Dugsie, I agree that the credibility of Diane Abbott and that of the Left in the Labour Party, are not the same thing. Indeed I take the same view of her candidacy, Abbott took of the Jon Cruddas candidacy before he withdrew. More broadly, her candidacy speaks not only to the material weakness of the Left in the party; but perhaps more pertinently it speaks to the fact that Labour the very much predominantly neo-liberal party, no longer feels the political, ideological and cultural need to have a socialist of any Labour Party sort standing for its leadership.

It could be argued that this has always been the case under ‘new labour.’ But the difference now is that the party does not need to entomb Labour socialism, treating it as the working class and socialist virus, as once it did. Labour’s commitment to what you correctly identify as modern classical liberalism, - neo-liberalism, - is sufficiently self confident that it can give Abbott access to the Leadership ballot on what are pretty straightforwardly, ‘new labour’ identity politics terms. – Terms moreover, which afford legitimacy to the process and to the eventual neo-liberal victor that it would certainly have otherwise lacked amongst many Labour neo-liberals in particular.

So far as leaving is concerned, I can only say that personally Compass and Anne Begg, (from their different points on the Labour neo-liberal continuum,) have quite coincidentally produced the last straw. The venal hypocrisy of Anne Begg in particular, presuming for nothing more than her own contemptible and careerist reasons, to condemn the Coalition Gvt for carrying forward Labour’s policies, is just too much. The other end of the final straw, consists in the Compass statement: “However, perhaps the most worrying element of this budget is the commandeering of the word "progressive" to describe its content.” The most worrying element in the budget? What world do these people inhabit? How selfish, how politically decedent is that in current circumstances? Observing the always self-serving Compass elite quarrel sulkily with the Coalition Gvt over prorietoral claims to ‘progressive,’ is like watching two bald right wingers pick a fight over a Left-handed comb.

The arguments for staying are what they have always been: the trade union link and that there are socialist men and women clustered around the LRC and not, in the Labour Party.

Thanks Harry. I hope that you manage it all. Please give my regards to Ian.

Dugsie : At last I have posted the item on Ken. I now have to make arrangments to get to his funeral. Ann and I are due to stay with Ian and Beryl for a couple of days, but we will be pushed to get back in time. So I will try to bring that visit forward a day. I last saw Ian at Karl's funeral. With yesterday's meeting on Peter Heathfield, such events form the main part of my social calender these days.

Paul

The credibility of Diane and the credibility of the Left within the Labour Party are not necessarily related. She is not seen as being representative of The Labour Left, in the way that John Mc Donnell is. She does have the great virtue of not being New Labour. The only one in the leadership contest who isn't. However, whether members of the Left decide to remain inside the party or leave depends on different considerations. The bulk of us are not entryists, but an organic part of the party. Of course, I am not saying that there are no circumstances under which socialists should leave. I can hardly say that given my record. But I haven't yet heard any convincing reasons put forward in this discussion.

It occurs to me that for Dianne Abbott to do as well as to receive 12% of the individual members vote and of the trade union vote, she has to come 4th. It is unlikely that she could come last and still do so well as to receive anything like 12%. So assuming she does come last therefore, I would guess that it is reasonable to say that her credibility threshold, (and by inference that of the strands of LP socialism,) would be 6-8%.

Please let us when, if, it is posted Harry. I look forward to reading it.

Dugsie : I hope to put something on my blog about Ken Coates whom I knew. Some of today was taken up with attending a celebration for the life of Peter Heathfield which was held in Chesterfield. These matters arise often at my age.

Some progress has been made with the campaign that is running on "Dronfield Blather" for the Labour Leadership Candidates to issue "Manifestos of Intent". Andy Burham has agreed to do this and John McDonnell is supporting our campaign.

Ken Coates did what I should have done. He went to work down the coal mines instead of doing national service. He was a very principled socialist. I most admired his work with the Institute for Workers' Control.


Ken Coates
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJump to: navigation, search
This article is about the British politician. For the Canadian historian, see Ken Coates (historian).
Ken Coates (1930-2010) was a British politician and writer. He chaired the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation and edited The Spokesman[1], the BRPF magazine launched in March 1970. He was a Labour Party Member of the European Parliament from 1989 to 1999. He was also the first Labour candidate to contest the newly created seat of Nottingham South in 1983, losing by several thousand votes.

