When is Not So Very New Labour going to stop copying the Conservatives of ten years ago?!?!

It is not a reason for Labour MPs to panic that they have lost the next election. What they would be sensible to fear is that this reflects a growing mood among disenchanted voters that a stale government is possibly running short of steam, ideas and credibility. All of which can be fixed - the election is some years off yet. As any good scouser would say ‘calm down, calm down.’

PS - Antonia did you get me email?

Agreed.

But then, at the same time, I suspect the ‘a bit of time in opposition would do us good’ view is very much a reflection of a growing feeling that it may take an electoral defeat to break the stranglehold of the current party hegemon merely to open up room for serious debate, i.e. unless ‘New’ Labour is discredited by defeat the push from the top will continue to be for more of the same only better executed/managed.

The problem with that view is that even if we could break up the current elitist hegemony within the party, I’m really not sure quite what we would expect to put in its places - you’re right that we cannot revert to the 1980s nor, indeed, could we try to revive old school state socialism, attractive as some its propositions might appear on paper.

The world has moved on an yet we haven’t - what little philosophical outlook the party has left (which is not much these days) remains rooted in the 19th and 20th Century and in a model of society that no longer exists.

As a party and a socialist I think we desperately need to go back to first principles, revisit the philosophical underpinnings of socialism and the Labour movement and ask ourselves quite how these need to be reinterpreted in a modern context to restore to the party a coherent sense of purpose and philosophical belief.

To give but one example of what I mean, one of the things that seriously pisses me off is the periodic crowing by one or two right-wingers, especally from amongst the Christian Socialist wing, about how the party has turned its back almost entirely on Marx, as if to suggest then the entire sum of Marxist philosophy can be summed up in terms of Stalinist/Maoist state-socialism, which has been pretty much thoroughly discredited.

The fact remains that much of Marx’s work, especially his critique of inherent instabilities within capitalism, holds entirely valid to the extent that his work is widely accepted even by many of the most ardent right-wing free market economists.

Marx and his contemporaries may have been better at diagnosings problem than offering solutions, but the fact that his work remains influential amongst economists, even on the right, shows that simply writing his work off as no longer relevant and/or discredited is a dreadful mistake and that what’s need is for socialists to go back to Marx, separate the key universal principles from those facets of work that were very much of their time and which have now dated and lost their relevance, and look at how we can apply those principles to society as it exists today and what we can learn from that to help us shape policies for the future.

Our most serious problem seems to me to be a desperate lack of intellectual and philosophical rigor and genuine radicalism running right through the party, something that will take far more than 4-5 years in either government or opposition to recapture, making genuine party renewal a long-term project, during which its better we have a Labour government, even a unsatisfactory one, than see the Tories back in power.

Im hugely angered by people like you who knock the best and most progressive government for years.

In a mainly right wing dominated country it is miracle we have a labour government and if you cant see that perhaps you should shut Ms Bance.