open Democracy News Analysis - What is Labour's British story?, Gerry Hassan - Comments

Toque on "What is Labour's British story?"

Toque — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 17:09:22 +0100

Keith, I've made the same journey. I made it a long time ago to be fair. I call myself an English nationalist, but not, necessarily, a separatist, because when sovereignty lies with the people it's up to them to choose independence or the Union. I happen to think that they will choose Union. Sovereignty needs to be moved from the centre - Westminster - to the peripheries - the nations - and when that happens we can still have a union but it will be one by mutual consent.

A federation is what the Scots wanted from the start. Extracts from Tom Nairn's After Britain.

Sir John Clerk of Penicuik (16 April 2006):

The Commissioners met there amongst themselves, the
first general point debated…was whether they should propose to the
English a Federal union between the two nations, or an incorporating
union. The first was most favoured by the people of Scotland, but all
Scots Commissioners, to a Man, considered it impracticable, for that in
all Federal unions there behoved to be a supreme power lodged
somewhere, and wherever this was lodged it henceforth became the States
General, or, in our way of speaking, the Parliament of Great Britain,
under the same royal power and authority as the two nations are at
present…

Earl of Mar:

…they [the English] will never meet with us, for they
think all the notions about federal unions and forms a mere jest or
chimera…

And Tom Nairn’s opinion?

The point was not simply that the English Parliament
demanded incorporation, but that they were right to do so. This is what
the Commissioners were really recognizing, against the will of many or
even most of them. Any lesser or more conditional union between the two
such hopelessly unequal polities could never work out, at least in what
Clerk calls ‘things of the greatest consequence’ - which were naturally
what the whole deal turned on. At bottom Union was about finally
separating Scotland from France, and being able to go on unimpeded to
conquest French hegemony in the wider world.

Thanks to the English ideal of the Crown's sovereignty in Parliament (which as Tom points out is under attack) the Act of Union incorporated Scotland into the English Parliament (it was now a British parliament but the furniture was the same). But at the same time the English parliament was incorporated, or rather changed, into the British parliament. With the benefit of hindsight it's fairly easy to see that a huge mistake was made. OK, so the Union has lasted 300 years, but the anniversary passed without celebration, and the French aren't quite as dastardly as they once seemed...Time to mend the huge cracks that have appeared in our union of nations.

Keith McBurney on "What is Labour's British story?"

Keith McBurney — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 04:03:59 +0100

I wonder if he has too Toque?

But perhaps the enabling vision of GB after GB in a transformed confederal "Union of the Isles" is in more folks' minds than i might be tempted to think brought it to their attention here. Once the real problems are identified from the symptoms, the best approach to negotiations is a win-win outcome. It struck me that recognition of sovereignty and confederation would be the antidote to so many of our democratic deficit ills. So even in England, I could not be alone in seeing the uniquely confederal accommodation of Independence and Union appears to do just and justly that, with no attendant downside whatsoever other than for the political parties, their paymasters and fellow travellers who put party before our peoples.

And yes, it is about all our freedoms. After taking their group photo in the HoL, i said as much to the CEP and ED members who had heard me advocate such a re-Union at the Hansard event with the Rifkind and Falconer on the WLQ. Therein, i suggested it was the wrong question being answered by the wrong people and the wrong solution. When i went on to expand on the real argument between a unitary federal UK and a reunifying confederal Union of the Isles, Rifkind looked as owlishly bemused as ever. However, Falconer got the point and the chair to shut me up, but not before it had been made to folk from Ireland and Wales who had made the journey too.

Likewise, if parties would put people first, the progressive will find expression in our preferred plurality. Else, our disinterest - if not downright disaffection in walking away from their undoing of us - will be marked both in declining membership of parties and turnout, as has been the trend in states where the electorate has become political consumer rather than participant. Here, cash back for votes is fostered by the decisive marginal gains to be had in first past the post; hence no party got more than 20% of the total potential electorates vote in the last rounds. That was not a mandate for anything other than the consensual, effectively heeded only in Scotland and Wales.

In contrast, Whitehall continues to hide behind the Westminster it sorely abuses - with the whipped connivance of unfaithful misrepresentatives, and so us by proxy. A Westminster locked in the adversarial, where strength of argument is outnumbered at our expense by unsustainable legislative incompetence. Like much else, such was the ersatz decentralisation of devolution.

