Very interesting find @ninfan. Not hard to imagine the dialogue

Civil Service: Our forecasts are that as a result of the financial crises GDP and tax collections are going to fall substantially. I recommend we consider reducing spending commitments

Brown/Darling/Balls/Miliband: We are the Labour party we are not going to make spending cuts, that’s what the Tories do. Plus if we make cuts we definitely won’t get re-elected, let’s just make some very optimistic assumptions on growth, after all Gordon has eliminated “boom and bust” so everything will be just fine.

deviant – Member
Who would’ve thought it, if you spend more than you collect in tax things go bust!

Ah, but you’re “investing” the extra that you borrowed in, er, well I’m not sure but it’ll generate profits to pay back more than you borrowed.

Or something.

Apparently.

Cheers Jambalaya – also interesting to review some of Blairs comments from ‘A Journey’ published September 2010

The danger for Labour now is that we drift off or even move decisively off, to the left. If we do, we will lose even bigger next time. We have to buck the historical trend and face up to the reasons for defeat squarely and honestly.
…
If Labour wants to come back, it has to realise just how quickly defeat has altered the political landscape. It means the Tories get to clear up the economic deficit and define its nature, and can do so while pointing the finger of blame at the previous government.

Hard to argue he wasn’t 100% spot on there, especially about finger of blame.

If Labour simply defaults to a ‘Tory cutters, Lib Dem collaborators’ mantra, it may well benefit in the short term; however, it will lose any possibility of being chosen as an alternative government. Instead, it has to stand up for its record in the many areas it can do so, but also explain where the criticism of the thirteen years is valid. It should criticise the composition but not the thrust of the Tory deficit reductions.

This is incredibly difficult Of course, the key factor in our economy as elsewhere, is the global economic crisis and all nations are having to cut back and adjust. However, we should also accept that from 2005 onwards Labour was insufficiently vigorous in limiting or eliminating the potential structural deficit. The failure to embrace the Fundamental Savings review of 2005-6 was, in retrospect, a much bigger error than I ever thought at the time. An analysis of the pros and cons of putting so much into tax credits is essential. All of this only has to be stated to seem unconscionably hard. Yet unless we do this, we cannot get the correct analysis of what we did right, what we did wrong, and where we go now.

Attacking the nature of the Tory-Lib Dem changes to public spending requires greater Intellectual depth and determination, and each detail has to be carefully considered. So, for example, if we attack as we should the cuts to school investment, we have to be prepared to say where we would also make more radical savings than the new government. But it is better than mounting a general attack on macro policy – ‘putting the recovery at risk’ – and ending up betting the shop that the recovery fails to materialise. It is correct that the withdrawal of the stimulus in each country’s case is a delicate question of judgement, but if you study the figures for government projections in the UK, by the end of 2014 public spending will still be 42 per cent of GDP.

Such an approach is the reverse of what is easy for Oppositions, who get dragged almost unconsciously, almost unwillingly, into wholesale opposition. It’s where the short-term market in votes is. It is where the party feels most comfortable. It’s what gets the biggest cheer. The trouble is, it also chains the Opposition to positions that in the longer term look irresponsible, short-sighted or just plain wrong.

I reckon pretty much sums up just how wrong Miliband et al managed to get it!

@ninfan. Thanks for posting that, STW at its best. It prompted me to re-read the postscript of ‘The Journey’. In terms of domestic politics the guy turns out to have been a prophet.

Shame his Foreign policy didn’t involve quite so much foresight.

Thanks again ninfan, nice find and as you say Blair was spot on.

In terms of domestic politics the guy turns out to have been a prophet.

Shame his Foreign policy didn’t involve quite so much foresight.

+1. An incredible politician – for better and worse!

and as you say Blair was spot on.

Well he is the Messiah.

What would it take for me, someone brought up in a working-class family, to vote Labour?
For a start, stop filling the party with a bunch of posh, public school educated nobs, fast-tracked to become lawyers and enter politics with MP as the ultimate career path.
Look at one of the principal leadership challengers, Chuka Umunna; lawyer, million-pound trust fund, wears posh suits that most working people couldn’t ever afford…
Just how, exactly, can someone like him relate to how people like me live their lives?
Listening to him pontificating on the party needing to listen to ‘ordinary working people’ just comes across as condescending, ‘pat the little people on the head, say comforting words, and I can get a job that’ll keep me in the style I’ve become accustomed to’.
As far as I can see, there are more new MP’s in the Conservatives who have regular backgrounds, and a number of them are women, which I see as a good thing, in fact there are now 32 women in the party, which it will be interesting to see how they influence policies in the future.
Especially as they’ve been voted for by their constituencies, rather than being parachuted in like ‘Blair’s Babes’,
and how patronising was that little operation!

