Welcome to the Celebrity Big Politics house. Want to hold elected office? Forget all that nonsense about dutifully campaigning for your party at local level for a decade or two, maybe serving as a councillor, or getting your head around the subtler nuances of important policy issues.

Just concentrate on getting your name into the papers instead, or maybe start your own radio station or something.

Even demonstrable sympathy for the basic values of whichever party offers you the gig has nowadays pretty much been reduced to an optional extra.

Hence Comrade Digby can be parachuted into a ministerial job, while Tony Lit gets to be Conservative candidate in a high-profile by-election, just days after writing a four-figure cheque to Labour.

Thankfully, London mayor hopeful Boris Johnson is at least a bona fide Tory, and a politician more serious than his public image. But he remains better known for being on telly a lot than whatever it was he was party spokesman for until this morning.

As a general rule, picking political pop stars disempowers activists in favour of placemen and placewomen. But as the party leaderships see it, that’s just another another advantage. We need to do whatever we can to scupper this trend.

I see that the Tories have bravely opted to instigate a US-style primary contest, open to all London voters, to decide their standard bearer for the contest to run Europe’s biggest city.

Can I just urge all non-Tory London readers to participate and lump behind whichever runner looks like the biggest liability?

Look what might happen if we fail to act. I mean, I’m sure Beyoncé would make an excellent secretary of state for defence. It’s just I think she should have to spend a few years sticking leaflets through doors before she gets a crack at the job.

And sure, cannabis is a mind-altering substance. Some medical studies reportedly show that prolonged heavy use can result in psychosis. With no relevant expertise in the subject, I’m happy to take the specialists’ word for it. But alcoholism can – and in countless cases every year, does - also have that effect.

I’m told available varieties these days are several times more potent than the stuff I freely consumed as a 1970s teenager and a 1980s student. But does that necessarily mean greater consumption? Surely today’s kids only need toke on one or two stronger joints, instead of the half a dozen or so typically passed around when me and my mates used to spend the evening getting wasted back in the day?

Yet in the space of about a week, both the Tories and Labour have hinted at the possibility of reclassifying cannabis as a class b drug, rendering simple possession theoretically liable to five years in prison and an unlimited fine.

This, despite the fact that the first cohort of the hippy generation is probably squandering some of its old age pension on the odd quarter now and again, if only to relieve the rheumatism pains.

This, despite dozens of MPs having openly admitted trying the stuff, and despite the leader of the Conservative Party himself having been grounded at Eton as a schoolboy after being caught with a joint.

If it wasn’t an inappropriate wisecrack in the circumstances, it would be tempting to ask what either Iain Duncan Smith or Gordon Brown have been smoking. The debate should be about decriminalisation instead.

Attitudes horribly reminiscent of class politics remain rather more widespread than the Financial Times would like, a new international opinion poll reveals:

Large majorities of people in the US and in Europe want higher taxation for the rich and even pay caps for corporate executives to counter what they believe are unjustified rewards and the negative effects of globalisation …

In response to fears of globalisation and rising inequality, the public in all the rich countries surveyed – the US, Germany, UK, France, Italy and Spain – want their governments to increase taxation on those with the highest incomes. In European countries, a large majority want governments to go further and to impose pay caps on the heads of companies.

These findings are an instant answer to those who argue that there is no potential popular base for leftwing politics. The ‘them and us’ mentality hasn’t gone away. Progressive taxation – much like social ownership of major utilities – remains in line with majority public opinion.

In a democracy, majority public opinion is supposed to prevail. It is an illustration of just how far all mainstream parties have come to identify exclusively with the business interest that even such basic social democratic notions no longer get a look in.

It would be interesting to get a backset of this data. Was there ever a time when privatisation, fat cattery and general neoliberalism enjoyed widespread backing? I rather suspect the answer is no.

In short, the British left could not ask for more favourable conditions to make the wider case for entry level basic Marxist ideas, centred on the existence of separate classes and their irreconcilable interests. Why aren’t I surprised that it continues to fluff the task?

They talk of Lorenz curves, Gini coefficients and 90/10 ratios. But strip away the jargon economists use to discuss income distribution in Britain today, and the message is clear. The UK has become a dramatically more unequal society since 1979.

Even after a decade of New Labour, that trends continues unabated. But at least it has managed to reverse the non-stop growth in absolute poverty that commenced under Thatcherism, which is the minimum its members and voters would expect from it. Check out the facts for yourself at this website.

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.

Now the other parties are trying to get in on the act. Following the recent Tory package from IDS, today the Liberal Democrats have published a plan they claim will lift 5m out of relative poverty by 2020. Only another 7m people left to worry about, then. But, hey, let’s gloss over that one.

The proposals will be funded by taking entitlement to tax credit away from 2m families made up of ‘higher earners’, while increasing child benefits by a fiver a week, and paying state schools a ‘pupil premium’ of £1,500 a head to take on poorer kids. State pensions would once again be index-linked.

The suggestions seem welcome enough. But just one question: how does a relatively modest fine-tuning of means testing, spaced out over more than a decade, amount to anything like the ‘radical new agenda’ Lib Dem spokesman David Laws proclaims it to be? It certainly isn’t going to turn Stockwell into Stockholm overnight.

Should Gordon Brown call a snap general election for this autumn? There’s certainly plenty of speculation at Westminster to that effect right now.

On the face of it, it might prove a smart move. The ‘Brown bounce’ sees the new prime minister around six points ahead of the Tories in the polls. That’s quite a pay-off simply for not being Tony Blair.

Meanwhile, Cameron is getting plenty of grief. His rightwingers are revolting following two humiliating by-election defeats last month, and even the Daily Mail is giving him a hard time for choosing a photo opportunity in Rwanda over a photo opportunity in his flooded constituency.

Matthew Tempest at Guardian Online offers this:

A Labour MP last night confirmed that the party was on "election footing", following a series of poll leads, well-received policy initiatives and last night's successful UN resolution on Darfur …

Sir Menzies Campbell has suggested that Mr Brown might use his speech at the Labour party conference to call a snap election - and insisted the Liberal Democrats are ready for one.

In addition, Mr Brown has conspicuously appointed Douglas Alexander, the international development secretary, as elections coordinator, and asked Ed Miliband, the Cabinet Office minister, to start writing a manifesto.

On the other hand, bear in mind that Labour is skint. As the 2006 accounts recently published by the Electoral Commission recently reveal, it is something like £1m in the red and shedding staff, while the Tories have a surplus of £4.2m and are hiring.

Here’s a different take on the snap election claim, this time from Philip Stephens of the Financial Times:

[T]he prospects of the innately cautious Mr Brown throwing the dice in an autumn election must be close to zero. Barring a Tory implosion, I am almost as sceptical about a spring 2008 poll …

Yet hard as it is to see Mr Cameron winning, it is much easier to imagine Mr Brown losing. The boundary changes will reduce his majority to between 50 and 55 seats. That means the Tories need only win an additional 25 or so seats to leave the prime minister heading a crippled, minority government. A swing of 1.5 per cent, half that achieved by William Hague in 2001, would do the trick. To my mind, Mr Brown will not face that risk until he has to.