It is ironic too that successive Conservative and now Labour maladministrations, throughout tribally engaged by infighting outside and knock-out by numbers inside the Westminster village ring, have been decrying what they might better have been themselves in Scotland and Wales had they not been party to shoring up the diminished power of the UK edifice of Empire past to preserve England writ large and so themselves.

This poorly attended performance is now bringing about the time-served UK state’s final curtain call. Moreover, hubristic Labour are now on the wrong side of a self-inflicted economic and political drag curve, where matters can only get worse before they can get better, and there is no quick fix without a nigh on terminal downside.

In readily recognising the English Question from their own colonial experience of the iniquitous inequality which begged it, others do recognise the English cannot leave themselves until they leave them to shut the UK door behind and step aboard a new Union. And this we would all be bound to do, as no man or nation is an island on our nations’ shores of families and friends and family of friendly nations.

Time and tide beckons. As Alex says, It is indeed concern for our neighbours as much for ourselves that will see us safe across the present divide between past and future, despite the divisive gloom and doom of naysayers. We should not be discouraged by false arguments couched in terms of Union v Independence, or ersatz Devolution v true Decentralisation, or Home Rule v Self Rule. These are the posturing pronouncements of politicians on manoeuvres. You will not hear them cry “Save the UK” lest we ask "why?" Instead, their calculating call is “Save the Union”. As the Union would be saved in any event, of course they wish to do so, as they well might in wishing to be the party in power that does! But not this UK state that the 1707 incorporating Union gave the mixed blessing of birth to. Instead, as all our nations should be party to the complete transformation, we folk might best prefer to do so too in our perceived mutual interests.

Meanwhile, the progressive voices of liberty are still alive and well in Scotland and Wales. If not keen on advice from there to change policies, the latest edition of the New Statesman has some thoughtful inputs from Martin Bright and its Leader on some progressive medicine for unhealthy democracies, respectively at: http://www.newstatesman.com/uk-politics/2008/08/labour-party-city-justice & http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2008/08/labour-wealth-continuity.

Unlock Democracy too might care to pass on some holiday reading to GB before he resumes his quest to be elected as PM. Given the little that has been accomplished, it should not take long to update what they sent him on taking up office. PR would be a good start. It might be the only way to ensure enough Labour MPs live to fight another day. It would be a liberating Act which has worked for progressive forces elsewhere!

Aye Ours,

Keith, frae Fife and Yorkshire, for Independence & Union

PS to others. There is an excellent article “In Support for Nationalism” and a contribution by Harry Reid which is a very succinct aid to understanding here: http://toque.co.uk/blog/?p=980

Toque on "What is Labour's British story?"

Toque — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 11:33:51 +0100

I wonder if James Bovington reads Our Kingdom?

alex_buchan on "What is Labour's British story?"

alex_buchan — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 08:25:10 +0100

Tom

I think what happens in England concerns everyone who lives in the UK.

The lessons from Scotland, I feel, is that progressive political change can only come about when 1) it is in line with, rather than going against, the deep underlying forces unleashed by globalism and European unification, 2) it manages to gain some political space free from Westminster.

On both these criteria the battle seems to be around the death of the old ‘Great Britain’ project, with its concern for world power status on the one hand, and the emergence of ‘England’ as a vehicle for a new progressive vision of the future.

As an artificial construct united around greatness on the world stage, Britain seems out of place and out of time, in the new Europe. The struggle over the vision of an emerging England also creates space free from the control of Westminster, and the media circus the surrounds it. Although the Westminster parties can co-opt most new movements that arise, such as the environmental movement, they cannot co-opt the movement for English democratic rights because it would signal the end of Westminster itself.

Tom Griffin on "What is Labour's British story?"

Tom Griffin — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 23:59:49 +0100

Mike,

I agree that a way forward for the English Left is not your responsibility. The belief that the Scottish left could make good the failures of its English counterpart is part of what got us where we are.

Those of us south of the border need to find our own way forward. I don't have any great analysis to show that will happen, but I'm not sure that calling the odds is what's important at this juncture.

Sarah2 on "What is Labour's British story?"

