable of providing that.

New Labour has come up with a great idea to get its message across without relying on the mediation of the hostile media. Yes, YouTube-based Number10TV will provide ‘exclusive video of the prime minister’s speeches, press conferences, media appearances and news archives’. But as the FT noted this morning, the portents are not auspicious:

The Tories launched Webcameron almost two years ago with a video clip of the Conservative leader giving his children their breakfast. The government responded with Labourvision on YouTube, the video-sharing website. Both failed to woo the masses. The sole clip posted by Labour in the past month on YouTube, Tenth Anniversary of the National Minimum Wage, has been viewed fewer than 420 times, compared with a six-figure audience for pop star Jordan Sparks.

You have to despair, don’t you? I mean, yes, the NMW is probably the best thing New Labour has done in the last 11 years, and has made a real difference to millions of people. But a celebration of the tenth anniversary of its introduction hardly makes for riveting viewing.

Politicians have to realise that simply trumpeting their achievements in sanitised fashion and expecting internet users meekly to say ‘amen’ is not how the internet works. Bland pap reduced to anodyne soundbites doesn’t cut it online.

Either come up with well-written controversial material and let the comments box rip, or don’t bother with the exercise in the first place.

Unnamed union leaders want to see Alan Johnson – former general secretary of the Communication Workers’ Union, of course – installed as Britain’s next prime minister, the Observer reported yesterday. Jon Cruddas, perceived as a union-friendly soft left, would be the bureaucracy’s top choice for the largely symbolic number two slot:

One pivotal figure at the head of the union movement said leaders of the main unions were steadily uniting around the Johnson-Cruddas ticket. 'The consensus is beginning to emerge that this is the way to stop a David Miliband leadership,' he said. Another senior union figure said: 'We have nothing against David Miliband personally, but what we don't want is the continuing marketisation agenda of the Blair years. I think the Johnson-Cruddas plan will have a lot of appeal to my rank-and-file members.' …

If Johnson were persuaded to stand for the leadership and if Harriet Harman quit as deputy leader to take him on, Cruddas would almost certainly run again for the deputy job. If Harman did not quit as deputy, the plan would be for Johnson to make clear he would appoint Cruddas to a top job, perhaps the party chairmanship.

Johnson is certainly more ‘saleable’ to ordinary union members than Miliband; he has plenty of ‘brought up in a council flat/left school at 15’ street cred, knows what it is to put in a day’s graft, and was even reportedly once a fellow traveller of the Communist Party of Great Britain.

But politically speaking, he would amount to a second Blairite runner for the top job. As far as the left is concerned, it is worth noting that this is a pointer to tactical divisions in the post-Blair Blair camp, which may now be breaking up into its component parts.

Yet given Johnson’s record in backing the Iraq invasion, ID cards and top-up fees, for instance, there is no real reason for socialists to prefer him over the baby-faced Hampstead intellectual.

Yet what most shocks me most about the piece is not so much the tone of ridiculous strident hyperbole but the sheer plagiarism. Shanahan’s deranged outpourings are little more than a hastily dashed off re-write of a recent Richard Littlejohn article in the Daily Mail.

Discussing Labour home secretary Jacqui Smith, Uncle Rich maintains that ‘Jackboot Jacqui’s a Nazi piece of work’. Nazi piece of work! Nazi piece of work! It’s a pun. Geddit? Oh, never mind.

I mean, Jackboot Jacqui? Seriously?!? Let’s just say I cannot think of a woman Max Mosley would be less likely to pay £500 to dress up in a Luftwaffe uniform in order to pursue his distinctive proclivities than Ms Smith.

Meanwhile, Socialist Unity - the most widely-read leftwing blog in Britain - recently carried a post by Derek Wall, illustrated by a graphic that slowly morphs a New Labour rose into a well-known Nazi symbol. This is a man who, as leader of the Green Party in England and Wales, presumably wants to be regarded as serious politician. I don’t think that he has bolstered his case by his choice of illustration.

Where to begin? Well, first of all, I am a Labour Party member, along with several thousand other socialists. We do not appreciate everything this Labour government does; much of it we oppose outright.But when people start equating the party we have chosen to join with the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartie, we naturally take not a little bit of umbridge.

You can almost forgive such idiocy on the party of Shanahan and Littlejohn, but Wall should know better. Next thing you know, you’ll be seeing lefties wearing stickers equating the Star of David with the swastika on anti-war demos.

As I have pointed out before, sadly for lazy hacks, not everything can always equal fascism:

In the 1980s, sections of the British left branded Thatcherism as ‘creeping fascism’. Today, there are US websites making the same point about the Bush administration.

I mean, you’ve got to watch those bloody union health and safety reps …They start by demanding that management keeps the fire escapes clear of boxes, and before you know it, they’re establishing a chain of death camps all the way across Poland.

Tabloid opinion slots, like the blogosphere, come under the general rubric of ‘all good knockabout stuff‘. I’m hardly going to break down in tears on this one, even though there were members of my family who suffered rather greater indignities on account of Hitlerism than having a town hall jobsworth take a photograph of them.

But to somehow equate spot fines for littering with Auschwitz, or to identify New Labour with the perpetrators of the Final Solution, is at the very least a clear marker that whatever follows need not be taken in the slightest bit seriously.

Legend has it that bloggers are usually overweight and bearded middle-aged white men, driven to vent their spleen into cyberspace because a cruel world does not recognise their innate political genius.

Well, I’m clean-shaven, so that stereotype certainly can’t apply to me! No way. But presumably it is only access to the mainstream media that keeps Charles Clarke from opening a Wordpress account.

I mean, he couldn’t bloody wait, could he? It’s only the first week of the 2008-09 politics season, and Wingnut is pouring out his disingenuous spite all over the pages of the New Statesman, reinforcing the message by badmouthing Brown for the benefit of the television cameras.

Apoplectic that he is no longer inside the tent, Clarke stands outside the tent, doing what LBJ famously said those outside the tent are prone to do. After a pretty bog standard defence of the Blair decade, we get to the money paragraphs:

Equally, however, it is inaccurate and misleading to dismiss as some kind of Blairite rump those who fear that Labour's current course will lead to utter destruction at the next general election.

This is not entirely wrong. Those that fear that Labour’s current course will lead to utter destruction at the next general election are many and politically various. They include the hard left, the soft left, virtually the entire trade union leadership, all but the most purblind of backbenchers, and very probably the more intelligent members of the Brown camp itself.

But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a Blairite rump, with Clarke and his homeboys Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers at the head of it.

There is no coherent Blairite ideology. Many of us who were proud to be members of Tony Blair's government had differing approaches even then, and certainly propose differing prescriptions now.

What is being said here, exactly? Is the contention that there never was a coherent Blairite ideology, or that there is not one now? Despite all those stultifyingly boring tomes by Anthony Giddens, Phillip Gould and others, a case can be made that the Third Way was ideologically eclectic and therefore does not qualify as an ideology properly so called.

But there certainly was a set of core ideas with which ‘New Labour modernisers’ – including, at one time, a certain G. Brown – aligned themselves. Hence the ideological severance, in no uncertain terms, with Old Labour.

Similarly, there is no Blairite plot, despite rumours and persistent newspaper reports. There is, however, a deep and widely shared concern - which does not derive from ideology - that Labour is destined to disaster if we go on as we are, combined with a determination that we will not permit that to happen.

The first sentence is a direct fib. That Clarke has been considering a stalking horse leadership challenge for many months now is one of the worst kept secrets in politics right; some Labour MPs have been directly canvassed on this score.

As am ordinary Labour Party member, what has most pissed me off, to use the chancellor’s technical term, is the continued shilly-shallying. At least when the Tories had to knife a useless leader – and yes, I’m thinking of the Quiet Man here – the brutally was meted out as surgically and as painlessly as possible. To use a soundbite Conservatives will recognise, in short, it is time to put up or shut up.

Listen to a standard speech from a Labour politician these days and you will hear references to ‘the heartland vote’ or ‘families that play by the rules’ or ‘the many not the few’. They will bemoan ‘social exclusion’ and hint at the need for ‘fairness’.

But strip away all the delicate affectations of refined language; translate the rhetoric into everyday English, and what they are actually talking about is class, poverty, and inequality.

The Daily Mail certainly isn’t so prissy; it likes nothing better than to use hot button words like ‘middle class’ in its splash headlines. That is because it knows exactly who its readers are, how they identify themselves and how to make them feel good. Labour cannot bring itself to be so focused.

The problem is that failing to call things by their real names doesn’t make them go away. You can’t help suspecting that one factor in all this political periphrasis is the recognition of this government’s poor performance in the very terms that have historically been the yardsticks of the entire tradition of Labourism, in its socialist and social democratic variants alike.

Now Harriet Harman has shockingly used the C word, something a well brought-up daughter of a Harley Street physician – and the niece of Countess Longford, incidentally – should never, never do. In remarks to be published in a magazine shortly, Labour’s deputy leader will aver:

We have made great progress on tackling inequality but we know that inequality doesn't just come from your gender, race, sexual orientation or disability.

What overarches all of these is where you live, your family background, your wealth and social class.

It’s only the first half of that statement that is open to debate. No sensible observer of contemporary Britain could possibly question the second part. We know, for instance, that two-thirds of a pupil’s educational attainment can be attributed to social class.

We know, too, that social class can make a difference of up to three decades to life expectancy, and that the longevity gap is increasing. On average, there is a 40% wage premium simply for having a middle class mum and dad.

So Theresa May’s efforts to paint Harman a ‘returning to the class warfare rhetoric of 20 years ago’ is indicative of a staggering degree of Tory hypocrisy in defence of privilege.

As a senior member of a political party dominated by the products of top public schools, May knows the reality of social class rather more than she is letting on for public consumption. If she has any doubt on the question, perhaps she should ask for a briefing from Paul Dacre.

Ms Harman has announced – in a speech to the TUC today which did not actually mention class once – that a National Equalities Panel, headed by a prominent academic, will be established to look into some of these issues.

This exercise is utterly pointless, and just maybe utterly cynical, too; by the time the findings are ready for publication, we will be far too close to the next general election for such aperçus as they may generate to be enacted.

It’s not as if a wealth of empirical evidence on such topics is not readily available. Pick up the dog and bone to the Rowntree Trust or the Child Poverty Action Group, Ms Harman. They’ll soon set you straight, and save you a few bob on meeting room expenses as well.

What Labour supporters want to see is not yet another glossy report on social exclusion, whatever that is; we want to see a government actually reverses the continuing redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich.

Every time you switch on the radio and hear some Labour MP on the payroll vote lamely trot out that ‘right person to be leading the country in these difficult times’ soundbite that has so obviously been concocted centrally, the gritted teeth are almost audible. It’s a pity Today programme interviewees are not routinely submitted to an on-air lie detector test.

But New Labour’s woes are not of the kind that can be rectified by the simple expedient of sacking the Fucking Awful One and substituting a prime minister who is merely bleedin’ dreadful in his place.

Brown is carrying the can for the way New Labour – which was, at its instigation at least, his joint property – has systematically trashed its support base over the last 11 years.

Yes, this malaise is still about cash for honours and it is still about the Iraq war. It is deeply seated, permanent, irreversible and as much if not more the fault of Blair and the Blairites as it is of Brown and the Brownites.

So deep is the electorate’s resentment at the moment that not only are there no quick political fixes, there are no slow ones either. If New Labour went to the country on a platform of making bar tabs tax deductible and giving all voters two weeks in Tuscany on the NHS, it would still lose big time.

