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.