So should New Labour go for it or not, readers? The comments box is open.

Biffen was an Oxbridge-educated middle-class English Tory rightwinger from the shires, Brown - pictured left - exemplified that layer of Scottish working-class opinion plainly influenced by CPGB Stalinism.

I’m not a fan of either political tradition, of course. Yet both men deserve some credit for a common characteristic: they were not afraid to say what they thought.

Biffen and Brown started from worked out political principles, and then openly argued for them. Both were out of favour with their respective party leaderships as a result.

I’ll leave it to the rightwing blogosphere to assess the impact of Biffen’s career and the legacy of his ideas. As the obits tell it, he was of an intellectual rightist bent.

It has to be said that Brown was never taken seriously on the wider left, not least after the court case in which he was cleared of breaking into his ex-lover’s flat and stealing two pairs of her knickers.

But whatever his peccadilloes, he remained committed to his conception of socialism right until the moment his liver packed in, becoming a founder-member and parliamentary candidate for the Scottish Socialist Party.

In short, neither of these people fitted in from the focus-group driven, don’t say boo to a goose, on message politics beloved of both the Parliamentary Labour Party and the milquetoast Tory opposition today.

Gone is any idea that one essential element of political life is to persuade the electorate of the correctness of a defined political philosophy.

In its place we have institutionalised Dutch auction populism serving as a smokescreen for organised kleptocracy.

And they wonder why the British electorate is increasingly apathetic.

There’s an interesting by-election coming up on September 13 in the Stonebridge ward of Brent Central, a deprived outer London area with inner city problems.

Last year it featured on a list of the ten most dangerous areas in the capital, ranked by number of muggings:

Stonebridge in Brent, north-west London, was in tenth place with 209 robberies. It was the scene of a triple family murder over a drug row on the Stonebridge estate last year, as well as the double murder of seven-year-old Toni-Ann Byfield and her drug dealer dad in 2003.

Labour is standing Zaffar Van Kalwala, somebody I know nothing about. Potential canvassers should email brentlabour@hotmail.co.uk, stating Labour Party membership number and times of availability.

Respect is running Sarah Cox, a retired teacher and longstanding member of the Socialist Workers’ Party. Wards like Stonebridge represent an acid test for the Galloway-led organisation: if it really is capable of making headway in working class areas without a predominantly Muslim population, this is the kind of place it will have to prove it.

Other candidates include Funmi Aladeshe (Conservative); Brian Orr (Green Party); and Sandra Elina Wiltshire (Liberal Democrats). As ever, the comments box is open to campaigners from all parties.

Luke Akehurst lists some of the runners and riders in forthcoming Labour selections in two London seats.

Campaign Groupie Neil Gerrard is throwing in the towel in Walthamstow, which has for opted to nominate his successor through an all women shortlist.

Early frontrunners seem to be leftwinger Laura Bruni, secretary of the constituency party, and Stella Creasy, a councillor and erstwhile bag carrier for Douglas Alexander.

Meanwhile, ‘Keith the Teeth’ Hill is standing down in Streatham. Those looking to replace him apparently include Lambeth council leader Steve Reed; local GLA member Val Shawcross; and Compass supporter Chuka Umunna.

There’s also speculation that Harriet Harman’s partner Jack Dromey, deputy general secretary of what was the Transport and General Workers’ Union, is also interested.

Local Labour blogger Lambeth Lou also names Lib Peck, the cabinet member for environment, and Sally Prentice, the cabinet member for children and young people as potentially ready to put their names forward, especially if Streatham also decides for an AWS.

The prime minister today unveiled his vision of a ‘New Politics’. But Gordon Brown’s erection of an even bigger big tent surely marks a further step in the continued rightwards evolution of New Labour.

That can be seen by looking at the track record of the two Tory MPs who will now be helping to making policy for a Labour government.

John Bercow - son of a Jewish taxi driver – is a former member of the Monday Club, and at one stage the secretary of its immigration and repatriation section.

His CV also includes stints as national chairman of the Federation of Conservative Students, an organisation that even Norman Tebbit felt compelled to close down for being too right wing, and as a special adviser to disgraced treasury secretary Jonathan Aitken.

To his credit, Bercow has repudiated his political past and reinvented himself as a cuddly Cameroon. That is more than can said for Patrick Mercer, who only this year was forced to step down from the Conservative front bench after claiming that the army practice of calling black soldiers "black bastards" amounted to nothing but common or garden services joshing.

Meanwhile, Brown has offered his first major political interview since arriving at Number Ten, selecting the explicitly rightwing Daily Telegraph as the outlet. The choice will not have been accidental.

This gave him the ideal opportunity to riff on the ‘government of all the talents’ theme that led to the appointment of Sir Digby Jones, the nastily anti-union former head of the Confederation of British Industry, as trade minister:

"I want us not to be in any way sectional but be a government that genuinely unifies the country.

"The reason that people are fed up with the old politics of division is that people recognise that we face new challenges and these challenges need to be met in new and different ways."

My trouble is with all this is, I don’t actually want to be unified with racist rightwing Tory bigots. And why not even the hint of a job for anyone within the substantial minority of the UK electorate – perhaps 10-20% - politically to the left of New Labour?

The PM should remember that people outside the tent sometimes have the most unseemly manners when it comes to urination.

Full employment always used to be a basic tenet of the post-war consensus, not a transitional demand from outer space. Yet for the last three decades, it has effectively been written off as a policy objective.

Tory chancellor Norman Lamont was famously happy to describe lengthening dole queues as 'a price well worth paying' for low inflation; I was one of the guys that paid it in the early 1990s recession. Thanks for nothing, Norman.

Meanwhile, Labour leader Neil Kinnock branded the very idea of full employment 'a slogan' and 'a not altogether illuminating phrase'.

Currently the whole question is not a high-profile political issue. After all, there are ‘only’ 1.65m people out of work and claiming benefits, and the trend is downwards.

But the true number of jobless is far, far higher. On some estimates, one in four British men of working age are either unemployed or economically inactive.

The official statistics exclude those with working partners, those with savings more than a few thousand pounds, and those deemed to have quit work ‘voluntarily’, even if they were in fact sacked.

And time was when 1.65m out of work would have rightly been seen as a scandal. That’s why the Tory ‘Labour isn’t working’ poster deployed in the 1979 general election campaign – when 1m were on the dole, a tally that seemed staggering at the time - is to this day hailed as one of the most effective advertisements in British political history.

The labour market is as much a social institution as an economic institution. Jobs get destroyed through financially-driven mergers and acquisitions, downsizing, low investment, bad training, the pursuit of short-term profit goals, high dividend payments and poor management.

The free market isn’t working. That’s why joblessness needs to be addressed politically. Policies that would facilitate full employment include improved education and training; more social housing, to enable greater mobility; investment in better public transport, so that people people can more easily get to work; and social provision of public goods.

After all, if we can have targets for inflation, interest rates and monetary growth, why can’t we have a target for reducing unemployment?