Accordingly, is difficult to imagine anything that could make New Labour more unpopular than it is now. But toppling Brown in a factionally motivated coup and putting another bloke in Downing Street without an electoral mandate is one of the few things that might just achieve that.

Labour’s crisis is rapidly becoming existential. It has no meaningful presence in many parts of the country, and in business terms, it is a wholly owned subsidiary of Unite. It would collapse tomorrow if Woodley and Simpson stopped writing the cheques.

Yet the events so far this week underline that a sizeable and socially rooted left of centre political party, able to articulate a workable alternative to neoliberalism, is needed now more than ever.

If Labour goes under, the organised expression of working class politics will be reduced to a handful of fissiparous dead-end Trot and Tankie sects. No one in the labour movement can rationally want that.

Most of those out to knife Brown are motivated more by the desire to preserve their precious parliamentary career than any consideration of the long-term political interests of the people that put them in Westminster in the first place.

They are the people who willed the New Labour project all along, but now cannot live with the foreseeable consequences in terms of popular disaffection. They could have opposed Brown in 2007, which would have been the proper time to do so. But somehow they couldn’t find the backbone back, largely because of the impact they thought opposition might have on their promotion chances.

This bunch of ambitious but apolitical self-serving Blairite prima donnas should dispense with the degrading hissy fits immediately, and cease and desist from a course of action that is damaging to the man most of them happily signed nomination papers for only last year.

Repeat after me: ‘Gordon Brown is the best man to be leading the country in these difficult times’. Keep repeating it, until you have convinced yourself it is true.

Back in the 1980s, the acronym TINA entered the political lexicon to denote the idea that there is no alternative. And - right now - TINA to the FAPM.

That possibility – outside the fringe meetings organised by the usual suspects, of course - strikes me as fairly unlikely. The whole event is so carefully stage managed these days that anybody suspected of harbouring latent socialist sympathies will be kept well away from the lectern.

The truth is that the Labour Party – after 14 long years of over-compensating for its Clause Four past by constantly stressing its born-again believer ‘pro-business’ credentials - has simply forgotten the requisite verbal flourishes.

Such is the extent of this linguistic self-denying ordnance that it cannot even debate the events of the last ten days in the meaningful grown-up English that characterises serious economic thinking.

Read the comment pages in the Financial Times; contributors there openly use words such as ‘the capitalist system’, ‘the ruling class’, ‘nationalisation’ or ‘neoliberalism’ if that is the most direct way of saying what they want to say.

Sometimes the authors are attempting to justify the free market, sometimes proposing steps to strengthen it. Occasionally, they even acknowledge that, yes, capitalism does have certain downsides. But at all times they are unafraid to call it how they see it.

Tellingly, no mainstream Labour politician would use such frank language in a conference speech, for fear of being branded a retro-Trot or worse. And we wouldn’t want the folks watching at home on telly to get the wrong end of the stick, right?

Because the ruling party cannot even bring themselves to think in such analytical categories, it thereby effectively rules out discussion the problems facing the financial markets in the terms that would be deployed in an intelligent pub argument.

Hopefully, City minister Kitty Ussher was joking when she parodied one famous yuppie soundbite with the comment: ‘Greed is bad, I think, maybe, in some ways.’ But whether she was joshing or not, that just about sums up the level of the debate.

Over the weekend, prime minister Gordon Brown even ventured mild criticism of ‘irresponsible’ bonus culture. Spin doctors are letting it be known that legislation is not likely, although the Financial Services Authority may tamper with the regulations.

This very morning, chancellor Alistair Darling has promised to avoid ‘kneejerk’ actions. And, for kneejerk, read ‘anything that promises to be effective’.

Facilitating the Lloyds TSB takeover of HBOS and imposing temporary restrictions on short-selling financial stocks are both reasonable interim measures in as far as they go.

But there can be no adequate policy agenda that does not start with clear definitions of what the problems we face are, and what should be done about them.

The tragedy is that – at a time when a democratic socialist critique of the last three decades could win considerable popularity - the British left does not have anyone capable of articulating it.

So I cannot offer a definitive verdict of Gordon Brown’s address to the Labour Party conference this afternoon. Instead, I’ll confine myself to a few observations on the main themes.

I lost count of the number of times the prime minister - pictured above in full flow - used the words ‘fairness’ and ‘fair’. I expect somebody out there is even now totting up the final figure, but even without a tally, most of us will have got the message.

The word fairness has become a New Labour staple, and with good reason. It represents the bare minimum defining value to which everybody from the far left to the centre left can subscribe, while remaining entirely ideologically open-ended.

A speech that very largely trades on the concept is at high risk of either banality or simply meaninglessness. No-one in politics openly advocates unfairness.

Nor did the repeated insistence on Britain’s standing as the best country in the world go unnoticed. As one of those who has never quite understood what it means to love a country, the markedly patriotic subtext left me cold.

And while no-one questions Brown’s insistence that New Labour remains ‘pro-enterprise, pro-business and pro-competition’, couldn’t he have found it in himself to utter the words ‘trade unions’ just once?

But let’s forget the rhetoric. I suppose it is up to a prime minister to choose the benchmarks he or she wants to be measured against. Let us compare the vision to contemporary society.

It’s all very well proclaiming that being on the side of hardworking families is the only place you ever want to be, and then go on to praise NHS cooks and cleaners, porters and paramedics. But how fair is it to expect these very people – along with millions of other public sector workers – to take a pay cut at a time of rising inflation?

How fair is it that British workers still have the poorest employment rights of any industrialised countries? How fair is it to allow employers to sack staff by text message? How fair is it that cleaners pay a higher marginal rate of tax than hedge fund bosses?

How fair is an education system that allows the de facto systematic purchase of class privilege? How fair is a health service still subject to post-code lottery and queue-jumping by the rich?

How fair is a society with sweeping differentials in life expectancy between those living on sink estates and the more prosperous parts of the country? How fair can it be that 22% of the population live in poverty?

How fair are Britain’s undemocratic electoral mechanisms that leave perhaps millions of voters without adequate representation of their political beliefs?

Don’t get me wrong; Labour remains fairer than the Tories, in many of the small but important ways that Brown emphasised in the better parts of his oration. Far, far better a nugatory minimum wage than no minimum wage at all. It’s just that with the requisite political courage, Labour could and should be somewhat fairer still.

The picture shows a man in evening dress, cropped so that his head isn’t visible, clutching a cigar that Freudians would surely regard as overcompensation for threatened masculinity. The caption reads: Cameron’s cronies cashing in on the credit crunch.

As sophisticated political attack ads go, the full page offerings Britain’s biggest trade union has placed in the Guardian and Daily Mirror are not exactly right up there with the finer efforts of Saatchi & Saatchi. But the message is as plain as the alliteration:

The hedge funds and short sellers who have made £millions from the destruction of Northern Rock, HBOS and Bradford and Bingley, bank roll the Conservative party.

DAVID CAMERON: CHEESY AND SLEAZY.

Now, all of this is true, and Unite are absolutely justified in feeling anger at this situation. Michael Hintze of CQS and Paul Ruddock of Lansdowne Partners both made killings shorting B&B and HBOS; Hintze has given £650,000 to the Tories since Cameron became leader, while Ruddock has donated £259,000.

Catherine Lagrange - wife of Pierre Lagrange, boss of the firm GLG Partners, which also shorted B&B - gave another £50,000. That kind of money pays for plenty of Montecristo number fours.

To make this point, the union has organised a protest outside the Conservative Party conference today, as Cameron prepares to deliver his leader’s speech, which will feature activists dressed up in pig masks and bowler hats.

You can read the rationale for the campaign in full here, by the way. Joint general secretary Derek Simpson argues:

The culture of the city is the culture of the Tories. They went to school with the city, they dine with the city and many of them married into the city. You can't rely on them to regulate the city.

Again, he’s right. But the problem for Labour-affiliated Unite is that every charge they aim at the Conservatives applies with almost equal force to New Labour.

As Unite knows full well, one of the other directors of GLG Partners is Paul Myners, who is politically close to Gordon Brown. Jon Aisbitt - a £1m donor to New Labour - is non-executive chairman of Man Group, another outfit that has done very nicely thank you out of the credit crunch. Sir Ronald Cohen, who has given over £2m, has just launched a new hedge fund.

Plenty of Labour leaders went to public schools too. Some of them send their children to such institutions. Labour has been dining with City chiefs since the prawn cocktail offensive. Gordon Brown’s director of government relations Sue Nye is married to Gavyn Davis, the former Goldman Sachs banker that Blair made chairman of the BBC.

The simple reality is that New Labour long ago abandoned the Labour Party’s traditional project of acting as the political wing of the labour movement and since 1997 has consistently governed with the interests of ‘the hedge funds and short sellers’ that the Unite ads disparage. The likes of Peter Mandelson and John Hutton are just as much at home in that culture as anybody on the Conservative front bench.

The only way to make sure the interests of working class people get much of a look in is to restore some elementary concept of working class political representation to British politics.

Both Simpson and his fellow joint general secretary Tony Woodley - read an insider’s account of the tensions between them here - are sufficiently savvy to know that. They are also positioned to do something about it.

GLENROTHES is the kind of place that a Labour Party that should stay Labour forever; it’s a coalfield town, and parts of the constituency were once sufficiently radical to return a Communist MP to Westminster. Labour secured a 10,000-plus majority there in 2005.

But as it goes to the polls tomorrow - the timing of the by-election presumably chosen because the attention of the political media would inevitably be elsewhere – it is looking increasingly likely to change hands. The bookies will give you 8-15 on the Scottish National Party, with Labour lengthening to 11-8.

If the outcome in Glasgow East last July – which saw the SNP achieve a 22.5% swing to take a seat held by Labour or the far left for 80 years – is anything to go by, those prices look pretty justified; all the Nats need is 14.5% to triumph in Fife tomorrow.

Remember, too, that the equivalent seat in the Scottish Parliament returned an SNP MSP last year, while the SNP is the largest party at local government level.

Both the Tories and the Lib Dems are well behind the frontrunners, while the Scottish Socialist Party and Solidarity will duke it out for whatever residual far left vote there is to be had.

The significance of the contest is that it will tell us just how far the financial crisis has rehabilitated New Labour. While the Tories still lead in the opinion polls, Brown’s has pulled back much to the gap, largely because he is seen to have kept a cool head as the markets crash. Can the prime minister maintain this necessary momentum?

Glenrothes borders Brown's own constituency of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, and Brown has been sufficiently mindful of the implications to take time off from his ‘Gordon saves the world’ routine to get out there and kiss babies in person.

Alex Salmond has hit the campaign trail 11 times, again in breach of convention. The SNP leader is perceived as having some credibility problems of his own, with his ‘arc of prosperity’ schema that an independent Scotland could align with the likes of Ireland and Iceland left in tatters by recent events.

But let’s say he secures the win, which at the time of writing looked the most likely outcome. SNP success – on an identifiably social democratic platform, topped off by opposition to both Trident and the Iraq war - would sharply underline the undesirability of Lord Mandelson’s insistence that there is no alternative to a brand of New Labourism well past its sell-by date.

Blairism theorised what it did in the name of the construction of an alliance between Middle England and what got euphemistically dubbed the heartland vote. The extent to which this project was ever instantiated is open to debate, but if it did exist, it is rapidly falling apart now.

After the London and local government contests in May and Crewe & Nantwich, it is clear that the Middle Englanders have upped and outed. After Glasgow West, there is every indication that the Scottish inner city working class is similarly disaffected.

Now the strategy is being put to the test in a former mining constituency, of exactly the variety that has made up the irreducible strongholds of Labourism since the 1920s. The verdict has to be that if Labour doesn’t hang on to Glenrothes, it has no reasonable prospect of it hanging on to office.