Sarah2 — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 22:01:35 +0100

'Liberal' is a sneered insult at times in the UK. This phenomenon is even more pronounced in the US. I suspect progressive may end up the same way. Perhaps many people have had quite enough 'progress'.

Mike Small on "What is Labour's British story?"

Mike Small — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 20:25:18 +0100

Tom I'm away of the radical traditions in English political cultural, and their great potential, though less sure when they have recenly manifested.

But when you say: "I think it is worth trying to come up with a way forward now rather than just waiting for that to happen" part of me asks, is that my responsibility?

Gerry writes: 'Such a new progressive imagination can already be seen in Scotland and Wales, where it will continue to grow with or without Labour. It will then find its English form. ' But will it? It seems like a bold statement, given a resurgent Tory vote, a sprinkling of support for the BNP and a political culture that seems at times to be lurching to the right.

john problem on "What is Labour's British story?"

john problem — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:26:19 +0100

It's all pie in the sky unless we can find a way of restoring some semblance of democracy to our treasured isle, instead of the once every 4/5 years when people get to vote.

Toque on "What is Labour's British story?"

Toque — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 07:10:37 +0100

"Today all modern nations manage their identities. They use logos, advertising campaigns, festivals and trade fairs to promote a national brand. Some have been incredibly successful. Recently Ireland transformed its image from that of a rural, traditional Catholic country to an innovative "Celtic Tiger." Spain has managed to shed the shadow of Franco and redefine itself as a modern industrial nation using the Espana picture by Miro as a national logo symbolizing a bright, optimistic, young country." Mark Leonard, Britain: Renewing Our Identity - the man who informed Blair's Cool Britannia.

It's prats like Mark Leonard that are as much to blame as Gordon Brown for rendering Britishness meaningless. The trouble with Britishness is that it doen't really exist, and the more you talk about it the more obvious that becomes. Brown's Britishness hasn't moved much beyond Cool Britannia. He throws in oblique references to the Magna Carta and then trashes its last extant clause with his repellant Nu-fascist legislation.

Fortunately Scottishness, Englishness and Welshness are more historic, deep-rooted, identities, based on ancient ethnicities. They can't so easily be rendered worthless by New Labour idiots.

Keith McBurney on "What is Labour's British story?"

Keith McBurney — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 21:18:15 +0100

Thanks Gerry, from one for whom the bell's toll is appealing, your article has directly and indirectly answered my sought for clarification in response too "The Lessons of Glasgow East".

If i am not mistaken therefore, it confirms we all might have a shorter timeframe to prepare for the implications of Indepedence and re-Union yet to be outlined beyond the social in a win-win confederal outcome. And that this in turn could transform the UK edifice of Empire in de-colonising ourselves at last but by no means for the least.

And that does not mean until the next Holyrood elections along with those at Cardiff & Stormont in 2011, because the next general election might well see a much different take on Westminster.

Which begs the question when Labour can afford to have it with their present shelves bare of persuasive policies and pounds. The longer they leave it, the less likely the poisoned chalice of their debt ridden false economy and off-book financing might be toxic to the touch.

So perhaps they will hang on in the hope of finding someone and/or something better from within themselves to deliver us from in time. For sure, it cannot be left to a jam tomorrow manifesto again. There have been too many important promises not kept already. Nor is any amount of rewriting how they have cleaned up their own foul mess going to convince anyone it was not when it happened on their watch, especially those they once stood for and abandoned.

Rootless, they will be blown away by the same wind of change which swept through Glasgow East on its way back south. Bring it on!

Aye Ours,

Keith, frae Fife and Yorkshire, for Independence & Union

Tom Griffin on "What is Labour's British story?"

Tom Griffin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:41:40 +0100

Mike,

The danger is that it will be the history of exclusion and disenfranchisement under the coming Tory hegemony. I think it is worth trying to come up with a way forward now rather than just waiting for that to happen.

England does have a radical tradition, which is closely interwoven with the decentralist strands of the British left that Gerry points to.

That tradition is as much about limiting and democratising state power, (particularly state power in alliance with private monopoly power) as about extending state power.

Mike Small on "What is Labour's British story?"

Mike Small — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 20:06:52 +0100

Will it find its English form? What soil will these roots spring from? What evidence do you see of this Gerry?