General elections are the apogee of the liberal democratic political process. These are the occasions – once every four years or so – that the ordinary subjects of Her Majesty, as a collectivity, are theoretically in the driving seat.

For weeks now, the media has been full of speculation over whether or not Gordon Brown is planning to ‘go to the country’, as the euphemism has it. Will he or won’t he ‘seek a renewed mandate’?

We are likely to know shortly. If the answer is yes, the vast majority of the electorate will engage with politics and politicians to an extent seen only two or three times a decade. Yet somehow, the words 'general election fever' do not seem to sum up the mood of the nation.

Some sections of the far left have long been dismissive of ‘bourgeois democracy’. Like Lenin said, it’s just a sham, right? Parliament is nothing but the executive committee of the ruling class. Voting is just another way for the bosses to sell the pass.

Well, yes. But there is another side to the story too. Winning the vote in Britain took hundreds of years of class struggle, from the Levellers to the Chartists and the suffragettes. We are only three generations into universal suffrage, remember.

Around the world, all revolutions in recent decades have been revolutions for plain vanilla liberal democracy. These revolutions have been velvet, orange, cedar, rose or saffron aux choix. Any colour you like, so long as it isn’t red.

The monks being killed on the streets of Rangoon as I write these words are being butchered by the Burmese junta because they are demanding freedom for Aung San Suu Kyi, who draws her legitimacy principally from her landslide victory in Burma’s 1990 election. They want the right to vote, and are prepared to die for it.

Compare and contrast the attitude in Britain. Many people forego putting their names on the electoral register simply to get out of paying council tax. It’s not that millions of people have suddenly bought into the Leninist critique of what goes on at Westminster; it’s just that they can’t be arsed to go to the ballot box.

A few days ago, Tory leader David Cameron even remarked on the phenomenon in his party conference speech:

[W]hat about the 40% of our fellow citizens who have given up on voting? They are just fed up with the whole rat-race of politics, the whole merry-go-round. We have got to inspire them that we can bring real change and deal with the things that people care about. People want the politics of belief and that means politics they can really believe in.

His comments both get the point and miss it by a wide margin. In the early 1980s, the differences between Labour and the Conservatives were sharply defined; Bennism and Thatcherism offered competing visions of society. Which side were you on?

Maybe there are still policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives. If I sat down for half an hour and thought about it really hard, I may even be able to name some of them. But none spring instantly to mind.

Today, all major parties subscribe completely to the free market consensus. British politics is reduced to a permanent state of small c conservative politics; vote for us, we’re more competent/nicer guys than that other lot.

Sorry Mr Cameron. Few people are going to get inspired about that.

Leona Helmsley - the billionaire New York City hotel operator and real estate investor who died in August this year – once loftily pronounced to her housekeeper: ‘We don’t pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes’.

She came to wish she never said that, when in 1989 her former maid quoted the two short sentences in a courtroom as her erstwhile boss stood in the dock on a federal tax evasion rap. Honestly, you just can’t get the staff these days.

So the woman they called ‘the Queen of Mean’ received an initial sentence of 16 years. She only served 19 months, mind you. One can only hope she had a miserable time.

Listening to the deafening volume of whingeing from private equity executives the in the wake of Alistair Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday, it is clear that the spirit of the late Ms H lives on.

Until now, the Kings of Mean have gotten away with paying proportionately less tax than their cleaning ladies, as some in their ranks have openly admitted.

Darling’s milquetoast move to scrap taper relief will indeed ensure that ‘those working in private equity pay a fairer share’. Then again, almost any change would. Capital gains tax of 18% is not fair enough, by far.

Meanwhile, there is also to be a levy of £30,000 on ‘non-doms’ – wealthy people who live tax-free in Britain – after seven years of residence. The idea is a response to Tory pressure.

You could almost describe it as ‘Tory pressure from the left’, were not £4,286 a year such a nugatory figure for people worth tens, or hundreds, or even thousands of millions of pounds.

The ultra-rich do not live on another planet from the rest of society. They benefit extensively from the way the whole of British politics and society is currently shaped around the needs of finance capital.

Hint, guys. If you use, directly or indirectly, publically funded services – the air traffic controllers that make sure your private helicopter flies in safety, for instance, or the educational system that provides you with clerical workers capable of doing their jobs – then you have to foot your share of the bill. Just like the rest of us have to.

There is a convincing case to be made for higher taxes on the rich, even if no politican today dares make it. It could easily be sold to the public, including Middle England. It all depends on how the money raised is spent.

Britain suffers from the irrational myth that public investment is by definition squandering money. The fact that Sweden and France have superior healthcare is regarded as unrelated to their higher levels of public spending.

Rightwing newspapers often campaign for such things as higher pay for nurses, but are against the tax rises that would be needed to pay for them.

The CBI moans about taxation ‘burdens’ on business, then in the next breath calls for better road and rail infrastructure. And it stays strangely silent when anyone suggests that tax credits amount to a massive taxpayer subsidy for low pay.

Darling’s pre-budget report yesterday will have little real impact on Britain’s new polyglot plutocracy. Maybe Leona Helmsley is looking up from Hell and smiling after all.

Of course the left in Britain should favour a referendum on the European Union reform treaty, an issue that will dominate official politics for months to come. But it needs to make absolutely certain it doesn’t line up with UKIP and the Daily Mail in the process.

A referendum is the only politically honest course for Labour, after having promised such a vote on proposals for an EU constitution.

The only reason for the prime minister to pretend that the reform treaty is not essentially a repackaging of the document rejected by the Dutch and the French is the certain knowledge that the chances of securing assent are slimmer than a bulimic supermodel on amphetamine sulphate.

Resort to such a flat-out lie that will both bolster distrust in the political process and feed the Tories’ ‘Bottler Brown’ meme.

On the other hand, old-style left calls to pull out of the ‘bosses’ club’ because it is ‘not socialist’ end up pandering to nationalism in much the same way as promises of ‘British jobs for British workers’. The EU clearly has many progressive aspects.

It has secured some major achievements over the last two decades, including the single market, the single currency, a common foreign policy and an increase from 12 members to 27.

In today’s Europe, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a good thing. The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united Europe

However much it suits some politicians in Britain and Scandinavia to deny it, it is quite clear the EU’s founders explicitly envisaged it as a federation in the making. The very least that can be said is that the EU seeks to transcend the notion of exclusive national sovereignty. It is already a federal system. A weak federal system, perhaps, but a federal system nevertheless.

That shouldn’t be a problem for us in principle. Socialists favour the closest possible voluntary unity of peoples, in the biggest possible state units. After all, we have traditionally demanded a United States of Europe.

Nevertheless, there is plenty to oppose in the EU as presently constituted: the lack of democracy, the neoliberal economic agenda, the ‘Fortess Europe’ mentality.

The Common Agricultural Policy - which takes up 40% of the EU budget – remains an abomination. How individual countries wish to support farm incomes is a matter solely for their governments and electorates. One size doesn’t fit all.

It’s quite clear that any serious social democratic government, of the Attlee or Mitterand stripe, elected in any European country, would at the very least have to radically renegotiate its terms of membership, and in all likelihood would have to withdraw. However, we are a long way from needing to have that sort of tactical discussion.