UPDATE: According to Paul Routledge, the bookies' odds have been cunningly manipulated by SNPers. Labour are said to be back at evens.

SOAKING the rich it ain’t; Labour’s decision to introduce a 45% tax rate for those earning £150,000 a year or more is largely symbolic, as many commentators are already busily pointing out. But sometimes – in times like now, for instance - symbolism is important in politics.

According to preliminary calculations, the move will hit just 400,000 people and raise a mere £2bn, which is next to nothing when set against government borrowing of £120bn. Yet even this gesture will generate paroxysms of entirely feigned moral outrage from those who make it their business to defend the wealthy in print. Look here and here for instance responses.

Let’s get some sense of perspective. Even a few years back, the Lib Dems were sufficiently bold to call for a 50p in the pound take on the rather lower threshold of £100,000 a year. How quickly the political right forgets that even during the hey-day of High Thatcherism, the top rate of income tax was 63%; despite his status as a former Trot, Alistair Darling is but a hopeless wuss by comparison to 'Red Geoff' Howe.

I mean, correct me if I am being needlessly controversial here, but the basic principle underlying any left of centre take on taxation is simple enough; the more you earn, the more you owe the Inland Revenue.

The idea that the rich should hand over a higher proportion of their income than the less well off has been a mainstay of the broadly progressive outlook since Lloyd George’s people’s budget of 1909, and it is high time the principle was restored.

Levying taxation on this basis has many advantages. Not the least of them is that, however much people grumble when they get their pay slip each month, it is widely perceived to be more or less fair.

But as someone on £42K – a decent wedge, ‘tis true, but hardly one that provides for a life of unbridled luxury in contemporary London - I am a higher rate taxpayer. If there is any logic in extorting the same proportionate rate from middle class types like me and people on £420,000 a year or £4.2m a year, I must have missed the meeting.

Taxation has been responsible for getting New Labour getting into more than a few political scrapes in the last period, from the indecent haste in following up Tory calls for the abolition of inheritance tax to the cack-handed reform of CGT and the entire non-dom fiasco and the 10p tax band balls up of last year.

At last the government have done something broadly right. Clawing back some of the spectacular giveaways doled out to the super-rich under successive governments since 1979 is entirely justifiable.It is not as if the City elite live on another planet. It is just not on for a small number of plutocrats to pay little or nothing to the public purse, while benefitingdisproportionately from the things for which it pays.

Even if they do use private hospitals and independent schools, who do they think foots the bill for the roads their chauffeurs drive them along and the streetlights outside their offices, or the courts that hear their litigation claims, to give just a handful of examples?

Given the way in which three decades of neoliberalism have seen society reconstructed around the needs of capital, what excuse can those at the top evince not to properly contribute to the arrangements that enable them to accumulate and hold their wealth? The rich have been taking the piss for too long, and they damn well know it.

AN UNNAMED ‘senior Labour figure’ – presumably one of the half a dozen or so perennial Blairite malcontents that makes up the list of the usual suspects these days - is aghast at the idea that the very wealthy should pay a higher rate of tax than the rest of us.

‘£150,000 may seem a lot in Edinburgh but it isn't a lot in Reading,’ he tells Rachel Sylvester of the Times, after yesterday’s announcement from Alistair Darling that this will be the threshold of a 45p tax band from 2011. ‘I fear that Gordon has just given a huge Christmas gift to the Tories. We are, to quote Lyndon Johnson, in danger of losing the South for a generation.’

What utter rot. And I say that with complete confidence, despite not having the foggiest idea of the average wedge in either the Scottish capital or the fine Berkshire town that secure namechecks here.

Only 2% of UK earners pull down six figure salaries, and the numbers on £150,000 and up will inevitably be smaller still. Sorry, Charles or Peter or Stephen or Alan or whoever, but £150,000 is a lot, anywhere in Britain.

And while I am always a sucker for the nifty use of historical analogy – it demonstrates a bit of book learnin’, if nothing else – the LBJ reference doesn’t work for me either.

Johnson uttered his famous words after signing the Civil Rights Act in 1964. Morally, the president was doing the right thing. But even by the yardstick of crude partisan advantage, it is not immediately clear that he was getting a bad deal.

While any number of redneck bigots switched to Wallace, the measure was ultimately rewarded by its effect in securing the allegiance of blacks and liberals to the Democrats.

Similarly, while it is not clear to me that a symbolic 45p tax rate will cost New Labour particularly dear in Reading, it is bound to play well in the heartlands. It might just win back the north for a generation, too.

But the inevitable question that must be answered after yesterday is whether or not the pre-budget report marks a return to social democracy. Benedict Brogan in the Daily Mail is in no doubt that it does; his front page story this morning runs under the huge headline ‘The Day New Labour Died’.

Similarly, Polly Toynbee is plainly ecstatic: ‘[H]istory will judge yesterday was the turning point when Labour unfurled its old battle banner for social justice,’ she exults in the Guardian. 'At last the party of social justice has woken up.'

I fear both Brogan and Toynbee are rushing to judgement. While we have been given an outline the kind of Keynesian budget required for recessionary times, it is notably not accompanied by any reversion to social democracy in the post-war consensus sense.

I haven’t waded through the small print yet, but as far as I can make out, there are no measures aimed specifically at job creation, very little that will boost the welfare state, nothing that will directly benefit organised labour, and not even a hint of an expanded role for social ownership. Multinationals, meanwhile, will be laughing at the exemption of foreign dividends from taxation.

Ultimately, the package cannot be divorced from the context of the recent bank bail-out, for which it is designed to pay. Whatever the technicalities, it lacks any moral dimension; whatever the window dressing, the interests of capital remain foremost in the government’s thinking.

Whether one considers the return of social democracy a good thing or not, there isn’t much cause to get excited, because that is not what we are seeing here.

‘LABOUR war on middle classes’, proclaims the front page headline of the Daily Mail this morning. Sounds kinda serious, doesn’t it? Posterity will no doubt look back at the conflict that unexpectedly kicked off in early 2009 as one of the most brutal episodes in all of British history.

Our descendents will argue long and hard over whether the relentless carpet bombing of Primrose Hill in the first week of hostilities should be regarded as a war crime, and perhaps question the necessity for the string of concentration camps that opened up across the better parts of the Home Counties.

Who should be held morally responsible for the collateral damage after that stray artillery round hit that prep school in Buckinghamshire, taking out over Henry, Poppy, Chloe, Jasper and their unfortunate teacher? And should New Labour really have tried to excuse the atrocity by falsely suggesting that the Aylesbury branch of Hamas was holed up in the basement?

In scenes unparalleled since Stalingrad, bitter hand-to-hand fighting saw irregular partisan units of expensively-handbagged fashionistas doing their damnedest to prevent the First Jeremy Corbyn Armoured Divison’s reclamation of Canonbury, it will be recalled. It was to no avail; the summary executions of numerous leading barristers outside the Upper Street premises of Hotblack Desiato quelled the petit bourgeois insurrection in Islington once and for all.

On the other hand, things might not come to quite this pass. On reading the story, it turns out that the government is merely planning to extend existing laws against discrimination on grounds of race, age, gender, disability and sexuality to cover class as well. About bloody time, too.

Yet this simple proposal – which should be axiomatic for any political party purporting to base its appeal on the majority of the population – has generated apoplexy over at Associated Newspapers. Some bugger has nicked the office copy of the Daily Telegraph, but I’d imagine the broadsheet isn’t too chuffed with the policy, either.

Harriet Harman is perceived as the architect of the scheme, and comes in for no uncertain amount of stick. The Mail’s editorial even accuses her of possessing an ‘infantile Marxist view of the world’. Please. The poor love wouldn’t recognize a dialectical negation if it nicked her stab vest.

Yet the irony is that legislation to ‘enhance social mobility’ is unlikely to make much too much difference in practice. More than 30 years ago, legislation was passed granting women equal pay for equal work; I don’t have the stats to hand, but I seem to recall that the gap is still massive. Likewise, class discrimination will persist, whatever the law says.

This is because capitalism is inherently based on class division, and couldn’t exist without it. Efforts to give more ordinary kids a break in the professions are probably worthwhile, but will not challenge the reality of minority ownership and control of the means of production. That would take genuine socialism, something still a long way off Labour’s radar screen.

YOU RENT an MP like you rent a taxi, or so disgraced Tory lobbyist Ian Greer reportedly assured Mohamed al Fayed, anyway. It now looks like you can hire a peer in pretty much the same way.

And to extend the metaphor just a little, Lords Truscott, Moonie, Snape and Taylor of Blackburn have given every indication of being the type of political cabbie ready to go south of the river after midnight, providing only that the fare is right.

In plain English, these four peers displayed a clear willingness to amend legislation in return for cash. True, they are not technically guilty of any offence. No money actually changed hands and nor was any parliamentary influence actually exercised. But that will matter little to a disgusted public.

Nor will the punters much care that they were the victims of a newspaper set up, of the type that gets routinely repeated every few years, with politicos and backroom boys of all parties dumb enough to fall for it every time.

Other than unfavourable press coverage, there appear to be few consequences. Tory cash for questions MP David Tredinnick still sits as the ‘honourable’ member for Bosworth. One would have thought that his alacrity in accepting £1,000 from an undercover reporter in order to ask parliamentary questions about a fictitious drug disqualifies the use of that particular adjective in his connection.

On the New Labour side, Derek Draper and John Mendelsohn – two of the men at the centre of Greg Palast’s lobbygate sting in 1997 - have both been rehabilitated and currently occupy themselves with high profile campaigning roles inside the party machine.

This latest episode speaks volumes about the nature of Britain’s second chamber, a place in which unelected legislators enjoy real power, in many cases after effectively having purchased their place through generous donations to Labour Party funds. No wonder it operates on straightforward business lines.

It also comes at a bad time for New Labour, with the latest opinion poll giving the Tories a 15 point lead, and with the electorate starting to question Brown and Darling’s handling of the current economic crisis. If repeated at the general election that the prime minister must hold by next year at the latest, the figures would give Cameron an overall majority of 120.

That is a hell of lead for Labour to have to overturn, especially given a backdrop of serious recession. Labour can at the very least expect a severe trouncing in this summer's European and local elections.

That gives the government an obvious self-interest in taking the latest scandal very seriously indeed. While the men accused by the Sunday Times of being on the take are entitled to due process, the two parliamentary investigations should be completed expeditiously, as should any investigation mounted by Scotland Yard.
If there is any truth in the allegations, those responsible should be expelled from the Labour Party for bringing it into disrepute, and should moreover face criminal charges if that is merited.

But there are wider issues to consider, too. If Britain is to have a second chamber at all – and I am agnostic on that matter – it should be 100% elected, thereby providing the elementary accountability without which the country cannot enjoy full democracy.

IF NEW Labour really does see celebrity status as the only requisite qualification for running the greatest city in the world, it might as well just cut to the chase and check out whether or not any or all of Girls Aloud would be up for the job. Better that than a man whose background and value system are antithetical to every last damn thing for which the labour movement used to stand.

Yet it seems that senior Labour figures have approached Alan Sugar to ask if he would consider standing against Boris Johnson as the party’s candidate for London mayor in 2012. Andrew Gilligan reports in today’s Evening Lebedev:

Ken Clark, Labour's London director, has telephoned Sir Alan for what Labour sources said was an "exploratory conversation" about him standing.

Sir Alan did not commit himself. However, he is considered by some in the Labour Party to be the only potential candidate in the field so far with the combination of experience and name recognition to take on the Tory Mayor …

and now for the real reason, of course

… and prevent another election attempt by Mr Livingstone.

