Cras wrote:
Labour have to go left. They've spent the last 10 years being "Like the Tories, but just a bit more lost and confused about it all", and that's just not an electable place to be. Sure, they'll lose some centrist support, but that's the cost of party politics - you can't be everything to everyone. Look at the welfare bill - abstentions across the board, showing that in opposition they've got less teeth than a stripped gear. They have to stand for something, and that something can't be Tory Lite.
Well, the fact that New Labour won three successive elections on just such a manifesto would tend to disagree with your analysis, Cras? They even stuck rigidly to Tory spending plans throughout their first parliament (as per their concrete manifesto pledge to do so), as Blair knew full well that this was the
only way the British electorate would ever trust his party again. (The prior deletion of 'Clause 4' was also very much part of the root-and-branch makeover)
New Labour was, or at least started out as being, very much 'Tory lite' on this basis, it could be argued, and undeniably successful it was in electoral terms, too, as a result.
I don't disagree with you about their lack of teeth and the utter shambles upon which they now find themselves in over the Welfare Bill, but as I've said and foretold for a decade, that's what happens when you don't even have a core ideology that everyone within a broad church that is a political party can sign up to. If you don't even have
that, then I would say you're not a political party at all, merely a loose collective whose cynical, vapid purpose is the naked pursuit of power for its own sake, which is always going to be unstable long term. As, I believe, we're about to find out.