Tom, what cultural history of exclusion or political experience of disenfranchisement might an English Left Nationalism grow from?

In hopeful scepticism, Mike

nezavisimost on "What is Labour's British story?"

nezavisimost — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 19:56:56 +0100

The section 'What is the Labour Story of the Nation?' is one of the best and truest peices of political writing that i have read this year.

Tom Griffin on "What is Labour's British story?"

Tom Griffin — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 17:09:35 +0100

a new progressive imagination can already be seen in Scotland and Wales, where it will continue to grow with or without Labour. It will then find its English form

That English form is a particularly urgent lacuna. There is a real danger that its absence will ease the Tories' return to the their traditional dominance in England.

Events have moved far enough in Scotland for us to be able to draw some conclusions about their implications elsewhere.

Even if the Scots have not yet decided on independence, they have decided on a principle of self-determination which is being ever more fully realised.

How can that principle be applied in England? Perhaps we need a manifesto for the English left.

What is Labour's British story?, Gerry Hassan

Gerry Hassan — Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:21:51 +0100

Writing from Scotland Gerry Hassan widens the OurKingdom debate on Labour's future sparked by the intervention of the Foreign Secretary.

The recent salvo across Gordon Brown's bow by David Miliband shows that there is still some life in the top echelons of Labour. However, Milband's prognosis, along with the delicate decoding and musings of Sunder Katwala, embody the problems and limitations of thinking in London's Labour circles.

This is an existential crisis for Labour. It might have been brought to a head by its dire opinion poll ratings, shocking by-election defeats and Gordon Brown's uninspiring leadership, but it is about much more than even a significant setback in popularity. There is a sense of pessimism and fatalism that Labour's immediate troubles have uncovered. This go deep into the party and helps explain its tumbling membership, as even its once loyal supporters come to sense the tremendous limitations of New Labour thinking as well as its politics. These include:

What does Labour stand for beyond the platitudes of ‘economic prosperity with social justice' and ‘for the many, not the few'?

Who does Labour give voice to and how does it aid, support and encourage the articulation of that voice?

What is the Labour understanding of nation and place, and is there such a thing as a ‘Labour nation' and a ‘Labour place'?

Ask these questions and you'll find that David Miliband's evocation of ‘change' and ‘radicalism' in his ‘Guardian' piece evokes an underlying Thatcherite orthodoxy, rather than someone calling for greater equality in an unfair world. Decoding his text in best Kremlinology fashion seems to indicate more than that he just wants to leave his options open. His failure to mention social justice, beyond complaining that the Tories have no right to lay claim to it, in an essay brimming with platitudes, indicates that part of him views the Thatcherite/Blairite consensus as beyond question.Gerry Hassan is a writer, commentator and policy analyst and author and editor of twelve books on Scottish and UK politics including The Scottish Labour Party: History, Institutions and Ideas, After Blair: Politics after the New Labour Decade and The Political Guide to Modern Scotland. He can be contacted on: gerry.hassan@virgin.net

Miliband talks what might once have been an intoxicating talk of ‘empowerment, ‘devolution' and ‘localism'. This may still impress some Westminster anoraks and those in its think tank world. For the rest of us, such Labour language has become utterly devoid of substance and action. It is not just that this language has consistently proven to be New Labour window-dressing. It is worse than that. While such terms are consistent with traditional Labour means and social democratic thinking in this country, they are being deployed for very different ends.

Labour is a social democratic party. As such (as David Marquand also points out) it urgently needs to reconsider its historic and contemporary approaches to centralism and the use of the state. In addition it needs to rethink its view of the nature of the UK, and the idea of ‘the Labour nation' and ‘Labour place'.

Understanding the Limits of Centralism

Labour has traditionally been the party of the central state. The dominant account of this has been the Fabian tradition which saw the state as a powerful political instrument for good - for planning, for redistribution and for taking progressive decisions.

Under New Labour centralism intensified to a ridiculous degree of micro-management, often to the point of parody, and local government was reduced to powerlessness. Westminster ministers now decide practically everything in public life in England, sucking up powers while they lament the state of civil society.