That’s right, the same Alan Sugar who - in explaining his decision to back Tony Blair in 1997 - admitted: ‘I did very well out of the Tory years. I was proud to be considered one of Margaret Thatcher’s favourite businessmen’. And although I can’t source the quote, didn’t he once admit that he would have no qualms about selling briefcase-sized nuclear bombs, provided only that the trade was legal? Nice.

Poor Livingstone. Look at how he is being treated, after everything he tried to do from 2000 onwards to distance himself from his radical past and ingratiate himself with New Labour and City big shots. Nevertheless, he still enjoys critical support from some sections of the left, and I was on balance happy to back him critically in 2008.

Yet one of the most striking features of last year’s election was the way that it was pitched in terms of a choice between ‘Ken’ and ‘Boris’. Substantive policy differences on anything other than the desirability of bendy buses were minimal. It was almost as if the electorate was being asked to decide which of the two might make more congenial company for an evening in the pub.

Don’t forget, either, the attempt to talk up Greg Dyke as a joint Conservative/Liberal candidate. Even a couple of small beer DJs saw the contest was a chance to boost their flagging careers, with Mike Read seeking the Tory nomination, and some minor league talk radio shock jock whose name I forget also in the running in the early stages. Doesn’t anyone take these elections seriously?

Now, given the figurehead nature of the role, strong candidates must necessarily evince a certain degree of charisma. City Hall is not the place for some timeserving dullard who actually bothers to read subcommittee background papers.

But I have to question the wisdom of Labour opting for a hardline Thatcherite best known for his propensity to sack people on the spot. Voters are going to be losing their jobs in sufficient numbers of the next few years to make that trait seem unattractive indeed.

If this mad plan to run Sir Alan comes off, Londoners will be reduced to a run-off between two de facto Tories, with Boris the slightly less rightwing pick. Londoners deserve better than a lab test of the old maxim that politics is simply showbiz for ugly people.

LABOUR has already launched its campaign for another term in office under the punning slogan of ‘Go Fourth’. But, sadly, there is a small but growing chance of a surge in support for the British National Party at the next nationwide electoral contest that will see Labour Come Fourth instead.

After all, much of New Labour’s strategy since the 1990s has been based on the deliberate neglect of what Blairites patronisingly dubbed the heartland vote. The gamble always was that, politically speaking, the working class had no where else to go.

In its own inimitable couldn’t-run-a-whelk-stall kind of way, the far left did its cack-handed clumsy best to prove the modernisers correct. But the far right clearly senses that the heartland vote has had its heart broken, and is now out to stake its ominous claim.

If you want to see one scenario of what could happen next, consider the recent Israeli parliamentary vote. Labour’s namesake sister outfit – once Israel’s natural party of government – was beaten to third place by xenophobic nationalist formation of the unabashed hard right.

Britain’s indefensible and completely anti-democratic first past the post system seems to rule out a repeat performance at the Westminster level in 2010. But the euro election coming up this June is entirely another matter.

So far, working class disaffection has expressed itself in electoral abstention, which is one of the main reasons that Labour suffers from opinion poll ratings that show up the Michael Foot years in a whole new positive light. Come back, Mr Donkey Jacket, all is forgiven.

But euro elections are ideal for protest votes. Despite the sincere protestations of MEPs and their hangers on, nobody takes them remotely seriously. Perhaps the only useful function of the whole event is to provide angry electorates with the opportunity to deliver a cost-free kick in the balls to the sitting administration.

Minor parties incapable of winning a seat in the House of Commons have always been able to outperform, as both the Greens and UKIP are well aware. That Britain is set to send a fascist to Strasbourg is now taken as a given. After all, we have a fascist in the London Assembly, so what is to stop them?

But I was not aware, until I read an article by my former boss Mark Seddon in the Independent this morning, of predictions that the BNP will do rather better than that.

…the BNP could win up to half a dozen Euro seats and that it is possible that only the north-east and south-west of England could be without a BNP MEP after election night.

That alone would be the single most depressing political development since the Major victory of 1992. But what would really make the nasty far right’s night would be a percentage share of the poll ahead of Labour’s, if not nationwide than in at least one region. Impossible, you say? You must have forgotten the result of the Henley by-election already.

LIKE many men whose work sometimes necessitates stays in anonymous chain hotels in strange towns around the world with little or no discernible rainy weekday nightlife, sheer ennui has on occasion led me to drain the minibar prior to sampling the indeterminate erotic delights of pay-per-view adult television.

Indeed, one particular film - featuring a young Japanese lady in a tartan skirt, face carefully pixillated to preserve what could feasibly have been said to linger of her modesty - still remains my dominant memory of a particularly dismal trip to Kyoto in 1995.

Such entertainment presumably represents a significant revenue stream for the likes of Holiday Inn, a company that must shoulder much of the blame for putting temptation in the way of the business traveller.

But what I would never do is try to reclaim the cost involved in the exercise of solitary vice on my expense account. Indeed, the express policy of my employer is that reimbursement is out of the question in such circumstances. 'You jack off, you pay for it' is the official line.

It must logically follow that I am unable to condemn Richard Timney, husband of home secretary Jacqui Smith, in the matter his indulgence in pornography per se, after he was found to have watched two cable TV skin flicks. The embarrassment of the revelation will be punishment enough. But even if he is officially Ms Smith's parliamentary assistant, what he is not entitled to do is to stick the bill on the missus's tab, which she presumably had to sign off prior to submission.

That said, the sins of the old man are as nothing compared to Ms Smith’s chutzpah in demanding that the taxpayer stump up £116,000 after designating the spare bedroom of her sister’s gaff as ‘main residence’. In fairness, I should add here that MPs of all parties are in on this little racket, leading to the general perception that they are abusing the system.

A year or so back, a colleague of mine got the boot for gross misconduct after she was rightly or wrongly judged to have claimed for a hotel stay to which she was not entitled. This is known in vernacular English as ‘fiddling your exes’, and is widely understood to be a straightforward sacking offence. It is simply not admissible, even for parliamentarians.

There is an obvious answer, and that is a flat rate accommodation allowance for MPs with constituencies beyond reasonable commuting distance of Westminster, set at a level that covers four nights a week in a comfortable but not five star London hotel while the Commons is in session, and perhaps the provision of a council house for those with ministerial workloads.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking that the old Militant Tendency slogan of ‘a worker’s MP on a worker’s wage’ could profitably be resurrected. It’s not as if they need £150,000 a year or so to function as part of the political system, is it?

Footage: courtesy of Daily Telegraph

THERE is a 2,400-year tradition of political thought in the western tradition. Broadly speaking, we can say that it runs from Plato’s Apology and Crito to Damian McBride’s recently leaked emails to Derek Draper.

As classic statements of ideology go, ‘let’s make out the other guy went to clap clinic’ is hardly up there with Leviathan, Two Treatises of Government, State and Revolution, or the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Come back Beavis and Butthead, all is forgiven.

Let’s not get too self righteous here. As I remember from my time as a political journalist, rumours of type the errant spin-doctor sought to spread are commonplace among self-styled ‘Westminster insiders’.

Stories that amused the select few under the last Tory government included lurid tales of two cabinet ministers in a gay threesome with a well-known footballer and separate allegations of kiddie fiddler predilections, involved one senior Conservative and one leading Labour figure. An inflammatory - but professionally printed - pamphlet detailing the accusations against the latter was in general circulation.

Journalists frequently used to amuse themselves by making coded references to such gossip in their publication, to the gratification of those in on the joke.

McBride’s position was obviously untenable, and he had to go. But that does not make those who called so vociferously for his ouster any less hypocritical. It’s not as if the culture of backstabbing briefings is anything new, or the sole property of any single party.

Nevertheless, this state of affairs underlines once again the ideological poverty underlying all of contemporary politics. As other bloggers point out, McBride and Draper could have been corresponding with each other to discuss how best to highlight the systematic anti-working class nature of Tory politics.

But that is pretty hard to do when you are footsoldiers in an administration that is only marginally less subservient to the employers’ agenda than the one that will replace it some time next year. These guys really need a refresher course in what the labour movement should be all about.

BLAIRITES habitually seem to regard 1994 as akin to the Year Zero. New Labour activists - and not a few MPs, come to that - tend to have little grasp of the party’s history, beyond a vague notion that there used to be something called Old Labour, and that its manifest failings allowed the Tories to dominate politics for an extended period.

So there is some irony in the latest poll findings, which put Labour on just 26%. That is, of course, less than the 27.6% it secured in the general election of 1983, on the basis of a leftwing manifesto the right dubbed ‘the longest suicide note in history’.

If the last week does prove to be the tipping point in New Labour’s fortunes, the McBride/Draper emails might just go down as rather pithier examples of the ‘bye-bye cruel world’ genre.

Gordon Brown’s government is now less popular than Labour in opposition under Michael Foot, and according to the pollsters, the latest survey has the potential to translate into a 120-seat Tory majority. But everything will depend on the distribution of the votes, which could simply stack up uselessly in heartland constituencies.

The fear now has to be not a re-run of 1983, but a re-run of 1931. The election of that year is usually seen as the worst defeat ever sustained by Labour. Yet it is worth noting that it took an average of 29% where it stood, and just under 28% if 67 uncontested seats are factored in. Labour came out with just 46 MPs, mostly from the coalfields and the inner city slums.

The difference between now and then is that in many constituencies, Labour exists largely on paper, and wider working class organisation in trade unions and tenants’ associations is at its weakest since the second world war.

I suspect that many on the left don't grasp just how calamitous the coming decade could prove. I've spoken to revolutionary defeatists within Labour who believe that a spell in opposition will strengthen the small socialist layer that remains. Can they really be oblivious to the prospect of defeat on a magnitude from which Labour will never recover?

Doubtless others will maintain that the smack of firm Tory government will dispel illusions in reformism, providing the most propitious circumstances for the formation of a new workers' party, or whatever other nonsense they picked up at last weekend's cadre school.

Unfortunately, that is not the most likely trajectory, if only because British far left remains organically incapable of serious politics. Working class depoliticisation on the one hand and growing support for the British National Party can be taken as given.

This scenario could be less than one year from fruition. Be careful what you wish for, comrades. You might just get it.

I FREQUENTLY open my email inbox and find messages sent by Gordon Brown, Alistair Darling, and Harriet Harman mingled with regular notifications of huge lottery wins and adverts for penis enlargement cream.

Well, those are the names that crop up in the ‘from’ column, anyway. It’s not that I am a friend of the stars, you understand. Spamming has become perhaps the chief means by which New Labour communicates with members, usually with the intent of tapping them for a donation.

There is also LabourList, which for reasons most people could have guessed in advance, has failed to take off. Nick Assinder, editor of the indispensable www.politicshome.com, is sadly correct in his assessment of the project:

Labour tends to be riddled with control freakery so from day one Labour
List looked like it could have been written in Labour HQ - dull, loyal to a fault, not very well written and not giving much of a voice to grassroots, dissident opinion.

I could also talk in this connection about Red Rag, but moving swiftly on …

Labour efforts to get its points across used to be so more serious. When I first joined the Labour Party, it published Labour Weekly, for instance. Given its remit, it was never going to be a particularly racy read. But as a source of statistics to counter the campaigns of the rightwing press in the early 1980s, it was a useful resource.

There was also New Socialist, an official party magazine that was open to a range of contributors, and not just those who today would be called ‘on message’. It regularly carried articles from Tony Benn, Stuart Holland and even one or two open Marxists.