Coates chose to became a coal miner instead of conscription into the British army fighting in the Malayan Emergency. After the War, he joined the Communist Party of Great Britain but left following the breach between Joseph Stalin and Josip Broz Tito, whom he defended. After the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary Coates and Pat Jordan became the focal point of a group of Marxists with a developing interest in Trotskyism. After attending the fifth world congress of the Fourth International in 1958, of which they were very critical, Coates played a central role in founding the International Group, forerunner of the International Marxist Group.

Coates also played leading roles in the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation (BRPF), the Institute for Workers' Control, and European Nuclear Disarmament. From 1989 to 1999 he was a Labour Party member of the European Parliament, and spent five years as President of its Human Rights Subcommittee.

It was while a member of the European Parliament that Coates was in contact with Vadim Zagladin, one of Mikhail Gorbachev's advisors, about the idea of a joint meeting between the European Parliament and the Supreme Soviet. Coates persuaded the European Parliament to explore the possibility of such a joint meeting, as a practical way of exploring Gorbachev’s call for a ‘common European home’ and supporting his democratic reforms. Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet foreign minister, visited the European Parliament, and said he would be willing to be present at a joint meeting. Coates visited Zagladin in Moscow, who offered a four-point programme of stages for realisation of the Joint Special Session, as it came to be known. [Reference European Labour Forum number 1, Summer 1990 pages 3-4, number 3, winter 1990-91, pages 20-22]

Coates pioneered a number of initiatives to help focus the institutions of European civil society beginning with a very successful Pensioners’ Parliament, and also including a special Parliament of Disabled People, and two Europe-wide conferences of unemployed people. He strongly supported the Delors programme for full employment in Europe, and became rapporteur of the Parliament’s Temporary Committee on Employment, which carried two major reports with almost unanimous support of the European Parliament.

Coates was special professor in the Department of Adult Education at the University of Nottingham.

Coates was the co-author of the official history of the Transport and General Workers' Union, among numerous other books on poverty, political philosophy, democratic and human socialism, social and economic issues, peace and disarmament as well as on democracy and human rights. His book The Case of Nikolai Bukharin (Nottingham: Spokesman, 1978) is regarded by some to have served as the international basis for the rehabilitation of that Bolshevik leader.

[edit] Books written or co-written by Ken Coates.
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Ken Coates

The History of the Transport and General Workers' Union, with Tony Topham, ISBN 978-0-85124-565-2, Basil Blackwell 1991
The Crisis of British Socialism, Spokesman Books 1971 [2]
Beyond the Bulldozer, ISBN 0-902031-43-0, Spokesman Books 1987
Empire no more, ISBN 978-0-85124-694-9, Spokesman Books 2004
Essays on Industrial Democracy, Spokesman Books
Poverty: The Forgotten Englishmen, ISBN 978-0-85124-375-7, Penguin Books 1970
The New Unionism: the case for worker's control, Penguin Books, 1974. ISBN 0-14-021811-4
Trade Union Register, Merlin Press 1969
Trade unions and politics, ISBN 0-631-13753-X, Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Trade Unions in Britain, ISBN 978-0-00686-1218 , Fontana Press 1988
Workers' Control: A Book of Readings and Witnesses for Workers' Control, ISBN 978-0-85124-699-4, McGibbon and Kee 1968
Workers' Control: Another World Is Possible, ISBN 978-0-85124-682-6, Spokesman Books 2003

"Unless your hope in the Labour Party is at an end" Paul my hope in the Labour Party was at an end years ago. However i have still been a member of the LRC, and would like to see the left and trade unions depart
from the NewLabour debacle. My original point was that the four male contenders for the leadership are business as usual merchants. With only Dianne Abbott standing for something different, and at least somewhere on the left spectrum. Osborne's cuts and his obvious allegiance to banking and big business, needs to be opposed. That will not come from anyone affiliated to NewLabour, apart from hot air. Hence what is the point in them, they are just another Tory Party.

“If Dianne Abbott does not win the leadership election, then the question must be, what is the point in the Labour Party?”

Is this really a realistic question Brian? She is not going to. Unless your hope in the Labour Party is at an end and you are inclined to leave, a more realistic question might be what is the point of the LP if Dianne Abbott fails to win a particular minimum level of support? In addition, if she managed to come a very close 5th, that would be better than say just getting 12% of the individual members vote and 12% of the trade union vote and being soundly defeated. If she were to defeat the candidate not called Balls or Miliband into 5th place that would be quite a coup, given the hold the various parts of neo-liberalism have over the party.

What Abbott were to do with what would be a resounding victory is of course another matter. I see she has resumed her role in light entertainment with Portillo and Neil.

