[Abernathy]

No really suitable existing thread to put this bit in, so started a new one for comment on Labour's campaigns, strategy, and approach.

The launch of the local elections campaign today has seen the party issue a new version of the old 1997 pledge card :

http://labourlist.org/2013/04/labour-la ... edge-card/



All good, but no mention of the current "hot" issue of welfare "reform". Rightly so, I feel.

Labour needs to pick its own ground, and not be dragged onto the Tories ' chosen battleground. Alternative proposals on a more humane approach to welfare will emerge in due course.

[Lord Brett]

Not the new Richard Curtis film I was expecting from the thread title, then.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Interesting that Sky News carried Ed's speech live, BBC News didn't mention it...

[Abernathy]

Well, it's been swept away by Thatcher croaking now.

[Malcolm Armsteen]

Yes. It's a pity, it was good.

But it's in the files, we can come back to it after the funeral...

[Littlejohn's brain]

Read the speech on LabourList

http://labourlist.org/2013/04/ed-miliba ... ch-speech/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Seemed like a good speech

[new puritan]

Got to say, this is an uncomfortably accurate assessment of where Labour currently stands from Mark Fisher. The stuff about cracking down on payday lenders was fine but Labour remains all over the place on welfare - and the rhetoric from Danczuk and others was well out of order coming from allegedly Labour MPs. I thought voting against the welfare uprating bill was a big step in the right direction, but it seems now it was a false dawn.

Meanwhile, Labour shuffles uncomfortably in the shadows, looking at its feet, before offering up its depressing policy review on the future of welfare. This confirms what few could have doubted: that Labour has learned next to nothing from the failures of Blairism, and that its only strategy is to hide out, do nothing to frighten the horses, and wait for government to be handed back to them as a consequence of discontent with the Tories. Without Blair’s charismatic thespianry and false hopes, without even the Shakespearean drama of Brown’s blighted leadership, an atmosphere of deathly, affectless decadence has settled over the Labour Party. Populist but not very popular, Labour has become a dead mechanism animated by a blind drive: win elections. It is an election-winning machine which can barely win elections, and which has long ago forgotten why you would want to win an election in the first place. By contrast, the Tories have a feverish sense of purpose. They serve ruling class interests even when not in power by dragging the ‘centre’ ground to the right. Once in government, they impose their policy agenda at high speed, without majority or mandate, retrospectively justifying it, if they bother to justify it at all, with the kind of “debate” we saw last week.

http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/1272-th ... t-thatcher" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Littlejohn's brain]

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jonny-m ... 45939.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Malcolm Armsteen]

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/jonny-m ... 45939.html

Utter bollocks.

Huffpo is the poor imitation of Mail Online...

[Littlejohn's brain]

Out of interest why is the article utter bollocks?

[Malcolm Armsteen]

It's a knocking piece on Huffpo. For a start. The 'there are no firm policies' line, over two years out from an election is just crap.

Tell me why it's worth reading.

[new puritan]

I think the point he's driving at is that Labour should take the opportunity to make a decisive break from the neoliberal blueprint, which I obviously sympathise with. But it's asking a bit much to expect Labour to make a series of high-profile policy commitments at this stage. Firstly, you'd be giving the Tories two years to chip away at them - John Smith learned a similar lesson to his cost in the run-up to 1992. Secondly, we just don't know what the next government will inherit. It's likely to be, to nick a phrase much favoured by the coalition, a mess.

[Littlejohn's brain]

Personally I'm not be impressed with it it ignores just how divisive Thatcher was and still is

As you mentioned the stuff about not setting out polices is bollocks since if Labour they would be picked apart by the Tories just as they did in 1992

He also makes a general error in that in 1979 the Conservative did not set out their stall as a make or break moment their manifesto contained no reference to privatization and it contained no real core Thatcherite policies

[oboogie]

It was the Falklands which emboldened Thatcher, she actually did very little in her first three years and was heading for a likely defeat in 1983.

[Big Rob]

It was the Falklands which emboldened Thatcher

Yip....