Look at one of the principal leadership challengers, Chuka Umunna; lawyer, million-pound trust fund, wears posh suits that most working people couldn’t ever afford…
Just how, exactly, can someone like him relate to how people like me live their lives?
Listening to him pontificating on the party needing to listen to ‘ordinary working people’ just comes across as condescending, ‘pat the little people on the head, say comforting words, and I can get a job that’ll keep me in the style I’ve become accustomed to’.

I think you are being a bit harsh on Chuka Umunna, he has for example apologized for referring to ordinary people as trash – he deeply regrets the harm it might have done to his political career.

Labour’s Chuka Umunna asked how to avoid mixing with ‘trash’ on elite social network

And if you think the Tory Party lacks self-serving careerists you are sadly very mistaken imo.

The reason self-serving careerists appear to be so prominent in today’s Labour Party is precisely because it is so completely at odds to what the Labour Party once stood for.

The conviction politician in the Labour Party of the past has given way to self-promoting and ideologically highly flexible opportunists.

The reason self-serving careerists appear to be so prominent in today’s Labour Party is precisely because it is so completely at odds to what the Labour Party once stood for.

really?

whether or not a party is really a political party of the workers does not depend solely upon a membership of workers but also upon the men that lead it, and the content of its actions and its political tactics. Only this latter determines whether we really have before us a political party of the proletariat.

Regarded from this, the only correct, point of view, the Labour Party is a thoroughly bourgeois party, because, although made up of workers, it is led by reactionaries, and the worst kind of reactionaries at that, who act quite in the spirit of the bourgeoisie. It is an organisation of the bourgeoisie, which exists to systematically dupe the workers with the aid of the British Noskes and Scheidemanns.

Top marks if you remember who wrote that – and it wasn’t Tony Blair!

Of course the Labour Party has always been ‘a thoroughly bourgeois party’, which is precisely why I have never been more than an affiliated member. But I always fully supported Lenin’s position that the Labour Party was the mass party of working people. From the same speech :

It should, however, be borne in mind that the British Labour Party is in a very special position: it is a highly original type of party, or rather, it is not at all a party in the ordinary sense of the word. It is made up of members of all trade unions, and has a membership of about four million, and allows sufficient freedom to all affiliated political parties.

The Labour Party once stood as the party of the people, it no longer does and is simply now a vehicle for highly ambitious egoistic lawyers and the like.

this is a cracking read!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9528312/inside-the-milibunker-the-last-days-of-ed-did-ed-miliband-sacrifice-ed-balls/

Another Labour insider told of the scene in the press office when Miliband posed with the notorious Ed stone, the 8ft 6in slab of limestone upon which his six key election pledges were inscribed. When it appeared on TV, a press officer ‘started screaming. He stood in the office, just screaming over and over again at the screen. It was so bad they thought he was having a breakdown.’

😆

this is a cracking read!

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9528312/inside-the-milibunker-the-last-days-of-ed-did-ed-miliband-sacrifice-ed-balls/Not really – mediocre third hand pish, surprised anyone would drink that down.
most catastrophic election campaign since the war LOL

@ninfan I call bull**** on that article – other sources have been saying the Labour polls were consistently more gloomy than the national polls.

Reliable sources?

Its bloody brilliant, Labour fighting like ferrets in a sack, UKIP committing hari kari and the Lib Dems – lets look out the window, see any Lib Dems nope.

Meanwhile George Osborne is potentially changing the nature of our democracy for good.

I look good in blue thanks to my killer blue/grey eyes.
So get rid of the red as a starter. Then I’ll get started on the policies.

So get rid of the red as a starter.

First recorded instance of the use of red to symbolise worker’s power was in.. Merthyr Tydfil.

I don’t know what year Merthyr Tydfil used the red flag to symbolise worker’s power but its use as a revolutionary emblem, like the terms left and right, dates back to the French Revolution :

The red flag on the Champ-de-Mars, 1791

In July 1791, King Louis XVI and the Royal family attempted to flee France, dressed as ordinary people. They were arrested in Varennes, on their way to Germany. It is often said that the son of the post house’s owner recognized the king after a coin. Other said that the royal princesses were recognized because they were not able to walk correctly without a servant to assist them. Betrayal might be a more rational explanation.
The king was brought back to Paris. A “Republican petition” requiring the overthrowing the king was deposed on Champ-de-Mars, where the Fête de la Fédération had been celebrated on 14 July 1790.
A lot of people gathered to sign the petition. On 17 July, when the meeting turned into a riot, the Mayor of Paris, Bailly, ordered to hoist the red flag, which meant at that time that the mob should disperse. The National Guards shot without warning. More than 50 rioters were killed and immediatly considered as the first martyres of the Revolution. The red flag, “shed with the martyrs’ blood” became the symbol of the Revolution by a weird inversion of its initial symbolism.

Who cares? Dump it.

No chance mate ’cause….

The people’s flag is deepest red,
It shrouded oft our martyred dead,
And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,
Their hearts’ blood dyed its every fold.