Dugsie, you might like to explain to the Compass elite and other ‘new labourists’ who Coats was. As a socialist, Coates was an example to those of us who are socialists and he was political and ethical antithesis of much that Compass is and like the rest of ‘new labour,’ is increasingly becoming.

Dam thats sad to hear, real labour bloke not this pretend bunch we have to day.

He will be missed sadly not by this labour party.

Ken Coates has died. A real loss to the Left. There aren't many of us left.

I wrote to the DWP, when Cooper led it, complaining about the waste of time that A4E:New Deal is. The response I got from the Department was cursory to say the least.

My Conservative MP has taken the case up with a Minister and response was forthcoming. Not the most helpful, in any immediate sense, but not without consideration and at least it is a start.

If the announced judicial inquiry into alleged torture by British security services, and sanctioned by the last government. Finds a guilty verdict and compensation claims follow, what then for
the shadow cabinet, ex cabinet members and NewLabour. Could it be that the legal system finally buries NewLabour, lets hope so. It will certainly spare us from hearing the useless hypocritical nonsense from the elongated list of mediocracy that is the opposition benches. I look forward to a statement from David Milliband in response to the inquiry. September might not come soon enough for some of the leadership comtenders. While Dianne Abbott could start to look stronger by the day.

Cooper is indeed embarrassing to watch. But then, her posturing is all show; as it is with all the various strands of ‘new labour.’ In Cooper’s case, her unconvincing but well performed piece of third rate political posturing and opportunism has little to do with her concern for those under attack. It has much more to do with her efforts to assist economic failure and ‘new labour’ bully- boy, Balls, in his Labour leadership bid.

Dugsie reminds us of the Cabinet’s Bradford sojourn. I should not be surprised to see plutocrats Cooper and Balls protesting loudly outside the venue; probably with that ‘new labour,’ ultra and clothes- horse, Caroline Flint, in fragrant support. But I’m not sure that the laws against plagiarism apply to politics do they?

To continue this line of consciousness just a little further: I know they say that there is no fool like an old fool; but why is Austin Mitchell so besotted with Cooper?

The Guardian seem to think Yvette Cooper is the new star of the fightback

'Cooper highlighted the loss of a series of benefits that will hit young children – the baby tax credit, the toddler tax credit, the Pregnancy Grant, while "cut is the Sure Start Maternity Allowance".

With Duncan Smith sitting opposite her, Cooper accused the government of going further than Margaret Thatcher who was known as the "milk snatcher" after she cut free school milk for children over the age of seven in 1971:

He wants to cut the support from the babes in their mothers' arms. At least Margaret Thatcher had the grace to wait til the children had weaned before she snatched their support'

This is so dishonest. Purnell brought the age at which single mothers would be forced to go back to work down from twelve years to 12 months. Teresa May forced it up to three years and then five.
Purnell had a hissy fit in the House - I watched him - claiming that the Tories had promised to support him. Teresa May said there were lines past which she could not bring her self to go.

Cooper inherited Purnell's purge on single mothers and did not reply to our e-mails about it and did not change it at all. Ask Winvisible what they did to single mothers.

No wonder there is no opposition. With their recent history they can't do it honestly. Sooner or later this will happen and they will re write their heroic defence of the vulnerable like Cooper is doing here. It's embarassing to watch.

Normally an effective left of centre opposition would be moving heaven and earth to oppose these cuts. With the obvious increase in poverty, inequality and exploitation that will inevitably follow.
The agenda would be social democracy as a priority to reverse this unfairness, and a mobilisation of the Labour movement to achieve it. However the total disaster of NewLabour makes this practically impossible.
We have a useless opposition, completely without any idea or agenda, apart from a rerun of the last 13 years. A party that laid the foundations for the cuts we are now seeing. Some individuals still actually more right wing than the coalition, blustering in public, while agreeing in private with the present government. We now have 3 Tory Parties, all in agreement with the free markets. Parroting Keith Joseph that markets solve everything, and like Thatcher, everyone eventually finds their place. The majority of course a huge pool of cheap labour, and the minority super rich. If Dianne Abbott does not win the leadership election, then the question must be, what is the point in the Labour Party?
Why should it be funded by working people, who then are betrayed time and time again.
One free market capilalist party is bad enough, but why three? with no real representation for the majority. The Labour Party was highjacked by right wing carpet baggers, its time they were sent packing!

PS. I understand that this is already started in Germany where lots of new ideas come from. Or are they old ideas?