In other words, it was a far cry from the derisory and instantly binnable glorified newsletters that get sporadically posted out to Labour Party members, which are entirely ‘ra ra ra’ in tone and make no attempt to argue about politics.

I’m not arguing for a return to newsprint, of course. But Labour websites and other internet-based efforts could learn a thing or two from the past.

It strikes me that at least part of the reason people join political parties is because they are interested in political ideas. To dumb down membership communications to the extent Labour has done is to do them a disservice.

They are literate individuals, quite able to consider a range of conflicting viewpoints within the spectrum of broad church Labour politics and then making up their mind as to which they support.

Moreover, given that politics is about convincing the electorate of a party’s view of the world, it is essential that its underlying beliefs occasionally be spelled out on a reasonably coherent basis.

It may be, of course, that the Labour leadership is unable to do this because it does not have meaningful ideas to spell out. But if dreaming up clap clinic smears is the best it can do, then we are surely in deep trouble.

ROTTEN rightwing sectarian Trot-bashing bastard though he is, I am genuinely sorry to hear that my Hackney North CLP comrade, the well-known New Labour blogger Luke Akehurst, will be hospitalised for some time with a debilitating disease called chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.

Crikey. I’m not sure what that is, even after googling it, but if it is anything like painful as it sounds, it must be nasty indeed. And unlike me, he has been principled enough to opt out of the private health cover that goes with his job, and patiently wait for NHS treatment instead.

I bumped into his partner Linda while dropping the kids off at school earlier this week, and she tells me: ‘Same old Luke, just without the use of his legs’. But for anyone who knows this non-stop 24/7 canvassing machine, that says it all. The local party will fall to pieces without him.

Get well soon, mate. Here’s hoping you make a full recovery, if only so that you will be well enough to shoot come the glorious day.

LABOUR backbenchers did not rebel against the Blair government in sufficient numbers to prevent war on Iraq, major curtailments of civil liberty, the privatisation of air traffic control, the abolition of student grants, or benefit cuts directed against single mothers and the disabled.

Yet last night the Brown administration could not muster a parliamentary majority to overturn a Liberal Democrat motion allowing Ghurka veterans to live in Britain.

I’m not commenting here on the merits of the substantive issue; I’m opposed to immigration controls and recognise that Nepalese service personnel have as much right to reside in the UK as anyone else.

But the point is that the 27 Labour MPs who voted for the Lib Dem position – and the dozens more who abstained – did so in response to a campaign led by the Daily Telegraph and a kukri-wielding Joanna Lumley, plainly motivated more by reactionary jingoism than support for open borders. The comparison with votes on what should be core ideological concerns for democratic socialists is surely instructive.

Meanwhile, it appears there is more trouble in store shortly, with the imminent publication of MPs expense claims before the July recess. The Daily Mail seriously reports fears that three Labour MPs are contemplating suicide, as a quick recce through the hotel receipts will show them up as infidel spouses.

Tough it out, guysk don’t top yourselves. Nine times out of ten, the average missus/hubbie will forgive a dalliance or two, if only for the sake of the kiddies.

I somehow suspect that most adults will take the view that politicians’ love lives are their own affair, as they did after that little John Major-Edwina Currie bombshell. What will hurt rather more will be revelations of double claims for the hotsheets hotel rooms.

In the mid 1990s, Labour and the entire left rightly castigated those Tory MPs found to have accepted a few hundred quid in plain brown envelopes as their reward for tabling parliamentary questions.

I suppose an argument could be made that it is slightly less morally reprehensible to accept bungs from the Phoney Pharaoh than it is to scam the taxpayer directly, if only because no political favours are involved.

But what is depressing is the persistence of low-level peculation. MPs seem not to have twigged it, but they are in fact on a better than decent middle class wedge that should run to all reasonable household bills and then some.

Yet some seem determined to cream off a few extra bob by any means necessary. They sell their integrity not in return for a six figure sum, in the manner of certain members of the House of Lords, but for less than the price of a made-to-measure suit, the better to facilitate a clandestine bonk.

Several commentators today draw parallels to the fag end of the Major government and where we are today, something I myself did last year.

It is worth noting that at no time in its history, prior to the rise of Blair and Brown, would it even have been conceivable for a Labour government to find itself in such a situation.

The left’s ethical standards have traditionally been higher than those of the corrupt and business-funded political right. But then, not the least effect of business-funded New Labourism has been the erosion of basic labour movement morality.

JUST a few weeks after the Social Democratic Party was launched in 1981, it was claiming 50,000 members. To resurrect a period expression more usually spoken in relation to the Top 30 chart, the SDP even went number one with a bullet; before its official formation, the pollsters rated it the most popular political force in Britain. Yet younger readers of this blog can readily be forgiven for never even having heard of them.

Such was the fate of the last attempt by a hardcore faction of Labour rightwingers to have a go at what the buzzword of the time described as ‘breaking the mould’. If the Blairite groupuscule currently said to be considering a repeat performance think that anybody is going to be heartbroken if they jump over to the Liberal Democrats, that only underlines how far out of touch they are with either the voting public or the wider labour movement. Let’s put it this way. They will not be taking any electoral clout with them.

Any notion that their defection will constitute ‘a realignment of British politics’ on the lines of 28 years ago testifies most loudly to their immense arrogance. Years after the limos stopped turning up at their doorsteps, these guys actually believe that somehow they still matter.

Check out some of the kite flying exercises. Apparently the Blairites are fearful that Labour is ‘lurching to the left’, with the purely symbolic 50p tax rate about the only hard evidence they can evince. Laughably, the architects of Labour’s impending general election devastation insist that this move alone – which has proved if anything rather popular – will result in meltdown at the polling booth next year.

Hence this little-noticed prediction from columnist Anatole Kaletsky in the Times last week:

The remnants of new Labour [will] probably split off and join the Liberal Democrats who would become the dominant left-of-centre party, while Brownites and old Labour activists would form an explicitly socialist party.

Kaletsky’s prognosis is plainly flawed on two key points. First, there is no meaningful sense in which the Lib Dems – with or without a handful of Blairite has-beens by way of a new ingredient in the soap powder - can be described as ‘left of centre’.

Second, the Brownites have been an integral part of New Labourism since the birth of what we used to call ‘the project’. Differences with Blairism have been differences of personality rather than substance. Accordingly, they do not have the capacity to form part of an ‘explicitly socialist party’.

Nevertheless, the speculation was concretised over the weekend by Lord Ashdown’s interview with the Daily Telegraph, in which he claimed that ‘Labour MPs disillusioned with Gordon Brown’s leadership have held private talks with the Liberal Democrats about defecting’.

There are signs that certain constituency parties are growing really Left-wing. Senior Labour figures have said to me, 'If that happens, I’m off’.

Such a contention – which of course fits squarely with the Daily Telegraph view of the world – was allowed to pass unchallenged. If any constituency parties were ‘growing really leftwing’, I’d be the first to cheer. Sadly, I can see little basis in reality for the idea.

Let’s just say that nobody on the Labour left is urging the Blairites to stay. But if split happens, it will be based not on any updated Limehouse Declaration, but what could more appropriately be called a Winehouse Declaration, based on the simple desire to move from one party to another once the highs run out. Anyone thinking of making the switch should bear in mind that the Lib Dems are reportedly no longer doing any Charlie these days.

THEY always were an unrepresentative activist minority that operated as a party within a party, you know. Yet their impact was to make Labour unelectable, thanks to extremist policies that were unpopular with the public.

Repeatedly they manipulated the rulebook to rig parliamentary selections, ensuring the ouster of hard-working good constituency MPs, and replacing them with identikit candidates committed to their factional agenda.

But then, what else could be expected of a bunch of ex-Trots and former commies, who alienated the majority of long-standing members by importing the methods they learned in student union politics into the heart of the Labour Party?

Indeed, these people were frequently beholden to ideologies from outside the traditional spectrum of Labourism. Likewise, it was never properly revealed who funded their efforts.

Crucially, trade union leaders let them get away with it, feeling themselves pressurised into genuflecting to their carpet-bagging machinations, even if that meant voting against the best interests of their rank and file.

The tragic result was to guarantee the return of a reactionary and rightwing Conservative government.

Your starter for ten: which school of Labour politics in recent decades do the above paragraphs best describe? Hint: it is an –ism, and it begins with the letter B.

ON JOBSEEKER’S, shacked up with the girlf, splitting the rent but still claiming full whack housing benefit? You could be looking at custodial, mate. The Department of Work and Pensions website warns:

There are no exceptions. People who knowingly withhold information or deliberately fail to report a change in their circumstances are benefit thieves. It is not ‘playing the game' – it is breaking the law!

Secretary of State at the DWP, shacked up with the girlf, splitting the rent but still claiming full whack second home allowance as an MP? If your name is James Purnell, such behaviour is ‘within the rules’, as the current euphemism has it. So there are exceptions after all.

If only the bloke could plead financial necessity, I might even have some sympathy. I’ve been there myself, you see. I’ll be in deep shit unless the statute of limitations applies, or something like that, but I admit that on several occasions in the 1970s and 1980s, I was a benefit fraudster too.

What’s more, I’m still not convinced that such activity is necessarily morally wrong, or to be more precise, that it is necessarily morally wrong in all circumstances.

My direct experiences came during a period of mass unemployment, presided over by a Conservative government who campaigned on the slogan ‘Labour isn’t working’ when one million people were on the dole, before going on to triple the joblessness count.

I genuinely looked for work and would have taken any reasonable offer of employment. But this was the last ‘worst recession since the war’, and as many unskilled youngsters found out, there were no legit jobs to be had. The only alternative was to sign on.

Supplementary benefit, as it was called, was supposedly enough to keep body and soul together, but didn’t run to such luxuries as halfway fashionable clothes or going to watch a decent gig. You can mount a philosophical argument that this is precisely the level at which supp ben should have been pitched, but no self-respecting teenager or twentysomething was going to see things like that. Not to be able to do what other young people do is, by definition, social exclusion of the worst kind.

The obvious solution was to take the occasional cash in hand number, an arrangement that seemed to suit everybody. Employers, some of them eminently respectable, got the work done on the cheap. Their employees got to pay the rent on their bedsit and thus avoided homelessness.

Perhaps the hardest day of work I have ever done in my life was eight hours spent scrubbing pans in the basement kitchen of an ultra-posh five-star hotel in the West End, famed as a dining haunt for rightwing Labour MPs. Sixteen measly quid, every penny well earned.

It wouldn’t surprise me if that fine upmarket establishment is to this day getting its washing up done for next to nothing by illegal immigrants. So I won’t name the joint, because some people might still need the lousy money.

Yes, of course I’ve read about the couple that spent two years sailing round the world on their £100,000 yacht, living off the proceeds of their property business while pocketing tens of thousands of pounds in housing benefit, disability living allowance, council tax relief and income support. They were banged up, and quite right too.

But this is not the typical face of benefit fraud, and nor is Shameless. The reality is that the vast majority of ‘benefit cheats’ are people who are so hard up that they have no choice but to do what they have got to do.

That is what makes the current DWP poster campaign – ‘Benefit thieves, we’re closing in’ – quite so stomach-turning. Now we find out that the slick Blairite politician running the show himself perpetrates behaviour absolutely analogous to benefit fraud in all respects save the provenance of the handout. Hypocrisy doesn’t even begin to describe it.

I CAN’T be the only Labour Party member who has had to put in an expenses claim at work in the last week or so. Well aware that my boss knows my political affiliation, I was expecting a few snidey comments, and I certainly got them.