This is of course a long story, beginning with the creation of the welfare state in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1970s with local government cuts, and then reaching turbo-speed under Thatcherism. Blairism has joined in with a vengeance. Reversing it would have been hard and would have needed a politics not just a different manner of administration. But this points to the fact that powerful forces in the centre have produced this state of affairs. They are not about to be reversed by warm rhetoric about ‘localism'.

State Power, its Legitimacy and Progressivism

There has long been a Labour tradition which saw increased government spending and the extension of the state as equalling progressive politics. This logic would make George W. Bush among the most centre-left politicians in the history of the United States! New Labour utilised an approach that questioned this attitude, and has talked about recognising the limits of the state, but it has done so to re-order the state, acknowledging its limits to do progressive things while continuing to support a politics where the state expands, extends and claims more and more power - all the while deregulating where it can, marketising as much as possible, and undermining those who believe in the public good. Also by Gerry Hassan in Our Kingdom: "The Lessons of Glasgow East" (25 July 2008)

Who in Labour's senior ranks dares to disown the determinist view of the world offered by the Julius report which argues that you can outsource all government actions apart from the commissioners? A party venturing into such terrain is a party which no longer fulfils its historic mission of protecting people from the power of the market.

The Character of the United Kingdom

The mainstream Labour tradition bought into the Whig version of British history: of continuity and lack of rupture. (See, for example, Gordon Brown's famous speech on Britishness to the Fabian Society in January 2006 where he claimed to be continuing the "golden thread which runs through British history - that runs from that long ago day in Runnymede in 1215...") But Labour also perceived the UK as a unitary state, where the centre held a monopoly of political power to enforce standardisation and uniformity across the whole country.

This has always been a fallacy. The UK has never been a unitary state and is instead what the political scientists Stein Rokkan and David Urwin have called ‘a union state'. Such a political order is neither a unitary or federal state, but a complex hybrid. A union state can have distinct sub-national and regional arrangements and also allows for the maintenance and preservation of ‘pre-union rights' in the union. This latter point explains Scotland's continued negotiated autonomy post-1707; Wales and Northern Ireland have had different experiences, but have undertaken routes which have preserved their distinctiveness and enhanced their autonomy.

A unitary state could not contain the different polities of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but nonetheless the political centre of the UK - Labour, Tories, the civil service and media - have consistently misunderstood the UK as a unitary state.

Labour's participation in this failure permitted it to preside over devolution to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland without understanding the context and implications of what it was doing. Labour established new institutions and yet at the same time remained wedded to a unitary understanding of power alongside the unreformed nature of the political centre.

What is the Labour Story of the Nation?

The persistent reluctance of the nexus of ‘bright' Labour politicians like Miliband and those of his generation in the Cabinet to even debate this or accept that it is an issue shows that they too are in denial. Once there was indeed a clear Labour story of the nation. It was a profoundly British story, about progress, the forward march of working people interwoven with the claim of organised labour: a story of ‘the common people' which gave the Labour Party a sense of moral mission and purpose which carried appeal far beyond its trade union boundaries.

This account was beginning to fray in the 1960s and 1970s, and it fell apart in the 1980s and 1990s. New Labour in part recognised this. Under Blair it attempted to weave a new narrative about diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism. This evaporated into derision over ‘Cool Britannia' and ‘Re-branding Britain' even before the honeymoon of having Labour instead of the Tories turned sour. It was an agenda, based on hype, hyperbole and false-hope, profoundly urban and English, but cod-American in its attempt to use marketing to reshape national identities. Brown's lonely efforts at reconstructing Britishness with responsibility and flying the flag are, in a way, even sadder. Not just because they are humourless and lack even the British tradition of irony and self-deprecation but also because they are second attempt to make re-branding work!

What is the Labour Sense of Place?

Do we have any sense about what a Labour shaped community or place looks like anymore? Beyond the rhetoric of Labour ministers about ‘localism', ‘community empowerment' and Richard Rogers inspired ‘place making', does Labour have any idea - after a decade of grinding central attrition of local decision making - about what a Labour community and place could be?

There once was a Labour answer to this which would have invoked self-organising, self-disciplined working class communities which were shaped by a range of voluntary groups and activities from trade unions to church groups and cultural bodies sitting alongside an active state.

