Since when? In some areas, especially in business, they want to interfere even more than NuLabour.

Shit! There goes that non-partisan idea…

DK

Precisely. Note; making allies within Labour is pretty low on my personal agenda, although I’ve already got more than I expected. Putting the case for freedom, liberty and reform is at the top.

As many allies as I can get, they all have to be a good thing. There’s a huge groundswell of opinion in favour of some sort of change; we need to capture it.

There may well now be a majority of Tories who think this is something worth voting for as there has long been a Labour one.

But that’s not what Old Labour ever stood for anyway from what I can see. Blair, Straw, Brown etc are all from the old labour leftist school. All they’ve done is update the rhetoric to reflect a different world (apart from Prescott who would rather keep to class war).
Socialism and the Labour Party have always used the language of liberty and liberalism but have always perverted the language.

Not consciously, perhaps, but certainly subconsciously - that’s what it amounted to.

It was about abandoning a culture in the party that had very little to do with any of that.

The culture that was abandoned was intrinsically linked with those concepts. And there were clear statements in rejection of fraternity (as in trade unionism), of liberty (with Blair making a pitch for the Mail’s readership), and of equality (with the scrapping of Labour’s commitments to democratic control of the economy and to welfare).

There is a huge gulf between what a lot of “New Labourites” thought they were signing up to and what Blair has become, and much of the internal politics of Labour now is about the tension between those two, not New and Old Labour.

That’s true to an extent, and that’s what the whole Blair-Brown thing is all about. Roy Hattersley - an Old Labour figure who supported New Labour - has characterised the difference now as being between those who think Labour has gone far enough to the right (New Labour) and those who wish to go even further (whom Austin Mitchell has christened, Nouveau Labour). But this only matters to the extent that that kind of in-fighting may lead New Labour to self-destruct. The tension between Old and New Labour is much bigger and more significant, and the traditional right of the Labour Party is starting to find that it actually has more in common with the traditional left than with new Labour. People like Hattersley and Peter Kilfoyle are now rebels, having found themselves to the left of New Labour in government. A lot of liberals and moderate conservatives who signed-up for New Labour, too, have found the political carpet pulled out from under them (though that’s more to do with Iraq than anything domestic).

New Labour is about more than party management. It’s management techniques are bad, but if they were in the service of a traditional Labour platform, if I’m honest, I probably wouldn’t have that much of a problem with them. Well, not the total and absolute crushing of dissent, but the PR machine and the replacement of civil servants (never as impartial as they liked to think) with special advisers were necessary developments given the hostility Labour has traditionally faced from the media and from the permamenet arms of the government. If Harold Wilson had had an Alistair Campbell (instead of a press secretary who was shilling for MI5), he could have worked miracles. But maybe that machine could never realistically be coupled with progressive policies.

There is a huge gulf between what a lot of “New Labourites” thought they were signing up to and what Blair has become, and much of the internal politics of Labour now is about the tension between those two, not New and Old Labour.

Abandoning liberty, equality and fraternity, certainly doesn’t strike me as a good thing.