In the mean time, instead of lining up with eurosceptic front organisations such as Better Off Out, parties of the left should be advancing positive demands for democratisation: a European parliament with real powers in place of the unaccountable bureaucracy, and a levelling up of social wages, union rights and working hours across the EU.

Sources of financial support symbolise - perhaps more than anything else - the different class bases of what Labour once was, and what it has today become.

Historically, few wealthy individuals have donated to an ostensibly socialist party out of political conviction. True, there were always a handful of working class boys made good, and those intellectually converted to Fabianism.

But most business backers of Labour - from Kagan to Maxwell, from Ecclestone to Abrahams - can fairly be labelled spivs and shysters. They are parvenus and arrivistes; in the words of that withering Tory put down, these are the sort of people that have to buy their own furniture.

New Labour’s tawdry crack whore-style dependence on what gets creamed off from the proceeds of rack-renting Newcastle slums offers democratic socialists an open goal to argue for the highest standards in political life. Such a call should certainly constitute one of the central planks of any platform of a renewed left.

We could make this our political monopoly, and we damn well should. As far as winning the support of the general public goes, this is the closest it gets to a one-way bet.

Corruption - sometimes petty, often not so petty - is an issue across the entire political spectrum, of course. Those of us that remember the Major years will be well aware of that.

If relatively few Lib Dems have been found with their fingers in the till in recent decades, that is largely on account of their continued distance from office rather then evidence of superior moral fibre.

Even sections of the far left have sometimes been happy enough to pimp their politics in return for a fistful of dollars from sundry petro-kleptocracies.

But the democratic left is sufficiently unsullied to make the demand for political transparency a speciality. Here are some policy proposals that deserve at least debate.

Let’s start from the proposition that political parties should be funded - if not entirely, than very largely so - by their own members and openly-declared supporters.

Individuals should be signed-up members of political parties before being allowed to make donations on more than the most modest of scales. It is surely only acceptable for someone to write out a six-figure cheque - or even a seven figure cheque - to a party if they strongly support its policies. Otherwise, the suspicion has to be that they are seeking either simony or bespoke legislation.

Let the political affiliations of both trade union executive members and board members of companies that make political donations be contained in the relevant annual reports. Most trade unionists don't keep it a secret. Business people shouldn't either.

Members of unions that donate to the Labour Party consciously have to opt in to the political levy. So why shouldn’t corporate donations - which no longer go exclusively to the Tories, remember - should be subject to similar strictures. Let shareholders vote on the question, and have the right to ‘opt out’ by withholding their share.

It is also necessary to oppose any further extension of state funding, and to examine ways of scaling back of existing provisions. There is a basic democratic principle at stake here. It just is not the job of the taxpayer to foot the bills for political parties, especially ones they heartily oppose.

Finally, it’s worth noting that there are plenty of existing laws against allowing considerations of personal gain to influence the performance of public office. Yet in all the decades of Tory and New Labour sleaze, only Aitken and Archer have actually done time.

Let's just say that a fair chunk of those who have served in successive New Labour cabinets should at least be looking at 40 hours of community service, to put it mildly.

For the uninitiated, T&S Original Magic Knickers – available from Littlewoods here – promise instantly to transform the larger lady into a svelte beauty who will knock the guys dead as soon as she dons her little black number.

But there’s just one snag, girls; a backside the size of a small planet, even when crammed into doubtlessly wonderful elasticated underwear, remains a fat arse.

There is simply no way for New Labour to get round the fact that it promised Britain a referendum on the EU constitution document; not even rebranding what was once brie and cucumber on ciabatta as a plain old cheese and Branston pickle sarnie removes this obligation.

Making such a point is not indicative of any latent UK Independence Party sympathies on my part, either. If a referendum did take place, I would listen to both sides in the debate, but as things stand, I would be minded to vote ‘yes’.

Of course, the British left has traditionally opposed the European Union. That line has pretty much been set in stone since the UK’s referendum on Common Market membership back in 1975. It’s just a bosses’ club, right?

And yes, there is much to dislike in the EU as things stand, from its pervasive bureaucracy and lack of democracy to the entire Fortress Europe bunker mentality.

That’s before we get to the entrenched neoliberal economic orthodoxy. Maastricht comprehensively rules out nationally-based Keynesianism policies for full employment.

Currencies – in around half the member states, anyway - cannot be depreciated, because they are subsumed into the Euro. Public expenditure is capped by European law. So even social democratic governments are forced to ‘restore competitiveness’ by cutting costs and axing jobs.

The Common Agricultural Policy, which takes up 40% of the EU budget, is an ongoing fiasco. With the varying weight of agriculture across the continent, there cannot be a ‘one size fits all’ policy on support farm incomes.

Yet – dare I say it? - the old left mindset sometimes panders more than a little to nationalist sentiment, to the point where certain Campaign Group MPs happily make common cause with rightwing Tory eurosceptics.

The EU has its progressive aspects, too. A lot of the pro-employee regulations New Labour routinely boasts of bringing in have not been introduced of the government’s own volition, but largely at the behest of Brussels.

To some extent, the EU has served as a popular front for social democracy by stealth, a consideration not unimportant at a time when British trade unions lack the weight to secure such reforms.

The EU must rank as one of the dullest topics that anyone can conceivably blog about. But then, there are virtues to dullness; read any history of Europe in the 1930s and you’ll see what I mean. Today, it is inconceivable that France and Germany could go to war. And that is a clearly good thing.

The 2004 enlargement marks the definitive end of the cold war division of the continent, and is another step towards a united democratic Europe.

However much it suits some politicians in Britain and Scandinavia to deny it, it is quite clear the EU’s founders explicitly envisaged it as a superstate in the making, as do its principle protagonists today.

The very least that can be said is that the EU seeks to transcend the notion of exclusive national sovereignty. It is already a federal system. A weak federal system, perhaps, but a federal system nevertheless.

That is not something socialists should automatically be against. It is the left that has historically called for a United States of Europe, remember. The key question is the class interests such a polity would be based on.

Taking the balance sheet as a whole, then, the socialist left should oppose the EU as currently constituted. But the way in which we express that opposition is crucial.

We are not Little Englanders and we are not irreconcilables. We shouldn’t lend credibility to hard right Tory and UKIP fronts such as Better Off Out. Instead, we should put forward positive demands for a more democratic Europe.

Of course she is right to say that ‘a culture of no one works around here’ prevails on some sink estates. Let’s agree with her on that. But is she right in thinking that the answer is to make the jobless homeless as well?

Perhaps we should instead be asking some rather more searching questions about how this situation came about, why it continues, and what can be done about it than our hapless housing minister cum Melanie Phillips manqué can seemingly manage.

Being unemployed - or at least the threat of being unemployed - has always been the lot of this country’s working population. I remember that from my own upbringing in the 1960s and 1970s.

Working class people mostly, well, worked; the clue’s in the name if you search hard enough, Caroline. But sometimes they didn’t. In 1966, my dad had a heart attack and spent an extended period ‘on the sick’. Sometimes people went on strike, others had jobs that were seasonal in nature.