‘Sure all these claims are within the rules, Dave?’, he sniggered as he flicked through assorted taxi, restaurant and hotel receipts. All 100% legit, Chief, and not a bathplug bill among them, I quipped back. I briefly contemplated flipping the subject – to coin a phrase – and making some wisecrack about cleaning out my moat myself, but thought better of it.

Quite clearly, this whole episode represents symbolic closure of an entire political era, and has left me reflecting on how Parliamentary Labour Party managed to debase itself to the quite frightening extent that it has succeeded in achieving.

My conclusion is that part of the blame is the way that sheer political ignorance has bred the mindless subservience that has dominated the backbenches since circa 1994. It has created an intellectual culture that has left far too many Labour representatives at Westminster unable to see what is wrong with the way in which they have acted.

It’s not so much that Labour MPs these days are unlettered in the basic arguments of Marxism and the implicit working class morality that doctrine inculcates, or lack an impressive roster of postgraduate degrees in the more arcane reaches of political science.

It is rather that they are unread even in the basic tenets of social democracy. Few evince even passing familiarity with the ideas of Tawney, Crosland, Rawls or even Will Hutton. They cannot marshal even the simple reformist or liberal democratic arguments against whatever authoritarian wheeze the government dreams up in any given week.

No wonder they have parroted whatever they have been told to say in favour of neoclassical endogenous growth theory, the knowledge economy, inflation targeting or the private finance initiative. Most are not equipped with the entry level grasp of Keynesianism needed to counter such nonsense.

Nor is there generalised awareness of labour movement history, or the merest hint of comprehension of the contemporary relevance the Taff Vale decision, the general strike or 1931. The collective memory does not extend further back than a vague insistence that the early 1980s = bad, mid-1990s onwards = good.

Thanks to all the gaps, there is little chance of these people exhibiting a rudimentary centre-left moral compass that realises that seeking refunds for pay-per-view porno flicks or mortgages paid off long ago, while purporting to represent ordinary working people, is unacceptable. Even if such behaviour is ‘within the rules’.

AT SOMETHING like 1,700 words, the Guardian’s editorial takes an awfully long time to get to a point it could have set out with considerably greater simplicity: sack Brown. Coming from what probably remains the newspaper of choice for most Labour activists, and on the day before a key electoral contest, the grotesque circumlocution and polite periphrasis with which the message is delivered will come as little consolation.

Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the voters to stick the size nine DM boot in. According to some polls, Labour will achieve support as little as 16-20% in the euroelections. All of sudden, the 23% that Michael Foot secured at the low point of Labour’s fortunes in the early 1980s is no longer much of a stick with which to beat the left.

Let me spell out the implications slowly, for the benefit of the terminally deluded. Backing for the government on Thursday may well equate to at best one-fifth of a turnout that could itself plunge as low as 40% of the electorate, which on my maths represents positive endorsement from just 8% of those entitled to vote.

Remember also that millions of people purposely make sure that their names are on the electoral register, either in the hope of evading council tax or simply because they do not consider the right to vote worth even the simple effort of texting the local authority returning officer.

In percentage point terms, the blunt truth is that enthusiasm for New Labour has been reduced to a low single figure of the adult population. And given the evisceration of party democracy over the last 15 years, there are no Bennite bogeymen, trade union barons scoffing beer and sandwiches in smoke-filled rooms or evil entrist bedsit Trots to blame. This is the public’s verdict on 12 years of New Labour and New Labour alone in power.

Weimar Brownism is the direct denouement of 1994 and after, the logical outcome of the qualitative change in Labour wrought by The Project, in which Brown was initially an equal partner, despite his animosity towards Blair.

Harold Wilson famously proclaimed – in language that would be deemed impossibly Islamophobic these days – that the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing. In ceasing to be a crusade, it did indeed become nothing.

In abandoning social democracy, it lost any political distinctiveness and lapsed into just another rightwing party. And yes, I realise I am speaking in the past tense, just as the prime minister now speaks of his chancellor.

What is surprising is the arrogance and imbecility of all those who bought into the line, as delivered 24/7 on that wondrous new technology of the period, the pager. Did all those Labour MPs and party officials – including those from a working class background, with time on the tools to their name – really assume that Labour voters would in perpetuity turn up at the polling booth and vote for the proverbial donkey in the red rosette, even though they were offered policies directly deleterious to their interests?

Businessmen might be good for million quid cheques, especially when they are on the sniff for policy favours. But unfortunately they are not good for millions of votes; only the electorate can deliver that. It takes amnesia on a spectacular scale to forget such fundamentals.

The corollary of Lord Mandelson being intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich turned out to be a party totally chilled about those that remain dirt poor. Supporters of New Labourism frequently trumpeted this or that initiative on social exclusion and the famous pledge to end child poverty. But social inequality has – with the exception of a brief period – steadily risen throughout the Blair and Brown years.

Since I began to write these words, the Guardian website has posted this story:

A group of rebel MPs have begun soliciting signatures for a round robin letter calling for Gordon Brown to step down, which they plan to hand to the prime minister after the results of the local and European elections have come in on Monday morning.

The Guardian has learned there are reports that the backbenchers think they can reach 70 or 80 signatories, with some claims that the letter could be delivered to Downing Street by the end of today.

Yet even if Brown were to heed the kindly words either written or authorised for publication by Alan Rusbridger, himself no mean New Labour cheerleader, the reality is that a change of leader is no longer enough to save Labour at the next election.

The work of reconstruction, if it can be undertaken at all, will require a fundamental overhaul of personnel and the introduction of policies that openly favour working people. It will, in short, necessitate a 180 degree U-turn on the road taken since the death of John Smith.

WHEN Stalinist hardliners from an utterly discredited ancien regime parked their tanks on Yeltsin’s lawn in August 1991, they were probably expecting a smooth transition.

After all, most of the conspirators had been part of the apparatus for decades. Some – including figurehead Gennady Yanayev – were already fulltime politicos 26 years previously, when the bureaucracy arranged the bloodless ouster of Khrushchev.

Many years of dictatorship had left the population of the USSR cowed and subservient, seemingly capable only of perpetual deference to the outcome of whatever faction emerged victorious from Byzantine internal power struggles staged by competing Kremlin cliques.

Yet Yeltsin decided to take a stand inside the Russian White House. He did so in the knowledge that had the junta wanted to mount a full-scale attack on his bastion, it would inevitably have been successful.

But after a three-day stand-off, the conspirators lost their nerve, fearful perhaps that precipitate action would plunge the country into a civil war that would have made the break-up of Yugoslavia look as eirenic as a loved-up illegal rave somewhere off the M25. They hesitated, and as a result, they failed.

Now Blairite hardliners from an utterly discredited ancient regime – the Telegraph names them as ultrablairites Alan Milburn and Stephen Byers - are planning to get rid of Gordon Brown. Or 'cut him loose', as the current euphemism has it.

They, too, have spent rather too long inside a political machine that could at one stage have offered the Communist Party of the Soviet Union lessons on how to operate as an ideological monolith.

Like Yanayev, Pugov and Lukyanov, they seem to believe that a handover will prove relatively unproblematic, and to be banking on the docility of Labour’s rapidly-shrinking membership base and trade union affiliates.

But they must know that the Brownites will not cave in without a fight. If the putschists dilly-dally, their scheme will collapse, just as surely as did the plans of the short-lived State Emergency Committee.

If the decision to send in the crack troops proves to be a miscalculation – and let’s face it, not even Hazel Blears is quite as scary as the average Red Army tank regiment – the consequences could be calamitous.

OK, boys, we know you are capable of the kind of political brutality that the big girl’s blouses who tried to save the Soviet motherland somehow could not find in their hearts. Learn the lessons; if you are going to do it at all, do it hard, do it clean and get it over with fast.

THERE is a new political cliché abroad. Large numbers of commentators are keen to point out that Alan Johnson – Britain’s new home secretary, and possibly its next prime minister – has got something called a ‘back story’.

I’ve heard several Labour politicians – all obviously singing off the same cribsheet – use the expression in broadcast interviews. Meanwhile, an editorial in The Economist this week makes conspicuous mention of his ‘penurious and industrious back story’, while The Scotsman is eager to point out that ‘Johnson's back story is as good as it gets’.

A gushing Polly Toynbee insists that the man has ‘the grace and charm to match his perfect backstory’, while her Guardian colleague Anne Perkins believes ‘he has a better backstory than any Labour leader since Ramsay MacDonald’. Yeah, we kinda know the frontstory on that one, don't we?

They are even picking up on this meme on the other side of the Atlantic. Christian Science Monitor refers to Alan Johnson as ‘a smooth-talking Londoner whose backstory as a former postman may help Labour reconnect with its grassroots’.

Such a surfeit of backstory can only mean that Johnson is – oh, I can hardly bring myself to say the words – actually working class. Comes from a broken home. Grew up in a council flat. Left school at 15. Did a proper job as a postie.

These days, word that a leading politician has exactly the same background as millions and millions of other people is enough to make him stand out as a weirdo amid all those normal Old Etonians.

If you need a comment on just how socially unrepresentative politics has become, the apotheosis of Alan Johnson’s backstory tells you all you need to know. Why don't the commentariat just brand him a chav and have done with it?

41: And Jesus sat over against the treasury, and beheld how the people cast money into the treasury: and many that were rich cast in much. 42: And there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing. 43: And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury. 44: For all they did cast in of their abundance; but she of her want did cast in all that she had, even all her living.
Mark 12:41-44, King James Version

If Labour is going to do wealth redistribution at all, it should at least make sure that it is doing wealth redistribution in the right direction. Its failure to suss out the basics of social democracy represents one reason why the decision to push the abolition of the 10p tax band through the Commons last night will prove electorally disastrous.

In Britain today, the problem is that ‘many that are rich’ do not ‘cast in much’ to the treasury. They pride themselves on casting in as little as they can bleeding well get away with. Either they blag themselves non-dom status, or they stick their money into a tax-exempt trust fund in Bermuda.

So hedgies pay a lower marginal rate than those who scrub investment bank floors. But rather than challenge this state of affairs, New Labour seems determined to beat up on the certain poor widows. Make no mistake, the voters get the symbolism.

For the many, not the few? On the side of hardworking families? All the effort entailed in programming MPs and activists to reiterate such soundbites like so many I-speak-your-weight machines in a 1960s fairground is instantly lost when you clobber hundreds of thousands of Britain’s poorest taxpayers and send their money up a few notches further up the food chain.

The entire 10p tax band episode has been botched from its somewhat inglorious start in 2007 to yesterday’s finish. Ironically, the cock up has been so complete that the backlash forced government to implement compensation packages that will leave the vast majority of basic rate taxpayers in pocket.

But that is not the big fat point here. Half a million people – including some of Britain’s poorest wage-earners – have been made worse off. New Labour supporters who doubt this point can read a neutral analysis here.

Just 16 Labour MPs – some of them not exactly hardcore leftists – found the courage to vote against a policy that is just plain wrong. I’d be grateful if anyone could point me to a list.

As I read the scripture above, I take Jesus to be making the point that even a quid a week means more to the very poorest than several hundred pounds in tax allowances means to the affluent. It’s a real surprise to find that the son of the manse appears to be reading it in quite a different way.

UNILATERAL nuclear disarmament formed part of the manifesto on which Gordon Brown was first elected to the House of Commons. I do not know whether he was ever an individual member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, but back in the early 1980s, such an affiliation was certainly no hindrance to ambitious young backbenchers. Just ask Tony Blair.

The trouble is, Labour’s peacenik credentials have certainly been somewhat tarnished since then. What, then, are we to make of the news that the prime minister will offer to scrap one of Britain’s four Trident nuclear submarines at a forthcoming session of the United Nations Security Council?