'where are these social employers with a conscience coming from, because I cannot bloody well find them'

It's the market - get IDS to put enough money on your head and they'll come out of the woodwork in a flash.

I think by the term 'new jobs' they mean there is going to be a chain gang with vests with 'community scrounger' on the back. Hope they don't run in to the 'community pay back' chain gang coming the other way sweeping the same street and all get mixed up and start swapping vests.

Why does Birkenhead keep electing Frank Field?

First of all no illness or disability should make you workless, employers should be able to find me work and help me carry out that work, a person with no legs no hands can still work if the money is put in place to help him, a person with mental health issues should be placed into jobs where they have no stress and the ability to rest when things go down hill. But of course thats bloody cuckoo land, people are expected to do a days work for a days pay.

Frank field has just said that people or fathers will have benefits stopped if they refuse a job given to them by the Job center, but if he had been to the job center he known that jobs are not given out at the job center, job applications are given out to people.

An example of how the job center now works, you go in say your looking for work, you say anything it does not matter, the job center will have a pile of jobs in front of them, they print one out, you go over to a free phone phone up the company, say is the job still available 90% of the time they will say no. You take your diary which the job center gives you put down the job number, what time you phoned them, and then you go home, in two weeks time you go back down the job center get another job offer and ask the person to sign your book, in this diary you will have written checked local papers for jobs, she signs it you can go home for another two weeks.

This is why all this rubbish being spoken about stopping benefits if a person refuses a job, nobody refuses a job.

Another one I saw was a chap phone a factory for a job offer from the job center, he asked do you have a room which I can inject my self, yes I'm a drug addict, what your not going to employ me, ah well never mind, he sticks that in his diary, will not employ drug addicts, as he goes he gives me a wink.

I then was next on the phone I phone up a job offer, is the offer still open, yes came the answer, good I like an interview, by the way I'm in a wheelchair will that matter, phone goes dead.

The fact is Frank Field and his mates believe that people on the dole and the long term unemployed refuse jobs, they do not many of them know how to play the field that s obvious, but tell me if your a drug addict drunk long term unemployed a Spastic retard like myself, where are these social employers with a conscious coming from, because I cannot bloody well find them.

The cabinet are meeting in Bradford, indicating their concern for the regions. It is hoped that their shopping expeditions will stimulate the local economy. Unfortunately there is now just a hole where the main shopping centre used to be. They plan visits to places of regional excellence, so I hope that Paul di Leeds has got the kettle on.

Frank Field is an example to us all. If you want to progress in politics you have to be flexible. I would like it to be known that I am available for consultancy work.

Frank Field isn't playing fair. He's telling it as it is. He's saying that young, uneducated, unemployable young men are a burden and need to be made in to proper husbands and bread winners. Just because all the sociology professors from Chicago rustbelt were writing about this twenty years ago when the factory jobs went and gang lands in Chicago became no go areas for police - and Thatcher started on about cycles of deprivation and Heseltine rushed up north in a panic and reclaimed all the canals and city centres - doesn't mean the problem went away. But we all ignored it nicely and looked the other way and wondered why the knife crime kept going up.

Frank Field is going to take their benefits away too because being destitute is such a good cure for deep, deep psychological and physical problems.

It isn't fair to start telling it as it is again now and move in and reclaim disaffected youth from the estates and turn them in to model citizens when all the jobs are meant to be for very sick people.

Employers are going to be spoilt for choice here. I wonder what the market will say about it.

Political debate has become meaningless. All the words have changed their meaning - or rather their meanings have been hi-jacked and changed.

No person is now sick or disabled. Every one can pass the computer fit test because you can't fail it. There is only fit and differently abled. No illness is bad enough that it stops you working - schizophrenia, learning disability, autism, stroke it is only a barrier to work that you should see as a challenge and overcome. They have courses for you called 'managing your disability for work'.

Work isn't hard and tiring and demanding. It doesn't happen in difficult to get to locations. It doesn't require more energy than your medication leaves you with. It is liberating and a cure for mental illness.

Employers don't take the fittest leanest employees - they understand that sick people are actually able to work harder and longer than fit people and choose them.

By taking someone's only source of income away you don't make them destitute and homeless - you get them moving along with their illness in to the work place. And you make them happier.

NewLabour invented this perversion of language.

Between the aspiration and the reality falls the shadow so don't give it a name. And then it won't be there.

Frances: Tell New Labour to fuck off. Failing that, we must start a campaign in which simply everyone just tells New Labour apparatchiks to fuck off, all the time.

Altogether now... After 3: New Labour fuck off.