But unemployment was never seen as permanent; spend a few weeks or a few months signing on, and something would turn up. The ‘culture of no one works around here’ didn’t come until Thatcherism.

In just a few years, the steel industry, shipbuilding and coal mining were destroyed, as an entirely predictable consequence of government policy. Inevitably, so were the communities that depended on them.

As a young man who would once have easily found industrial employment, I spent two years on the dole. Older men and women who had put in decades of graft knew they were never going to be employed again. Want a good reason to really, really hate the Tories? By the early 1980s, we had three million of them.

The cultural impact was devastating, and remains with us to this day. The phenomenon known in economics textbooks as ‘discouraged workers’ is not the least aspect of all this. Now it has become an intergenerational in nature. But our response has to more intelligent than mock Dacresque outrage at the fecklessness of the proles.

What Flint should face up to is that pockets of persistent unemployment have become a potent symbol of Britain’s post-war economic failure. Full employment – once a basic tenet of cross-party consensus politics – has over the last two decades been successively reduced first to a radical left demand and then to a largely forgotten idea.

A party that based itself on the ideas of social democracy and a significant working class membership would have understood all this; it would realise that if you can have targets for inflation, interest rates and monetary growth, you can have a target for job creation; it would want to reverse Thatcherism, rather than take it to its reductio ad absurdum.

New Labour is obviously not such a party, as Ms Flint’s ugly little outburst rather underlines.

Does Britain need a written constitution? Traditionally, this isn’t an issue to which the left has paid much attention.

Either it has been written off as being of little importance, or else the very concept has been seen as favouring conservative forces in a society. As a result, the ruling class has essentially been able to make up the rules of the political game as it goes along.

But with the latest hint from justice secretary Jack Straw that such a development is likely over the next decade or two, it is clearly time to sharpen up our ideas on this one.

Should we be for or against the proposal in principle? Broadly, I think known constraints on governments have to better than unfettered extemporisation. This country is one of only a handful in the world to rely on unwritten guidelines in constitutional matters. New Zealand and Israel are the only others that come to mind.

Actually, there has been rather a lot of constitutional reform since 1997. The trouble is, much of its characterised by timidity.

New Labour’s idea of modernisation has seen Britain move from the fifteenth-century principle of heredity to the eighteenth-century principle of patronage. This at a time when the public is increasing alienated from the culture of the machine politics.

House of Lords reform has persistently been fluffed. Britain remains one of only two countries in the world where hereditary chieftains still pass laws for the rest of the nation; the other is Lesotho. Half the second chambers in parliamentary democracies around the world are wholly elected, and half the remainder are largely elected.

The Scottish parliament and Welsh assembly, on the other hand, do represent democratic advances, albeit of a limited character. The proportional representation system used to elect these bodies should be extended to Westminster, so that a wider spread of political opinion can be represented.

We’ll have wait and see what Straw comes up with, I suppose. But the debate over a future constitution could offer a real opportunity to promote some basic democratic demands; we’d be mad not to take it.

Then again, the world has changed tremendously over the last quarter of a century, say. Political analysis has to keep pace. Just because somebody advanced a position in 1983 and advances a contradictory position in 2008, it does not automatically follow that they are mutating into a reactionary.

This train of thought has been sparked, in part, by my toe-curling recollection of a student union meeting in the early eighties, at which I opposed a resolution calling for Chinese withdrawal from Tibet. My argument was that the Chinese annexation of 1951 had introduced proletarian property relations to a backward feudal country, and was therefore historically progressive. Such was the Trotskyist orthodoxy of the day.

Fast forward to now, and I am in full sympathy with the protests that have rocked Lhasa, illustrated by the smuggled-out picture of rioters courageously stoning a cop car. I now think firmly that Tibetans are entitled to self-determination, as are Chechnyans, Kashmiris and Palestinians. So have I moved right on this issue, or have I moved left?

Outside of a few whackjob cults, the idea that incorporation inside a 'workers' state' in possession of a command economy trumps all other conceivable considerations finds few takers. I guess the contemporary equivalent is the notion that putting oppressed nations in charge of their own affairs 'objectively aids imperialism' if the oppressor is an Islamist or former Stalinist country.

Britain's most widely-read leftwing blog, for instance, recently opposed independence for Kosova because it is said to constitute a 'gangster state', born of a 'great power-orchestrated' break-up of Yugoslavia, and dominated by prostitution and drug-trafficking.

Even if such obvious nonsense were true, it is hardly 'swallowing exaggerated Nato propaganda' to point out that 90% of the population of Kosova didn't want to remain a province of Serbia; end of chat. If a marriage has irrevocably broken down, no-one would deny a battered wife a divorce because some pig of a man won't give his consent.

What's more, the last time I checked, the far left wasn't arguing for the revocation of Italian independence on account of the role of organised crime in Sicily and Naples.

Again, 25 years ago, I used to insist - with full Marxist conviction - that apartheid was integral to South Africa as a social formation; therefore, only a process of permanent revolution could bring about its demise. Subsequent developments have revealed this position to be, in plain English, bollocks.

True, the democratic gains for ordinary black people since 1994 have not been matched by higher living standards. The bourgeoisie is still predominantly white, even if it has been forced to accomodate a black section. Yet however far short South Africa falls of what I would have wanted to see, it seems inherently a better place now than when Afrikaaner rule was untrammelled.

Similarly, a quarter of a century I would have maintained that the British ruling class was committed in perpetuity to the maintenance of a Unionist statelet in the North of Ireland. Yet the trajectory ever since the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 has been towards incorporation of the top layer of nationalists into the formal structures of governance

Fundamentalists leftists - fundamentalist republicans too, come to that - will point out that this is a far cry from a 32-county socialist republic. But it does offer an improvement on the bloodshed that previously prevailed, and a settlement with which the bulk of those effected clearly feel they can live.

What's the moral of this story? Well, if you are a young Trot reading this, never argue that 'there are no reformist solutions'. Not only is that a dull cliché, but the truth is - at least where an issue reduces essentially to a demand for democracy counterposed to a denial of democracy - there almost certainly is a reformist solution. What's more, it won't always be a sell-out or a step backwards, either.

Don’t go breaking my heart, Yazz. Unlike the real victims of McCarthyism, you are not the subject of a concerted campaign of vicious untrue allegations, fabricated in an atmosphere of febrile paranoia. You straightforwardly admit to attending six conferences of an organisation called the British-American Project, which is all that Pilger accuses you of doing. You challenge not a single one of the facts he puts forward.

There is no way you are on a moral par with the hundreds of progressive Americans who spent time in prison on trumped up charges, simply on account of their political sympathies. Any attempted comparison amounts to hyperbole of a wilfully stupid variety. It’s an insult to good people.

Let’s take your wretched parallel further. McCarthyism saw perhaps 12,000 US citizens lose their jobs, in many cases spending decades out of work as a result. There’s just a teensy-weensy contrast between their fate and your role as a regular broadcaster and national newspaper columnist, no?

