Jonathan Todd

Good post earlier this week from Danny Finkelstein:

“A very interesting comment from Pregethwr underneath my post on Labour and its leadership:

‘No Blairite seems to acknowledge, even those who were around at the time, that Blair won in 1994 with a coalition that reached deep (very deep – Peter Hain, Harriet Harman) into the soft left of the party. He won because he squeezed Robin Cook to such extent that he could have only run as the candidate of the far left and lost. No Blairite seems to want to build that coalition, they seem to want to run a ‘back me or lose’ campaign and blackmail the party into supporting them. Worked well for Ken Clarke that tactic didn’t it?’

“I am quite sympathetic to this argument.

“During the three or four years that preceded David Cameron’s election to the leadership of the Tory Party, we modernisers often discussed how we had been better at diagnosing the electoral failures of the Tory Party, and less good at analysing our own political failure to persuade the Tory Party.

“That having been said, the alliance that Tony Blair built was only possible because the soft left abandoned their position. They accepted that they had to win and were prepared to make whatever sacrifice was necessary to do that.

“I agree with Pregethwr that the Blairites need to build a broad coalition in order to win. It’s just that this may not be possible”. 

To which I replied:

“Susan Crosland’s biography of her husband records that he said to Roy Hattersley just before his death:

‘We have got to keep making the point that the far Left are not the only people that can claim a socialist theory while the rest of us are thought to be mere pragmatists and administrators. It’s not enough to disagree with the Marxists et al. The centre must remember and keep reminding people that we are ideologists too’.

“The centre of the Labour Party must again do so”.