Sane,compare and contrast,Miliband and Owen.
Use a screen surface one electron deep,neither
are that substantial.
Do you think Miliband will also be a prized associate of
an immense foreign energy conglomerate in a decade or so?
Crosland said that the 60's leadership contest was
between a crook,a drunk and a conman.
I guess today's between four nerds and a diva
has to be an improvement?
Gaitskell's tag was "A Man With A Plan".
Anyone seen the Labour plan lately?
Any plan?Anyone?

Frances,

Your last post concerning the BBC interviewer

The BBC are biased against the sick. They cannot get their facts right even now. Still going on today about 2.6million on ESA when the transfer from IB to ESA does not start to take place till early next year.

Never once do the BBC asks who will employ the disabled and mentally ill? NIMBY is one reason why the question is not asked.

They are as bad as Murdoch's Sky News, poodles of government and paying themselves far too much with no accountability at all, they now seem to enjoy attacking the voiceless on a regular basis.

As for New Labour, they must be pround of themselves today that Purnells Welfare Reform Act is being used with such joy by the right wing Tory/Lib coalition with rabid daily mail support. Even the public sector workers many whose job involves working with the sick and disabled. are encouraged to protect their own jobs by cuts to the very people their jobs engage them with on a daily basis.

Paul

The news that IB/ESA is to be cut in terms similar to Housing Benefit is yet another body blow. I wonder what tomorrow’s news will bring? - And we have not even got to the Spending Review due on 20 October. The more this and the previous Gvt’s policies come to light, the more I feel certain that I will become homeless eventually. I don’t know when that will be of course, but I hope it is not until after my cat has died.

As to the well paid and financially secure Anne Begg, with as near to a job for life and copper-plated pension as one can get, she was always the hardest of hardliners acting as poster girl to the workfare aspirations of the hardest of her ‘new labour’ friends. - A kind of Uncle Tom figure, as it were, with her wheelchair very much to the fore.

I would resign from the LP today except that it would be a gesture of even greater futility than not renewing my membership next year.

I just saw Ann Begg trying to attack the government for the announcement today that IB/ESA is to be reduced along with housing benefit. So any one with schizophrenia who has been pushed out to independent living in a flat on their own will have far less money to survive on along with being under continual threats and sanctions for not finding work. Ann Begg was at a loss to explain how this purge was any different from the Labour purge. The legislation to do this is all there on the statute ready to go from Labour.

Even more confused was the top BBC interviewer who was saying - but we don't want people with severe mental illness to be classed as 'unfit for work.'

She is confused because it is not kind to assess some one as 'not fit for work'. Of course the opposite of fit for work shouldn't be unfit for work. So being 'fit for some limited work' applies to every disabled person now.

Every one fit for work - is the new mantra which would be fine in a Brecht play. Of course just because you are very, severely, enduringly ill you should be able to work like Stephen Hawkins. He leads the way on this. Every one is not disabled now but differently abled. The goal posts are now so wide that every one is 'fit for work'. Being 'fit for work' is a social construct. There are two sides to the equation. Your health and the employer who has to want to help and be prepared to spend his own money.

No problem at all. But being fit for work in some best case scenario does not mean you can find a job that accommodates your disability. Realistically most people have the same disability as they had yesterday and if they couldn't find work yesterday - how are they going to find work today. The reality is they will find it very, very difficult to find and keep work. So they are condemned to a life of sanctions and threats for not finding work and now today it is announced that IB/ESA levels will be reduced along with housing benefit.

Why can't they just say - we need to save money - we can't afford any longer to support the sick and disabled who fail to find work. Instead of dressing it up as some great liberation of the sick in to work which can't and won't happen.

I hope you and your friends resist this pressure Frances. That Carewatch should come under such pressure from Labour says much about their seemingly boundless cynicism. For a decade, ‘new labour’ led a steadily louder and more strident drumbeat against benefit claimants of all categories. Those of their colleagues who perhaps thought this vulgar, - even unfair- could strike a pose of moral opposition knowing full well that their fellow ‘progressives,’ would continue the policy and bear such opprobrium for them as needed to be borne. A sentence containing the words, ‘cake’ and ‘eating it,’ springs readily to mind.