And before you go making up fictitious bodily injuries, bear in mind that the repression born of McCarthyism drove some people to suicide. The senator from Wisconsin cost them their lives.

Remember the old adage, Ms A-B; there’s no such thing as bad publicity, so long as they spell your name right. Good night and good luck.

For many of us, family tradition or class background made the choice – be it Labour Party Young Socialists or Young Conservatives - more or less automatic. Then again, more than a few nice middle-class kids aligned with the left out of some sense of idealism, while plenty of what we used to call C2s and Ds happily went along for the loadsamoney ride.

What was for sure was that political alignment meant something. I’m not certain that if I was in my early twenties today, I would find such ideological distinctions as the partisans may discern between post-Blair New Labourism and the Cameroonies sufficient to merit getting particularly worked up about.

These days, political debate self-limits to an extended Coke versus Pepsi taste test, not questions of justice versus injustice. Let’s face it, unless you have a pecuniary interest in such esoterica, who can possibly get worked up about the finer nuances of local government finances or the small print of Capital Gains Tax arrangements?

What’s more, the trend towards depoliticisation appears to be long term. During the Wilson era, half the population expressed strong identification with a political party. Today that figure has fallen to one in seven.

While I’m not sure about the figures last time round, I do know that in 2001, not a single MP gained the votes of the majority of his or her electors. Again, some 12% of the population vote on who gets kicked out of the Big Brother house, yet turnout in some local government by-elections is below 10%.

Polly Toynbee – not a commentator who always meets with this blog’s approbation – cites some alarming statistics from the Hansard Society in her column today. Only 13% of voters describe themselves as ‘very interested’ in politics; only 51% are interested at all; and less than a quarter of 18-24 year-olds intend to vote at the next general election. Sadly, her proposed remedies are limited to tinkering with the electoral system. That’ll inspire mass political participation, Polly. Not.

It’s hard to have much sympathy for some of the other potential solutions doing the rounds, either. Bribes for voting – such as council tax rebates – seem such a retrograde step. Compulsory voting is unappealingly authoritarian.

I suppose it is also possible to argue that low turnout is not ‘bad for democracy’; it is democracy, in the sense of being the democratic expression of people’s indifference to all the parties on offer. It is effectively the only way of registering ‘none of the above’.

Yet the Angry Young Man argument that there are ‘no good, brave causes left’ is surely as wrong now as it was in the 1950s. Issues like the war on Iraq, skyrocketing social inequality, third world poverty and racism are there to inspire and, yes, divide.

The art of political leadership is to articulate these issues and translate gut sympathies into passionate political activism. Or, if that’s too much for these times, at least to convince most punters that they should be arsed to turn up at a polling booth.

OK, it’s not quite up there with the all-time greats such as ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts’. But the front page splash in this morning’s Daily Mail – headlined ‘Immigration: the great lies’ will probably be worth just as many votes to the racist right.

The article it accompanies purports to be objective coverage of a House of Lords economic affairs committee report on Britain’s immigration policy. But the hyperbole kicks in with the first par and just doesn’t let up.

‘Labour’s justification for mass immigration was torn to shreds by experts last night … landmark study … devastating cross-party report … ruthlessly exposed …forced to accept the social harm from migration, with little or nothing to fall back on.’

There’s plenty more where that came from in the editorial, too; the report ‘explodes a nuclear bomb beneath the government’s case …alas, it may already be too late to undo much of the damage.’

The Daily Telegraph plays the story with a straight bat. Unfortunately, its leader writers take it upon themselves to present us with ‘the brutal truth’, in language scarcely more temperate than that of its tabloid counterpart.

‘Labour’s immigration policy finally exposed,’ we are informed, without being told when it was ever supposedly hidden. The government, it seems, has ‘lost control of our borders’. I must have been imagining those long lines I thought I saw at passport control last time I passed through Heathrow.

‘As recently as the 2005 general election, the Conservatives were accused by Labour of “playing the race card” for raising concerns about immigration,’ the leader splutters indignantly.

That might just be because they did, of course. Here’s a direct quote from Tory MP Andrew Lansley: ‘Immigration, an issue we raised successfully in 1992 and again in the 1994 European election campaign, played particularly well in the tabloids and has more potential to hurt.’ He evidently didn’t see the need to add that it plays particularly well in certain broadsheets, too.

None of this is to argue that such a major issue should be airbrushed out of public debate. Serious coverage of the controversy surrounding immigration is entirely legitimate. But taken in aggregate, articles such as those cited above have a huge impact on the climate in which the arguments are had out.

If the British National Party does find itself with a seat – or even two – in the London Assembly next month, then some journalists may just want to ponder the tone of what they write.

Meanwhile, politicians should have the courage of the neoliberal convictions they apply in all other instances. Either liberalisation maximises economic welfare or it doesn’t. If it does, governments should dismantle immigration controls with the same alacrity with which they once scrapped capital controls.

New Labour’s forthcoming immigration points system – and this, or something like it, is supported in principle by Respect Renewal’s only MP – effectively welcomes 25-year-old computer nerds, 30-year-old entrepreneurs and multimillionaires of any age into Britain.

But there is a lot of dirty work to do in this country. Those who want to do it should be allowed to live here legally and not be criminalised for their willingness to get their hands dirty. Even if they do not happen to be white.

There was something enjoyably subversive about supporting Ken Livingstone in the London Mayor contest eight years ago. Here was a man authentically popular with ordinary working Londoners, standing as an independent against New Labour.

For many on the left, it was a free kick against Blairism, a chance to register a protest vote against the government without having to back the Lib Dems, the Tories or some no hoper.

By way of full disclosure, I write this as one of the team that helped the London Socialist Alliance on its way towards the triumphant 27,073 ballot papers it secured in that particular election, a figure that probably represents the benchmark against which the SWP’s Left List should be judged this time round.

The 2008 campaign is now underway, with ‘Ken’ running against ‘Boris’ and some spliff-addled quasi-anarchist gay ex-copper insufficiently well known to go by given name alone, but representative of enough minority groups to have qualified for a substantial grant in the glory days of the Greater London Council, if only he had come out against the bomb.

Livingstone and I are both back in the Labour Party, with past indiscretions a spent conviction within the meaning of the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act, and I will be canvassing and leafleting in his support. Yet somehow, the transgressive frisson of 2000 is nowhere to be found.

What I find even more disturbing is the incessant resort to first name terms, which is emblematic of not just depoliticisation, but dumbed down democracy. Given the ugliness of all three front runners, you couldn’t exactly call it a beauty contest, but you know what I mean.

They are essentially selling themselves as guys you could have a pint with - or perhaps a breakfast-time double Glenmorangie - rather than the bearers of competing visions for our capital.

It’s not that the candidates don’t differ on this point or that if you at the manifestoes hard enough. Yeah, I know Livingstone opposed the war on Iraq, and Johnson equates blacks with picanninies.

But in terms of the concrete policy proposals on offer, there isn’t clear blue water between the Tories and Labour, clear red water between Labour and the Tories, or clear yellow water (snigger, snigger) between Paddick and his rivals.

