Your Choice In All Of This Is

Do you want hits?

Or do you want misses?

I am typing this while listening to the incorporable Pulp's incomparable Cocaine Socialism, the most searing critique of New Labour ever published in any medium.

It contains the answer to my old friend Jonathan Ashworth, who is now a Labour Whip. He says that, although he knew that I was a party member in those days (in stark contrast to someone else whom I could name), he nevertheless always thought that I was right-wing at university because I hung around, and indeed at one time chaired and then lived in, a certain House of the Rising Sun. It's been the ruin of many a poor boy, and God, I know I'm one.

But, as Saint  Jarvis, or at the very least Sir Jarvis, puts it:

You must be a Socialist,

'Cos you're always off out on the piss

In your private members' bar.

Oh yes, you are,

You superstar.

The sound of 1998, indeed.

15 years on, where stands the Labour Party? When it comes to seeking selection as a parliamentary candidate, its National Executive Committee's mighty Organisation Sub-Committee has just decided that membership lists should be available to candidates from the start, rather than, as hitherto, only after shortlisting. The number of permitted leaflets has also been increased from two to three.

You can bet your life that each of your opponents will be sending out three leaflets to every member, the first at the very start of the nomination process, so you had better do the same. Meaning that you had better have the money to do it. Never mind the increasingly prevalent practice of visiting them all at home. That's right. Each and every one of them. At home.

Whom does this favour? Party, think tank and MPs' staffers? Full-time trade union officials? Senior councillors? How do they necessarily have that much time on their hands? Quite the reverse in the last case, at least. Nor do they have that much financial support necessarily, or even ordinarily, or even very often at all.

No, as has been pointed out to me by several of my contemporaries who remain in the Labour Party and who I think would make fine MPs, several of whom are in principle open to the idea, securing a Labour nomination, at least for a safe or winnable seat, is increasing a game able to be played only by the persons, the offspring and the courtiers of the massively, independently wealthy.

Let's just mention Euan Blair, and the point is made. As it is by reference to Lord Sainsbury and his bankrolling of Progress, that party within the Labour Party which tweets that, "Calls for more working-class MPs are just calls for more left-wing trade unionists in Parliament." The horror!

Oh, you owe it to yourself,
Don't think of anybody else.
And we promise we won't tell.
No, we won't tell.
We won't tell.