The supporters of Blair and Brown, not least those who sought to undermine each in turn; and who now seek to deny supporting either or both of them, were supportive cheerleaders of the economic and social neo-liberal policies which has caused the crisis, for which the poor, the sick and the disabled, most now pay the price. Frankly when I listen to the likes of Jim Fitzpatrick, Yvette, (‘double Place-Seeker Allowance household,’) Cooper and the ‘new labour’ men chasing the leadership, criticising the Coalition Gvt for driving forward Labour Party policies, I feel almost physically sick. In Bevin’s time. We knew who it was who were ‘lower than vermin.’ These days, it is not just the Tories.

As the drumbeat became ever more shrill with each passing year, any expectation that Labour neo-liberals, from the clique for whom Compass exists, to the other ‘new labour’ networks, to the PLP, would change, declined exponentially. The Tories and Lib Dems have completed that part of the ‘new labour’ Project which sought to substantially expand the shared definition of the ‘undeserving poor.’ And in a matter of weeks, Tory allies to whom the likes of Frank Field, John Hutton and of course Jon Cruddas are close, have succeeded in virtually turning the’ undeserving poor’ into social pariahs and public enemies.

A question for Carewatch and every individual to be sacrificed to ‘new labour’ hubris and economic failure, is to whom do they turn? More than ever Labour MPs are either ‘new labour’ or are their fellow travellers. And if recipients of the Place Seekers Allowance do decide to take up a the case of those already defined as ‘undeserving’ might they not do so simply because they want to embarrass the Coalition Gvt?

Nothing that the ideological, social and political heirs and beneficiaries of the Blair- Brown years think or do surprises me. But I am genuinely surprised that Vince Cable and Steve Webb should be in this Gvt…..And without Cable, it is unlikely that this Gvt would exist.

Sane,a greater emergency to divert from internal woes,how novel.
Cue Miliband snr. to reprise his national unity role.
Any odds on a grand alliance to meet this threat (whatever it is) to our very national survival?
Send the scroungers to the front line (wherever it is) say I.
frances' concerns will just have to wait until this immediate catastrophe is dealt with.Doesn't she know this crisis transcends general politics.
Now shall we resurrect foreign inspired terrorism,Iran,N.Korea,Swine flu,the Russian threat to energy supplies,Lady Ga Ga.Perm any two of three.Can we get the very independent PLP on side?
I couldn't possibly comment.

Dont take the criticisms down from the site Frances. New Labour should be held to account. When the full horror of the welfare reforms kicks in and suicides happen Labour will try to pretend its all IDS's fualt We dont yet know how bad IDS will be but he will be merely continuing where Purnell left off.

Interestingly New Labour didn't get any credit for its welfare reforms as the Tories and the tabloids were banging on about "scroungers" anyway. Chances are they lost more votes on the left than they gained on the right if any. Whether its welfare or immigration trying to appease right wing prejudice never works. It only helps to make prejudice the conventional wisdom and the Tories can then go futher to the right without effective opposition.

This is certainly a strange new world or should I say next world.

At CarerWatch we find welfare doves and hawks in all parties. No party is wholly for us except the Greens. We have Labour Party members who have ignored us for the past two years while we pleaded for protection for the sick - suddenly asking us to take criticism of the last Labour government off the site as too harsh when it would be impossible to be too harsh about the last government's Welfare Reforms.

Labour seem to think they can forget the past and join us now in criticism of the Coalition and thus fight back in to power. But why should we believe that they will be any better next time round.

We are refusing to take the Labour record down but we are getting a lot of pressure.

Brave next world is very confusing.

‘Not only does the SDP still exist, but the Liberal Party still exists as well. Read their views on the Tory /Lib Dem coalition on their site.’

“They have betrayed the party workers who have worked hard promote the centre left of politics by rushing to the rescue of the political right.”

That is not a bad up sum of the ‘new labour’ coalition and its Project either.

There is an unfortunate situation now for those who put their faith in New Labour- New Labour was all about Bling and individualism. It was a crass experiment in 'grab what you can' politics and don't think about the future.
If the Lib Dems hadn't gone into Govt with the Tories then we would have had a minority Govt for the next few months with Cameron going back to the polls in the Autumn and ending up with a majority and the ability to do what he wanted.
By creating this coalition the Lib Dems have created a situation that means the country is saved from the worst excesses of Toryism and the Lib Dems aren't anihilated in four months time.

I agree with Sane, English Football especially in the Premiership but in the lower leagues as well highlight the greed fuelled by debt that has consumed all aspects of this Country.

The poor and the voiceless now have to pay for it.

Paul

Unfortunately for Williams and Jenkins-type SDPers, who should have known better, the SDP will forever be associated with that vain pillock - Owen.

At least Con Dems will not be able to bask in any reflected glory and no good football run will distract the English part of the country from the state of the nation.