I’ve just seen my first Livingstone billboard, on one of those annoying automated hoardings that rotate three different advertisements. I had to wait until it came round three times before I spotted the (small) Labour logo in the top righthand corner. The pay-off line – ‘Vote for London’ – could mean anything. How exactly would it be possible to vote against the city in which one lives?

The upshot is that the biggest spat so far has been over which of the two main candidates is most strident in his opposition to bendy buses. And this just in; Boris has denounced knife crime. Controversial or what?

No wonder the result is going to be close. I guess this isn’t a coloured water kind of contest.

So in theory, it should be pleased with today’s High Court judgment that Blair acted unlawfully when, in 2006, he ordered the Serious Fraud Office to scrap a probe into BAE Systems’ dealings with the totalitarian monarchy; best business practice has been upheld in a manner that will hopefully act as a deterrent to further New Labour moral laxity.

Lord Justice Moses even hinted that Lord Goldsmith’s blatantly mendacious and self-serving invocation of the national interest in this affair amounted to interference with the course of justice.

If you live on a council estate in Dewsbury and are the mother of seven kids by five fathers, you can expect to find yourself in the dock for such misdemeanours. Unfortunately, the smart money is not on the erstwhile attorney general having to do the same.

The whole story of how BAE ended up as the chief supplier of lethal weaponry to what is unquestionably the planet’s most repressive regime speaks volumes about how the international arms trade works.

The Saudis would rather be buying American kit. But while Washington wants to keep the House of Saud onside – both because it is both the world’s number one oil supplier and because it is a key military ally – the impact of the Israel lobby makes it impossible for the government to ally US companies to oblige. BAE Systems gets the gig by default.

It is a lucrative contract, especially in terms of follow-up technical support. The Saudis are incapable of maintaining advanced weapons systems, and have to import the know-how.
The al Yamamah contract has been mired in corruption since its inception in the 1980s. New Labour are not the first government to simply shut up and play ball.

As long ago as 1989, the National Audit Office launched an inquiry into bribery allegations surrounding the deal. It took three years. So what was the outcome, you ask? We still don't know.

In March 1992, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee decided not to publish the NAO's findings. The chairman, Labour MP Robert Sheldon, refused even to disclose the report to committee members, assuring them that there was 'no evidence of fraud or corruption'.

Some Labour MPs expressed 'misgivings'. Martin O'Neill - then Labour's defence spokesman - pledged that a future Labour government would re-open the inquiry. But 11 years after Labour returned to office, that still hasn't happened.

In October 1994, Labour MP Tam Dalyell produced two documents - a US intelligence report and an internal British Aircraft Corporation memo - which claimed that Mark Thatcher, the son of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher, received commission payments worth as much as £12m from al Yamamah.

But the PAC declined to investigate the matter, deeming it outside its remit, which is restricted to issues concerning taxpayers' money. The claims have never been refuted. And in the intervening years, we have certainly learned much about the ethical standards of the son of our former prime minister.

In 2005, Mark Thatcher was forced to leave South Africa after pleading guilty to involvement in a plot to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea. He was fined $500,000 and given a four-year suspended sentence.

The biggest problem with today’s High Court ruling is that it is not retrospective. It is no good preaching transparency to developing countries while keeping corruption under wraps at home.

Why Labour repeatedly gets its knickers in a twist over taxation policy is entirely beyond me. I mean, correct me if I am being needlessly controversial here, but the basic principle underlying any left of centre take on this matter is simple enough; the more you earn, the more you owe the Inland Revenue.

This isn’t some kind of transitional demand; 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.

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.

It is only when you depart from this default position that you reach the situation where the super-rich do not pay a higher rate of tax than their domestics. In fact, by and large, they pay a lower one.

As a result, taxation has been responsible for getting New Labour getting into more than a few political scrapes over the last year or so, 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. All of this is effectively tantamount to one vast job creation scheme for already grossly overpaid tax avoidance lawyers.

Now the jinx has struck again. Brown’s decision to scrap the 10p in the pound income tax rate – a move that leaves up to five million of the poorest people in Britain worse off - has led to the rediscovery of ABC social democracy on the part of some backbenchers.

The move is apparently designed to fund a 2p cut in the basic rate. Yet there are plenty of other ways in which that aim could be achieved. Simply by scrapping taper relief on capital gains tax, for instance, the government could do even better and knock off 3p in the pound.

Indeed, it shouldn’t be beyond the Treasury’s specialists to devise some means of getting low earners out of the tax system altogether.

It turns out that Denis Healey never actually did utter the soundbite he is best known for today, namely a promise to ‘squeeze the rich until the pips squeak’. So why is Alistair Darling seemingly so determined to mete out just this kind of treatment to the poor?

Well, the stridently anti-Brussels neo-Poujadists in question have just secured a base in the House of Commons. Rightwinger Bob Spink (pictured), who recently lost the Conservative whip at Westminster, joins two Lords, ten euro-MPs, 55 or so councillors and a claimed 16,700 members in what is clearly Britain’s largest minor party.

This is the man who three years ago published a newspaper advert on immigration, under the headline: ‘What bit of “send them back” don't you understand Mr Blair?’ True, he didn’t preface the slogan with ‘If they’re black’. But for anyone who remembers the National Front catchphrase from the seventies, he didn’t have to.

Anti-immigration hard right outfits have had MPs before, of course. In 1976, disgraced Labour MP John Stonehouse – on remand in Brixton after bizarrely faking his own death – became the English National Party’s sole parliamentarian.

Mr Spink, although by all accounts quite a colourful politician, is a more serious proposition. UKIP are reportedly confident that they can retain his Essex seat at the next general election. If Respect, the Blaenau Gwent People’s Voice Group and the Independent Kidderminster Hospital and Health Concern can pull off victories against the mainstream party machines, that cannot be impossible. We shall see.

For some reason, UKIP is an outfit that the left - which habitually pays obsessive attention to developments in dozen-member microsects, the finer points of the Respect Renewal/Left List split and the chance of the British National Party securing representation in the Greater London Assembly – usually prefers to ignore.

That is odd, and possibly complacent. UKIP’s populist right platform has undeniable appeal to swathes of the electorate. The 2.7m votes it picked up in the 2004 euro contest illustrates that. As Cameron waters down or jettisons many Tory traditionalist shibboleths, that tally may yet grow.

In many ways, UKIP has the potential to act as a focus for the nationalist reaction in ways that the BNP cannot, because it is not tainted by fascist association. Precisely because it is constitutionally opposed to racial discrimination, and because it has fielded black and Asian electoral candidates, its opposition to immigration can be passed off as respectable.

It is not enough simply to write these guys off as the provisional wing of the Daily Mail any more. For more than a decade now, the hard left has talked (and talked and talked and talked and talked) about regroupment; the hard right has been getting on with the job, and is now a consolidated force in organised political life.

On top of denouncing its own readers as thick, the tabloid - which backed the Conservatives throughout the campaign - was in effect arguing that Rupert Murdoch gets the final say in who occupies 10 Downing Street.