This powerful ideal has ended in the grim reality of Glasgow East: an area which is a mixture of deprivation and poverty alongside the insecure middle class of urban Scotland. What a place like Glasgow East lacks is a sense of voice and power. It used to have both of these characteristics, in part aided by the Labour Party alongside others. But no longer. Even before its disastrous defeat, could anyone but the most blinkered Labour loyalist claim the party gives a voice to such areas?

After Social Democracy?

A major problem running through all of the above is mainstream Labour and social democratic thinking; New Labour has appropriated its approach but for a very different kind of politics.

David Miliband might like to claim the solution is a fusion of ‘social democracy and radical liberal tradition' into a "single narrative" as if the latter could be transplanted across without really altering the nature of social democracy as we know it. In fact fundamental surgery is needed. Labour and social democracy have never in their history adequately understood the limitations of the state and centralism in the way that late Victorian and Edwardian radical liberalism instinctly did.

Phil Collins and Richard Reeves, whom Katwala counter-attacks, are both right and wrong here. They are right to address the over-arching shadow of the Fabian tradition of centralism which like an Upas tree has killed off the British left's older decentralist traditions. However, their remedy is even more ‘poisonous' than Fabianism: an anti-political, dogmatic and narrow view of politics and economy, one which is bereft of any concept of political economy, and filled with a notion of change shaped by management consultants and buzzwords.

Labour does desperately need to alter how it thinks of the world. It needs to weave a path which avoids the twin cul-de-sacs of Fabianism and the new conservatives. It needs to open up to new ideas about territoriality, nation, state and place. It needs to ask what would be the ingredients of a successful, self-governing, self-sustaining Labour community and place, and how it balances this with issues of equity? We know one thing for sure - Glasgow East and the existing order of things is about as far as you can get from such a place as possible.

(Instead, the only ‘hope' or sense of spirit Labour offered the voters there was a defiant defensive ‘we'll show them' local patriotism after the SNP pointed out that some of its health indicators were worse than Gaza. A kind of sad futureless syndicalism, ‘We may be hopeless, but we are the hopeless of Glasgow so watch out!' that may indeed have drawn 10,000 loyal supporters to the polls - but even they know it has no future.)

Meanwhile, a change of thinking, and a new radical politics, that does indeed combine elements of social democracy and liberalism, is already underway: outside of Westminster and the narrow bandwidth of New Labour. Progressive agendas are already growing across the UK. Of course, sometimes they are noisy and suffer from interference. But this is a sign of their vitality. In Scotland, first, the coalition of Labour and the Lib Dems, and now, more pronounced, the SNP minority administration, have given life to a revitalised social democratic sensibility. In Wales, the Labour/Plaid Cymru coalition, and in London before Boris Johnson's election, the Labour/Green collaboration, have shown similar possibilities.

What such genuinely new "fusions" of power have in common is that they have developed within the context of bodies elected by proportional representation, and they gave voice to very different constituencies and their leaders do not echo New Labour mantras: Alex Salmond in Scotland, Rhodri Morgan in Wales, and Ken Livingstone in London - all representing a new kind of popular politician. But reading David Miliband's ‘Guardian' article and Sunder Katwala's response, I get the impression that the Westminster Labour village of ministers, advisers and think tanks, has little grasp of this. They don't understand that lots of us already inhabit a political process that is broadly positive and we have a different experience of change from the direction New Labour has taken.

There have been considerable achievements of a decade of Labour. But it is tarnished and threatened by where it seeks to take progressive - and British - politics. The Westminster village seem blind to the way New Labour has trashed the egalitarian and public impulse of the labour movement and diminished what it means to be on the left. Old fashioned social democracy needed to be democratised, to put it mildly. Instead, Blair-and-Brownism, for want of a better word, have made it something worse. There is now no unique Labour story of its mission and purpose, merely a commitment by its officer class to the new order. Nor is there a Labour story of the nation and nations of these isles.

Progressives need to offer sustenance to the hopes, energies and imaginations of people with effective concepts of voice and power. Such a new progressive imagination can already be seen in Scotland and Wales, where it will continue to grow with or without Labour. It will then find its English form.

The choice for Labour is whether it wants to remain the party of the new ancien regime paving the way for the Conservatives or whether it can begin to make the break from this mindset. No debate about the future of Labour is worth its salt if it fails to confront this.

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