I think in the England football humiliation we also see the result of bling and individualism.

Not only does the SDP still exist, but the Liberal Party still exists as well. Read their views on the Tory /Lib Dem coalition on their site.

Who else still exists ?

Perhaps, in a parallel universe, England's football hopes still exist.

To assist Lewis in fending off latent romanticism for the SDP, we should bear in mind that they still exist. They have a website, a handful of parish councillors and, (at a guess,) a couple of hundred members across Lincolnshire and the old East Riding. They seem harmless enough and certainly less harmful than the real heirs to the SDP who contributed so much to ‘new labour’ and who are joined by their natural Tory and Lib Dem allies of late in parading their cynicism as ‘progressive’ politics. And of course we know to what trouble, - let’s call a spade a spade- Neal Lawson in particular went to, to undermine the Labour vote and increase the Lib Dem vote, during the election. When the history of this Gvt’s emergence and policies are written, Neal Lawson will surely merit at least a grubbily appreciative footnote from its hagiographers. Those who will lose their earnings, their tax credits, their DLA, their Housing Benefit/Housing Allowance and their homes, between now and the next election, should certainly remember him.

As George Irvin says, “The pain has just begun.

If as Lewis suggests Labour has been destroyed, it was not destroyed by Michael Foot, but by Blair and Brown and their allies. As Lewis says the current leadership is crucial. But what makes it crucial is that it will indicate the relative strength and influence of the competing interests within Labour neo-liberalism. And with this in mind, look at this site; then Progress; but then, Left Foot Forward. It is Left Foot Forward, of those who accept the neo-liberal settlement, that is most likely to most appeal to the socially liberal anti stateist and anti-socialist idealism of our newly arrived Lib Dem colleagues.

As to Diane Abbott, her nomination papers were not hawked around by ‘new labour’ trusties in panic-stricken efforts to ensure that she would appear on the ballot paper because they thought for a moment that she might win the Leadership. For them, her importance to the Leadership contest is for quite other reasons.

It is no surprise surely that Miliband D should want it known that he is reading Crosland? Those who gave us ‘new labour’ have been praying him in aid for years. Now, if Miliband were taking an instructive interest in his dad’s writings that really would be noteworthy.

I thought Foot was elected because Healey had rubbed too many people up the wrong way.
The defection of the SDP created a self-fulfilling prophecy and the Party was left for the Left.
Even so, what price - for very unpopular Tories - a ship sailing out of range in the South Atlantic?

Lewis

You don't still believe that the SDP was in any real sense social democratic do you ? I thought that you had recovered from those delusions.

The Yorkie mob must realise that this Labour leadership election is crucial,Foot's victory destroyed Labour.
In this context Diane's share of the vote is academic.
The next leader could well have to offer the nation a realistic programme much sooner than conventional wisdom would believe.
The PLP is certainly not socialist,and the (remaining) membership is probably not predominately so.
People on the social democratic wing are now going to have to confront the choices they mocked and derided the SDP for making decades ago.No doubt these will be dressed up as high principle as opposed to the "shameless expedient hypocrisy" taunts directed at the SDP.
There are other traditions in Labour,andit was interesting that David Miliband recently praised Antony Crosland.

And as far as there are passing bits and pieces outside the Labour Party, we just carry on having one foot inside and the other outside. Unless something dramatic happens from an unanticipated avenue, the more things change the more they stay the same.

What's changed ? We were in a political party dominated by New Labour neoliberalism in government and now we are in the same situation in opposition. So the rhetoric is likely to move leftwards, but the reality will remain the same. Government will have more conviction about it, because the Tories and Orange Liberals really believe in a 'free market'.

There is no viable socialist or social democratic project outside the Labour Party. Inside, there is the Labour Representation Committee and associates, which function well, within very restricted limitations. So do we abandon them or attempt to turn them outwards, which they have been attempting to do, anyway, for some time.

The thing is Harry; social democrats have left the LP and continue to do so. No less important, many who remain have become disillusioned and/or inactive. In this category I now include myself. I note that a signatory to your excellent statement is a member of my BLP who has not been seen at a meeting for years.

Like you, I very much doubt that the candidates will issue considered manifestoes, still less cause them to be distrusted for comment. I agree that there is no alternative to the LP. But there has to be more than that balled statement: there has to be substance. There is substance, - class interest and politics at its root. But that substance is not of socialist and internationalist social change. It could be argued that it never was. But in reality Labour’s class and political role in reformist socialism has always been much more complex than that.