Yet although this claim has entered political folklore, its veridical status is open to question. Hard psephological evidence that most people vote in accordance with the editorial line of the daily newspaper they read is somewhat scant.

Indeed, the majority of Sun readers voted Labour that year. Many, if not most, were presumably oblivious to contents of the leader column.

Nevertheless, New Labour made it an ostentatious priority to get the Murdoch press onside. In 1995, Tony Blair flew half way round the world to meet News International executives at a company conference in Australia.

It is widely believed that, in return for a promise of support from the Sun and neutrality from the Times, Britain’s prime minister in waiting committed his party to watering down previous policy commitments on media monopoly issues.

Murdoch’s operative maxim in deciding the political stance of his publications and television stations has long been ‘any colour you like, so long as it is going to win’. Opportunist? Maybe, but undeniably effective.

Just three years after the savage union busting operation at Wapping, Ken Livingstone was hired to write a regular column for The Sun, reportedly being well-rewarded for the task. As the then-MP for Brent East, he was happy enough to use the space to attack rivals on the left, notably the Socialist Workers’ Party.

That was then, and this is now. Yesterday, what is still Britain’s best-selling newspaper recommend Boris Johnson – sorry, I mean ‘Bozza’, of course - as the next major of London, rather its former contributor.

If Cameron looks like he will be forming the next government – and given his consistent lead in the opinion polls right now, he does look like he will be forming the next government – then the presumption has to be that the red top will soon revert to Tory form.

Livingstone – in 1981 branded an ‘IRA-loving, poof-loving Marxist’ by the Sunday Express – has much experience of negative press coverage. The Sun’s decision, while unhelpful, will not obviously prove decisive.

This time round it is the Evening Standard that really has damaged the Labour candidate’s re-election chances. Although technically a local publication, inside the M25 it carries more weight than any national title. Naturally, it is the only major newspaper that has covered the London elections in full detail. Much of what it has written about Livingstone borders on vendetta status.

Most of the articles in question come from the keyboard of Andrew Gilligan, one of the few old school investigative journalists still in business. Why Gilligan has decided to open sustained mortar fire, I have no idea. I used to know the guy professionally, and I am certain that he is neither a Tory nor a racist, as the Livingstone campaign has suggested.

One possibility is that he is simply delivering the copy that his editor wants to read; all journalists do that to some extent, at least if they wish to remain in employment. But my best guess is that Gilligan just likes causing trouble. Just because he can.

The real question is not persistent Tory media bias, but why the labour movement has no media counterweight. Back in the eighties, there was plenty of talk of the need for a serious leftwing newspaper, and even a half-arsed attempt to launch one, in the shape of News on Sunday.

In an era when nobody under 30 reads the dead tree press anyway, unless they are given a copy for free by a man or a woman clad in a purple polyester fleece, this is something that is now never likely to happen.

More colourful leftists, such as George Galloway and Tommy Sheridan, are sometimes able to make use of radio and television outlets. But they only have them on sufferance of media owners, and the platforms can be withdrawn as quickly as they are offered. Moreover, some may not see them as the ideal people to present our politics to the wider world.

So the wider problem remains as unresolved now as it was two decades ago. A serious left would make sure that it had a permanent new and old media presence that doesn’t depend on the goodwill of rich.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The charge sheets against the latter two can be summed up in one place name apiece; ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ respectively. Nothing that Major - pictured - has ever done in his life has been of that order of historic magnitude.

This guy didn’t cynically carve up Czechoslovakia, or even make a complete Horlicks of the invasion of a third rate third world dictatorship by not getting permission from Uncle Sam first. Here was a man who considered the national cones hotline to be the defining moment of his premiership, remember. But there were bungles aplenty.

There was Black Wednesday, for a start. Many commentators, especially on the eurosceptic right will never forgive him for Maastricht, although as a soft europhile myself I can’t really see where they are coming from.

Yet the malaise that surrounded the government during the Major years could not be attributed to one or two single issues, however weighty. The miasma of mediocrity was more pervasive than that.

The over-riding impression was one of a teacher out his depth, completely unable to control the naughty boys at the back of the class. The Bastards, the bonkers and the hardcore Thatcherite wrecking crew were accordingly given the run of the school. As the late Labour MP Tony Banks memorably quipped:

He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, ‘what on earth is councillor Major doing?’ I can't believe he’s here and sometimes I think he can’t either.

Of course, the BBC History rankings predate the time Gordon Brown finally got the set of keys Cherie reckons he constantly rattled over Tony’s head. So today I asking readers to comment on where they would insert the incumbent in the rankings.

It struck me this morning that there are certain parallels between the Major and Brown. Most obviously, both became unelected prime ministers after succeeding rather more charismatic predecessors who had won three elections on the trot. To be fair, the Tories were returned to office under Major’s leadership in 1992; it’s now looking doubtful whether Brown can repeat the trick for Labour.

Both give the appearance of being beleaguered PMs, holed up in a bunker and essentially powerless in the face of incoming flack. Brown has even acquired his own set of Bastards. Frank Field and friends now fulfill the same symbolic purpose as Teresa Gorman and that whackjob backbencher bloke from Northampton North, although they are mercifully not quite so obviously unhinged.

But there is one comparison that clearly doesn’t come out in Brown’s favour. In 1995, Major attempted to assert his authority – and the word is assert rather than reassert, because he never had much to begin with – by resigning the party leadership and inviting his critics to stand a candidate against him.

In the event, Major won by 218 votes to John Redwood’s 89, with 12 spoiled ballots and ten abstentions. The gambit didn’t quite work; even that margin was deemed unconvincing, and the removal vans were pulling up at Number Ten just two years later.

Would Brown – who, remember, secured the Labour leadership by coronation without putting his popularity to the test – have the guts to do the same? And would it make any difference if he did? Comments, please.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change.

Yeah, right. Such faux audacieux attempts to stake a claim to the traditional territory of one’s political rivals is getting so old hat, darlings. This kind of dumbed down 1994 vintage New Labourism in reverse is rapidly losing its power to shock. I’m bored already.

Nevertheless, I bet reading that ghost-written tripe ruined breakfast for many supporters of the rightwing Labour faction Progress, which brands itself as representing ‘Labour’s progressives’.

Meanwhile, the piece came on the very day that the Guardian published Ken Livingstone’s call for Labour to head a ‘progressive alliance’ including the Greens, and hinted that there was room for the Liberal Democrats on board at some point in the future.

Only after posting a critique this approach did I suddenly remember that Cameron offered those very same Lib Dems a ‘new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics’ just six months ago.

One presumes this has to be a ‘new progressive alliance’ to distinguish it from the old ‘progressive alliance’, a term coined by the Edwardians to describe the collaboration of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Liberals and those MPs ‘elected in the labour interest’ after 1906.

Meanwhile, former SDPer David Marquand, writing in the New Statesman in February, has described Gordon Brown’s early tentative overtures towards the Lib Dems as an attempt to construct – what else? – ‘a progressive alliance’.

If you are thoroughly confused by this point, that’s because you are meant to be. The obfuscation is 100% intended. The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an