The most striking aspect of the announcement is the sheer lack of underlying logical coherence. Either this country needs weapons of mass destruction that enable it to nuke other nations at all times, or it doesn’t.

If it does, why compromise the ability to mount 24/7 nuclear submarine patrols just to shave a few bob off the maintenance bill? The cash involved amounts at best to single figure billions, which is about one tenth of what it cost to bail out Northern Rock.

It is high time Labour got its head around the idea that Britain is no longer a superpower. It cannot afford nuclear weapons and there are no conceivable circumstances in would use them. Why not simply scrap them and have done with?

The standard justification is that nukes are ‘essential for our national security’. That is an argument for proliferation. On those grounds, India, Pakistan, North Korea and Israel have as much of a case as we do. So did Saddam Hussein. If they make us safer, then they would make Iran, Egypt, Taiwan and Brazil safer, too.

As Nobel Prize winner Mohamed el Baradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Authority, comments: ‘It is very hard to preach the virtues of non-smoking when you have a cigarette dangling from your lips and you are about to buy a new pack.’

In sum, the move is not – as Kate Hudson, chairwoman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, puts it – ‘a serious and positive first step towards the scrapping of both the current Trident nuclear weapons system and its replacement’.

The reality is that it amounts to little more than blatant pre-conference grandstanding on Brown’s part, especially as there is no chance of it being enacted before Labour is turfed out of office by the Tories next year.

This is a cost-free cheap stunt dressed up as a grab for the unilateralist moral highground that Labour vacated at least two decades ago.

FOR generations, the default assumption of southerners meeting northerners has been that they are likely to be Labour supporters.

There always have been pockets of Toryism at positions further up the M1 than Londoners usually care to go, from the rolling farmlands of the East Riding to the Cheshire stockbroker belt, of course.

But they were more than outweighed by a mass base of proletarian steelworkers, miners, textile workers and shipbuilders. Not for nothing do Yorkshire, Lancashire and Tyneside rank among the historic cradles of Labourism.

These have been the bastions of ‘our people’, the ones who voted Labour in 1979. The ones who voted Labour in 1931, for that matter.

Until now. Here’s the findings of the latest opinion poll in this morning’s FT:

The Tories have built a narrow four-point lead in the north, eradicating the 19-point Labour lead in the region that underpinned Tony Blair’s last general election victory, the research shows. The 11.5 percentage point swing from Labour to the Tories in the north since the May 2005 poll is the largest for any region of Britain.

This, after claims that the Tories are about to become the dominant party in Wales.

The symbolism alone should make it abundantly clear to even the most dim-witted New Labour politician or policy wonk that the game is up. As I have argued before, bases that take generations to build can evaporate in a matter of years.

Deindustrialisation and depoliticisation have kicked in to the extent where Labour faces defeat on a scale that may leave it never again in a position to govern. What I find most alarming is that nobody seems to be particularly alarmed.

LISTENING to a group of young people shouting ‘Labour, Labour, Labour; out, out, out’ while marching past Brighton’s conference centre yesterday took me back to when I was the same sort of age. We had a similar chant, you see. But back in the 1980s, the slogan was aimed at Maggie, Maggie, Maggie.

Instantly recognisable was the intensity of the hate on display, which was clearly of the kind that will last a lifetime. My twentysomething animosity to the Conservatives has been enough to secure decades of commitment to the far left, and I don’t doubt that a whole layer of students, young workers and a million or so NEETs in 2009 are in pretty much the same frame of mind about the party of which I am a member.

I’m assuming, if only from what I overhear apolitical workmates in a similar age bracket say, that this mood is generalised and not confined to the radical elements that each successive decade inevitably throws up.

And frankly, New Labour might just as well have striven actively to cultivate the contempt of the young, as evidenced by everything imaginable from tuition fees to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the parliamentary expenses scandal.

Not trying to cause a big sensation. Just talking ‘bout their generation. If I still looked good in tight jeans and didn’t have to comb my hair in unusual directions to hide the bald spots, I’m sure I’d feel the same way too.

Any defence, justification or spurious apologetics for Labour I can offer – from the national minimum wage to my inimitable old git reminiscences of just how nasty Conservative government truly can be - will have little impact on people who were schoolkids 12 years ago.

For instance, I remember telling a keen teenage fan of house music how the Conservatives once tried to ban ‘repetitive beats’. He clearly found the idea amusing, but I doubt that the revelation is going to change the way he votes.

In recent posts I have detailed how New Labour has lost the north, and pointed to analysis that suggests it will be wiped out in Wales. For good measure, let me highlight this Evening Standard poll, which indicates that 17 of its 44 seats in London are set to go.

To lose regions such as this – the historic cradles of Labourism – is of course calamitous, but not necessarily irreversible. Lose an entire age group, on the other hand, and you can kiss government goodbye until another one comes of age. See you in a quarter of a century, comrades.

THE year is 1982 and the soundtrack is Town called malice, Come on Eileen and Should I stay or should I go. The boys look good in rockabilly-inspired flat top haircuts, lumberjack shirts and 501s, while ra-ra skirts and leggings are all the rage for girls. Israel invades Lebanon, Britain and Argentina go to war over some islands somewhere in the South Atlantic, and Italy wins the world cup.

That was the last time Labour trailed the Lib Dems – or the Liberal-SDP Alliance, as they were back in the day – in the opinion polls. But the latest survey from Ipsos Mori gives Labour just 24%, one percentage point behind Clegg and co, with the Tories on 36%. And Cameron hasn’t had to kill a single Argie to get there.

It’s probably a rogue result; the Lib Dems appears to be enjoying an 8% post-conference bounce, and their ostensible advantage over Labour is well within the established margin of error for these things. But the symbolism is there, all the same.

I was a young Bennite activist in this period, and have for the last 27 years had to listen to the standard invective that early 1980s influx of lefties came close to destroying the Labour Party, and only the Long March to the neoliberal centre-right commenced under Kinnock enabled it to survive, let alone form the last three governments.

Unsurprisingly, I have never bought into the analysis. Michael Foot’s leadership was deliberately sabotaged by some of the very people now posing as the most consistent Labourites. Yes Polly Toynbee, I do mean you; protestations of the need for loyalty ring hollow from the mouths of erstwhile SDPers.

Then there was the Falklands Factor. Remember when making war on the third world was electorally popular? The contrast with the damage Afghanistan and Iraq have done to Labour’s standing could not be more complete.

New Labourites maintain that Labour in 1982 had been pushed back to its core constituency, and at the empirical level, that seems largely true. But the point is that we had a core constituency left; even that has now been dissipated by those who thought seven figures cheques from the super-rich were somehow adequate compensation for the loss of a mass electoral base.

The irony is that it the very people who will suffer the most under the Tories are the ones who will ensure their victory, largely by abstention but perhaps by voting fascist. Not a few will actively support the Conservatives.

The 1983 manifesto was famously dubbed the longest suicide note in history. But suicide notes are only notes, after all. There is all the difference in the world between writing one and actually committing suicide.

I NEVER did quite share the visceral contempt in which almost all lefties seem to hold The Sun, although I certainly understand where it’s coming from. The vicious personalised red-baiting in the Thatcher years, the bitterness generated by the Wapping dispute, and the way the bastards stitched up Kinnock all take some forgetting.

But I reckon that at least some of the loathing is down to snobbery. The Currant Bun is not Britain’s best-selling newspaper for nothing, and most of the people that read it are, well, you know, a bit … working class.

And although the red top doesn’t quite pull off the trick as well as once it did, the secret of its success has been the brilliance with which it has been able to articulate the concerns and prejudices of its readership.

When on form, it is as much the authentic voice of the Diamond Geezer as the Daily Mail is the precise ideological expression of the Middle England Chelsea tractor mum.

The Sun was the newspaper I was used to seeing about the house when I was growing up. After all, it contained as much news as my old man could ever use, in as much depth as a Labour-voting trade union stalwart railwayman who wasn’t much interested in anything that happened beyond Calais could ever want.

Throw in full perm plans for doing the pools, the most successful racing tipster in Fleet Street, and teenage girls getting their kit off, and it is entirely obvious why circulation peaked at four million.

After I got involved in politics, I made a point of reading the tabloid every day, in the same way I made a point of reading the Financial Times and Socialist Worker. Each of them, albeit after a different fashion, told you something you needed to know about how certain layers of society were thinking.

Until the early 1990s, The Sun – as well as the rest of the News International stable – formed an integral part of what socialists used to call ‘the Tory press’. Out and out hatred for the titles was de rigueur for Labour activists. Indeed, after Wapping, it was party policy for MPs to refuse interview requests from News International publications.

As late as 1992, Labour’s manifesto carried a commitment to a Monopolies and Mergers Commission inquiry into the concentration of press ownership. The provision didn’t mention Murdoch by name; then again, it didn’t have to.

New Labour changed all that, and quickly, too. As soon as it was clear that he would become the next prime minister, Blair flew to Australia at Murdoch’s expense, clocking up 50 hours flying time to address a conference of News International executives.

Reports at the time suggested that Murdoch and Blair came to an arrangement that would deliver endorsement from the Sun and neutrality from The Times, in return for the sort of favours that New Labour was only too anxious to do for leading businessmen anyway.

That’s never been proven, but concession after concession to the company were seen to follow. For many years, News International kept its tax bills below 2%, even as it railed against people that sponge off the state. Somebody please tell that scam has not been allowed to continue.

New Labour helpfully overturned in the Commons a Lords attempt to outlaw loss-leader promotions from The Times, a tactic clearly designed to kill off the Indie, which was struggling then as now. Blair even personally chatted up Berlusconi when Murdoch’s BSkyB wanted to buy controlling interest in Italian TV station.

But the ability to deliver favours not fairness necessitates being in office, and the present government seems unlikely to be in office a year from now.

In short, New Labour came to power on the back of a more or less explicit deal with the Murdoch empire. It’s going it some to argue that loss of support from the Sun will bring about its downfall, but the decision symbolises a watershed in British politics, nevertheless.

SIMPLY branding David Cameron a posh tosser worth worth thirty million quid – and that’s what he is, of course - is not enough to constitute a serious electoral strategy. Even if it were, New Labour no longer has the credibility to pull it off.

Yet the government seems to be relying on crude toff bashing as some kind of political Vergeltungswaffe, capable of reversing the fortunes of war even in the dying months of the conflict.

When Boris met Dave, tonight’s C4 docu-drama on the teenage adventures of today’s top Tories will be only the first doodlebug to land on the plucky British electorate, as a party that in its modern form is essentially an Old Fettesian creation moves into full-on anti-Old Etonian overdrive. But hey, I never did get these obscure public schoolie feuds.

Don’t misunderstand what I’m saying here. I’m a Marxist; for me, politics is all about class. The interests of the vast majority of society, who live by selling their labour power, are directly opposed to the interests of the small minority who live by exploiting it.

I certainly don’t buy the contention advanced by some commentators that stressing such themes are inappropriate in a country that thinks it’s so clever and classless and free. Most people certainly do not live in aspirational Middle England.

Those lobotomised ultra-Blarites still proffering this dodgy analysis should bear in mind that social mobility in Britain is in decline; in other words, class divisions are not only still with us, but actually hardening.

But the Labour Party is no longer top heavy with former miners and shipyard workers, and the privately educated are over-represented among the higher echelons.

After 15 years of consistent orientation away from the labour movement, it’s just that little bit too late to be playing the working class hero card. No one is going to take Mandy seriously as a wannabe horny handed son of toil.