Quite reasonably you quote the LP’s ‘new labour’ constitution. Time was when one could swallow hard but still accept the constitution in full as a statement of politics and class purpose; and indeed not need to place inverted commas around such solid Left concepts as ‘values’ and ‘progressive.’ Now, LP socialists have to tread with care through a constitution which in practice has no socialist values or purposes and have to light on occasional words and phrases in hope of sustaining a socialist justification for remaining in a party transformed from broadly socialist purposes to broadly pluralist neo-liberal purposes.

Labour in Gvt and opposition since 1994 has been fully supportive of an anti working class, substantially anti democratic political consensus and political centre ground. It is anti-democratic in the fundamental sense that it, (like the political economy and civil society it has sustained and strengthened,) relies increasing on a competitive elitism at the level of the ideological superstructure.

We shall see in due course if Diane Abbott seeks to break free of the role allocated to her by her ‘new labour’ patrons in the Compass canteen and elsewhere. Particularly if she does not seek to break free of the neo-liberal consensus, - and of her patrons, - no amount of proclaiming that there is no alternative to the Labour Party will change a thing. Nor will it arrest the decline in active membership, or in membership as expressed in numerical terms.

Dugsie expresses concern about the influx of social liberal refugees from the Lib Dem Party. There is a distinction to be drawn between social liberals and the social liberal end of neo-liberalism as championed within ‘new labour’ by Compass. What the Lib Dem arrivals make, of that commitment to pluralist elitism synthesised with that intellectually course crude and utterly self-interested use of Labour tribalism at the heart of Compass ideology, will be interesting to observe. More immediately, since these new members are to have a vote in the Leadership contest, I’d have thought that they would be genuinely progressive enough to mostly support Diane Abbott rather than any of the 4 ‘new labour’ old lags. - Each of whom is notionally to her Right This is part of the context in which it seems reasonable to expect her to reach the very modest threshold of 12% of the members’ section of the Electoral College.

The longer one supports a decaying, ossifying relic, the longer one leaves it before developing the alternative.

Supporting what is still New Labour only gives them an excuse.

I believe, still, that whatever wanton liberty their desperado leadership have taken with their support, many Lib Dems in the country remain on the social democratic left side. It remains as to how to identify, reach out to and channel that opinion.

A lot of you think the Greens are just Tories in wellies. Their latest manifesto was the closest of all parties' to Old Labour. I do not know if the Greens will continue to occupy the positions they do, but reading somebody like Monbiot, one realises that doing anything serious in favour of the environment and sustainability, necessarily will involve social democratic regulation, organization and possible ownership models. Yes, like the Lib Dems, Greens have seemingly let themselves down by going into partnership with dodgy parties. A considerable reason for this is how FPTP has helped persuade Labour to campaign only to the swing voter and to undermine the basis for social democratic unity.

Something other than FPTP and AV allows the social democratic-outside Labour to be something worth voting for. Overall, social democracy, a sensible policy for the people can have a good future. It just needs for social democrats to come out of their bunkers. Perhaps there should be a sudden rush of membership of the Labour Party and, with all new members, the remaining socialists and social democrats can refuse to play New Liberal ball. Some wish, huh?!

There is always a question of what alternative political practice exists to remaining a member of the Labour Party ? Of course, an individuals own politics will inform their particular answer to this question. Harry identifies himself as a democratic socialist and I am a socialist democrat who supports social democracy. It's complicated, but, presumably, all members of the Labour Party have thought that they could achieve something by their membership.

As some of you will know, I have spent time outside the Labour Party, twice since I first joined in 1950, actively looking for an alternative political practice. I couldn't find it. What did I miss ?

Paul McLean : My argument isn't just that Labour was the only political party which democratic socialists could operate within in 1957; but that it is still the only avenue today. This is the case even though the scope for democratic socialists in today's Labour Party is massively more restrictive than it was 50 odd years ago. Of course, New Labour practices (including the final destruction of what were never more than limited areas of internal party democracy) are far worse than the ideas expressed in, say. Crosland's "Future of Socialism" in 1956.

But we know all this without seeing what happens to a specific candidate in a flawed election. Pressure to get all the candidates to spell out a full policy programme could help lift the nature of the internal debate in the Labour Party. See "Dronfield Blather" on this. I know that this is highly unlikely to happen. But when it doesn't, there is still no case for democratic socialists leaving the Labour Party for something-we-know-not-what. If a better alternative to Labour came along, I would join them immediately. But I can't imagine where it will come from.