Next Labour, Indeed

This contest is not really about the Leadership of the Labour Party, a twentieth-century anachronism which, like the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats, would have died out soon enough even without the electoral reform that will render it obsolete overnight. No, this contest is really about the Leadership of whatever comes next. David Miliband, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls are fighting it out to be the founding Leader of that neoliberal, neoconservative, socially liberal and Politically Correct thing, the Even Newer Labour Party, although that position would already appear to have been filled by David Cameron. John McDonnell has staked his claim to be the founding Leader of the Labour Left Party, which will presumably hope and seek to draw in all the endless factions of the wider Hard Left. Which would be worse for it, to fail at that, or to succeed?

But no one wants to lead a party which can participate in the alliance of the traditional Right and the traditional Left against the neoconservative war agenda and its assaults on liberty at home, including against any new Cold War with either or both of Russia and China. A party of the socially and culturally conservative, strongly patriotic tendencies within the British Left's traditional electoral base. A party of those who recognise that we cannot deliver the welfare provisions and the other public services that our people have rightly come to expect unless we know how many people there are in this country, unless we control immigration properly, and unless we insist that everyone use spoken and written English to the necessary level. And a party of those who refuse to allow climate change to be used as an excuse to destroy or prevent secure employment, to drive down wages or working conditions, to arrest economic development around the world, to forbid the working classes and non-white people from having children, to inflate the fuel prices that always hit the poor hardest, or to restrict either travel opportunities or a full diet to the rich.

Enjoy the show. But don't take it seriously. The real work is elsewhere. Let's get on with it.