That’s why Labour’s by-election efforts in Crewe and Nantwich last year - which saw young supporters camping it up in Wombling white tie and tails, the better to portray Conservative candidate Edward Timpson as a ‘Tory Toff’ - went so spectacularly wrong. It’s not as if the super-rich dress like characters in a 1930s Daily Worker cartoon any more.

Such behaviour was acutely embarrassing, even for those on the Labour left who still assert the central salience of class to political understanding. This is not something that would even have been tried in a southern constituency; instead, New Labour decided to patronise northern working class voters with such obvious nonsense.

Instead of offering policies that directly appeal to working class needs, they insultingly insinuated that the proles cannot make their minds up on the issues and asked them to choose an MP on the basis of caricature instead.

New Labour might just as well have gone the whole nine yards and got hapless candidate Tamsin Dunwoody to don a flat cap and lead a whippet around throughout the campaign, while emphasising her leisure time pursuits of pigeon fancying and growing marrows at every available press conference.

Or perhaps got her to pose pushing a pram while clad in a shell suit and clutching a 24 pack of Royals, in a bid to move with the times. They did tout her as a 'single mum of five', after all.

Yet the brains behind the New Labour operation have learned nothing from the debacle, and are instead out to repeat the stunt as a central theme of the general election. The electorate already knows the background of Cameron and Johnson, and plainly do not regard it as disqualification from high office.

Labour should either develop a brand of class-based politics updated for the twenty-first century, or it should butt out of the territory altogether, rather than reveal how utterly clueless it has become in doing what once came naturally.

THERE are many of us for whom good looks are perhaps not our primary selling point on the dating market. So it was admittedly unchivalrous of Labour’s former West Lancashire council leader Alan Bullen to describe physically unprepossessing size 16 local MP Rosie Cooper as ‘the elephant in the room’.

Sexist? Undoubtedly. Such conduct is fully deserving of a warning. Nevertheless, a three year ban on standing for local office strikes me as something of a harsh punishment for the gravity of the offence in question. As a political operator of several decades standing, Ms Cooper is clearly a big girl, as it were. She should certainly be able to handle uncomplimentary remarks.

I am reminded of the 1998 expulsion of Garth Frankland, a Labour councillor in the Chapel Allerton ward in Leeds, merely for referring to MP Paul Boateng as ‘that bastard’.

It is immediately apparent that double standards are at work. After all, one cabinet minister – John Hutton, it is widely alleged – predicted prior to Gordon Brown reaching Number Ten that he would make ‘a fucking awful prime minister’. That was no bar to his subsequent reappointment. I leave it to readers to reflect on the veracity of the prognosis.

Can there be an activist in the land, of any party, who has not badmouthed a colleague in similarly disparaging terms? Never mind. As Mr Bullen himself pointed out, his career is not over until the fat lady sings.

THE OLD socialist slogan that the worst imaginable Labour government is still preferable to the best imaginable Conservative government has been sorely tested over the last 12 years.
Not only did we not get the New Jerusalem, what we have lived through barely qualifies as a Barratt estate hastily flung up on the outskirts of the greater Tel Aviv conurbation.

But anybody who was politically aware in the 1980s knows full well what a Tory administration means for the poor, the sick, children in the state education system, patients in NHS hospitals, organised workers and benefit claimants. Surely any other government – any other government whatsoever - has to be better than that?

With the polls now pointing to a distinct possibility of a hung parliament, this question will be widely debated in the months ahead. If a Lib-Lab pact is the sole alternative to Cameron, there will be tremendous pressure on the left to grasp at such a straw, and gratefully at that.

John Harris looks at the issue in Guardian this morning. He starts from the implicit assumption that Labour and Lib Dems are both parties of the centre-left, and that alliance between them is thus somehow more natural than alliance between the Lib Dems and the Tories. To my mind, this line of reasoning is inoperative in a situation where the centre of gravity in all three major parties lies on the pro-market centre-right.

In any case, the ‘two halves of the centre left’ postulate - that somehow two essentially compatible traditions were artificially divided as a result of a series of historical mistakes - is one that socialists should reject.

The historic significance of Labourism rests in its partial expression of a clear desire for an independent working class voice in electoral politics in the opening decades of the twentieth century.

Further illustrating the tenuous nature of Lib Dem claim to any kind of centre-left standing is Clegg’s admission that he is minded to form a coalition with whichever party emerges the strongest after the 2010 poll. In context, those remarks could only have meant he would rather strike a deal with Cameron than a deal with whoever is Labour’s caretaker leader at this point.

On the other hand, the identikit far left insistence that there are no circumstances whatsoever in which Labour could even possibly contemplate working with a ‘bourgeois party’ has also been rendered nonsensical by Labour’s evolution since 1994. To put it mildly, Labour has left social democratic territory so far behind that there is no evidence a deal with the Lib Dems would represent a brake on incipient Labour radicalism.

So what if we do reach a scenario where the choices boil down to either Cameron or A.N. Other plus Clegg? Anti-Toryism is a particularly compelling shotgun to have held to one’s head.

In my heart, the revolutionary defeatist option has a certain appeal. A decade in opposition would allow Labour to reinvent itself, especially after the likely departure of the Blairites. Even then, the obvious question would be just how much or how little of its structures would survive the process.

And in my head? Well, never say never. Almost any sacrifice might just be worth it, if it keeps the Old Etonians out. I suppose left has nothing to lose by asking to see the terms of any proposed deal prior to making a decision. But many of us will need a lot of convincing.

WHAT Patricia Hewitt and Geoff Hoon have done today strikes me as one of the most obvious putsch bids since the events in Moscow in August 1991. Ms Hewitt’s insistence on the World at One that 'this is not an attempted coup’ carries about as much weight as a similar denial from Gennady Yanayev.

Frankly, I am only surprised that she did not seize control of the state broadcaster, in order to declare that Gordon Brown is standing down ‘on grounds of health’ and that Britain is henceforth under martial law. That seems to be the way these things usually go.

Obviously I do not count myself among Brown’s strongest political supporters. Even so, as a Labour Party member, I am dismayed at the endless succession of half-arsed efforts to topple the best prime minister Britain has got.

All of them have so far failed, simply because no grouping within Labour has a credible alternative leadership contender with a cohesive political platform in place. And yes, that goes for the soft left and the hard left as much as it does for the Blairites.

The argument that a new PM could somehow mitigate the kicking Labour is likely to get from the electorate at the next general election might have had some superficial traction a year ago. This late in the game, a switch to Johnson or either Miliband brother is likely to appear to the voters as a panic measure rather than carefully considered renewal.

As a zealous young Bennite in the early 1980s, I got used to being told that my brand of politics was disloyal, divisive and factionalist. But after the behaviour of the Blairites over the last period, retrospective rehabilitation is clearly overdue.

SAMUEL Johnson is credited with the dictum that ‘when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully’. So what went wrong in the case of New Labour, which seemingly stands clueless despite the clear proximity of the gallows?

The party that has been in government for the last 13 years is now just months away from opposition, and in all likelihood, will find itself out of office for more than one term. Yet as far as I am aware, the cohesive book-length analysis of how the outfit that swept all before it in 1997 finds itself where it is now, and how it could have avoided getting there, has yet to be published.

The Marxist left has offered some broad brush diagnoses, which have not been without some strengths. Blairism’s deliberate decision to dismantle a working class base that took generations to build, and not erect anything comparable in its place, was always going to look a bad move once the sugar rush wore off.

But Labourism never was Leninism. In order to discern signs of life on the no-longer-red planet, there has to be evidence of discernible social democratic cranial activity. With all due respect to the best efforts of Compass, it is quite clear that Cruddas is no Crosland. Piecemeal proposals to keep the Post Office public are fine, but what is lacking is a Big Picture vision of the good society.

The trouble with the ‘anything that wins elections’ school of focus group-centred realpolitik is that once you can no longer win elections, you are left essentially rudderless. Now that Labour has junked pretensions of being ‘the political wing of the labour movement’ and has ceded Middle England to Blonded-up Conservatism, what is Labour’s defining moral purpose?

It is fully apparent what questions need to be debated here. First – now that Gordon Brown has hinted that the topic is no longer unmentionable - what is Labour’s relationship with the working class? Ed Balls is reportedly pushing a ‘core vote strategy’, with Mandelson disingenuously countering that the core vote is not enough to win at the ballot box. Nobody ever said it was.

But unless Labour achieves palpable improvements in the lives of working class people – and let us remember that this is what it was founded to do – than the core vote can go elsewhere. Labour has to decide how much that matters to its future prospects, especially if it wants to hang on to trade union donations in the long run. It would be suicidal not to opt to reconnect, but drawing up a concrete plan to do so will not be easy.

Second, what has Labour got to say about capitalism? Mandelson famously quipped that ‘we are all Thatcherites now’. Unfortunately, Labour tried too hard to live up to the billing. But boom and bust wasn’t abolished after all. Recession and unemployment will be hallmarks of the 2010s.

Is the insistence that the market cannot be bucked and that it is best to let the bankers get on with it more or less unhindered any longer intellectually tenable? Must the British economy evermore be dependent on financial services? Could some kind of manufacturing base be re-established? Is there a role for public ownership in all this?

Third, foreign policy. Whatever positions one took in 2001 and 2003, it is high time to draw up a balance sheet of the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. The verdict can only be that they failed. Robin Cook wanted Labour to develop an ethical foreign policy, and resigned when it didn’t. Was that just a catchphrase, or can the next Labour administration manage something that resembles the designation?

These are just three of the issues that Labour should be debating, instead of squandering its energies in factional in-fighting. Never mind; it will have at least a decade to get its ideological ducks in a row.

THE Blairites brand him ‘psychologically flawed’ and ‘a fucking awful prime minister’, the Cameroons make jokes about his Asperger’s Syndrome. Rightwing bloggers insist that he is permanently zonked on heavy duty antidepressants known as Monoamine Oxidase Inhibitors.

Everyone, it seems, feels qualified to play the amateur headshrink when it comes to discussing the mental health of Gordon Brown.

Now Andrew Rawnsley has weighed in with accusations that the Labour leader is a nasty piece of work, much given to grabbing staff by the lapels and screaming invective in their faces, and thumping the back of passenger seats in a manner that scares chauffeurs.

Sure, Rawnsley has got a book to sell, and may conceivably be guilty of exaggeration, although in journalistic terms he is frankly the antithesis of the stereotypical sensationalist tabloid hack.

But unfortunately for the PM, there are enough corroborated tales of his behaviour to render official insistence that the claims are ‘malicious’ and ‘totally without foundation’ entirely risible.

That’s why attempts by some on the left to write off the story as a Tory-orchestrated personal smear, designed chiefly to deflect attention from Conservative policy shortcomings, themselves come across as entirely insincere, unconvincing, and therefore ultimately misguided.

No amount of reflex Labour loyalism can get away from the essential point that this kind of behaviour is unacceptable in any modern workplace, from Ten Downing Street to the local fish and chip shop. If anyone else comported himself in such a manner, any on-the-case union rep would have a grievance lodged with HR in no time flat.

Sure, it is legitimate to criticise the catchpenny way the Tories have tried to make political capital out of this through some two-bob front organisation charity, but that does not let Brown off the hook on the substance of the claim.

Shouty Boss Syndrome was actually commonplace as late as the 1980s. It is perhaps one of the few triumphs of employment legislation in the intervening period that jumped up middle managers now know that they cannot start bawling people out the minute they get the keys to their first company car.

The revelations, in and of themselves, are hardly likely to push any sizeable number of Labour voters into the Tory camp this late in the electoral cycle.

But speaking as somebody who will be out on the knocker for Gordon Brown’s party, all I can say is that they will not make the sell any easier. Once more we are being let down by the men at the top.