Then raise the scarlet standard high.
Within its shade we’ll live and die,
Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer,
We’ll keep the red flag flying here.

I’m out.

I’m gutted.

We can still have a beer together though?

Sounds like one of those stories that people adopt for themselves..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merthyr_Rising

I thought you were more Arise ye workers from your slumbers, Arise ye prisoners of want Ernie

Yeah why not eddie, one of my closest and dearest friends who I love to bits* told me that she voted UKIP last Thursday, it can’t be worse than that.

*We very rarely talk politics, I think it’s maybe time that we did.

*We very rarely talk politics, I think it’s maybe time that we did.

Hopefully you’ll be able to listen to her reasons and appreciate they are legitimate concerns even if you don’t agree with her conclusion to vote UKIP

She did give me her reason, she couldn’t tell me that she had voted UKIP without giving me an excuse – the look of guilt on her face was palpable. In fact she didn’t even say UKIP when I asked her how she voted she just said “you don’t want to hear”, we both knew what she meant 🙂

And the reason ? Well she’s never had much political savvy despite of the fact that we first met over 20 years ago in a trade union social club, of all places. Her excuse was that she knew her seat was “safe” and she was happy enough with her MP so she voted UKIP “to send a message”. A very typical reason.

In fact she had no reason to believe that her MP had a safe seat. It might have been safe last general election when he got 48% of the vote but last week he became the only remaining LibDem MP in London by the skin of his teeth.

But as I say she doesn’t have much political savvy, I’m sure she considers herself to be left-wing. And she is herself an immigrant from a poor family of 10 siblings from rural Ireland, uneducated – she struggles to write, but can sew and cut down trees with her impressive collection of chainsaws, and she absolutely loves all the arts.

It’s her political ignorance which UKIP has successfully exploited. I’ll be seeing her this evening although I generally avoid discussing politics any questions you think I should ask ?

Cracking lefty response to someone who doesn’t vote labour or share their views “They’re not very plitically savvy”, or “they don’t know what they’re doing and are ashamed and they’re kidding themselves”, and immideately dismiss their views and opinions. Maybe it would be more accurate description of the situation to say that she know’s your a hard core lefty and was not wanting a confrontation and in depth political debate on a night out with a mate, and that all she requires you to do is respect and accept her differing opinion and get the next round in.

Not being left wing is not a disease that needs curing. Just accept that some people, the majority in fact, don’t share your views and opinions and don’t have to justify their opinions any more than you do.

Cracking lefty response to someone who doesn’t vote labour or share their views “They’re not very plitically savvy”

Two things:

1) Both sides do that just as much as each other. In fact people do it in all areas not just politics.

2) I don’t think that’s what’s happening here anyway. If she felt embarrassed about her vote then something is wrong. If you can’t give sound concrete reasons for your vote then you aren’t politically savvy, by definition.

And the reason ? Well she’s never had much political savvy despite of the fact that we first met over 20 years ago in a trade union social club, of all places

Sounds slightly condescending Ernie, does it not? We’ve all heard the messages from the party leaders and we’ve made our choices. The fact that someone voted quite differently to how you voted would suggest they came to different conclusions….not that they are a bit dim!

If you can’t give sound concrete reasons for your vote then you aren’t politically savvy, by definition.

Some people don’t have the will or ability to put forward concrete reasons, especially to someone who is (to be polite) politically astute!

They like what they hear and vote accordingly.

Cracking lefty response to someone who doesn’t vote labour or share their views

I don’t vote Labour. And I think I know my friend better than you do. She’s always up for a confrontation with me, or most men for that matter, she’s a fiery Irish woman, you argue with her at your peril.

She completely lacks political savvy, it’s as bad as her geography. She’s just come back from a holiday, it took me ages to work out where she was going (I took her to the airport) all she knew was that it was “Spain”, it was only by looking at her ticket that I saw it was Menorca, she had no idea where it was. Even when she came back she thought she had flown to Alicante ffs. She showed me a booklet about Menorca that she had bought “I made a mistake it’s written in Spanish” she told me, I had a look and it was written in German ffs. And this is the woman who last year went to Russia, Tibet, and China, completely on her own, on the Trans-Siberian Express. You can understand why I love her so much 🙂

But she is just as confused about her politics. Last year she also booked herself on the annual trade union coach to the Tolpuddle Martyrs’ Festival, a must for all lefties in Croydon (but something which even I have never got round to do) she found the whole experience inspirational. She is instinctively left-wing but it is this confusion over what UKIP actually stands for which UKIP has so successfully exploited.

it took me ages to work out where she was going (I took her to the airport) all she knew was that it was “Spain”, it was only by looking at her ticket that I saw it was Menorca, she had no idea where it was.

Sat behind some bimbos going to Cardiff for a weekend of boozing from Dublin, also Irish coincidentally. They said ‘where’s the TV? I want to watch a film’ I asked them how long they thought the flight was, they had no idea.