Greatly Strengthen The Hand

I cannot imagine any two people more guaranteed to ensure the failure of a new party than Tony Blair and George Osborne.

Notice that no one thinks that it would be incongruous for them to launch this joint venture.

What a pitch: make Blair Prime Minister again, and make Osborne Chancellor of the Exchequer again. Who could resist such temptation?

As for my own life in electoral politics, it is like Star Wars, which has definitively ended twice, but which is still going strong.

After a good run, I gave it all up in 2013.

But I stood for the County and Parish Councils after all in 2017, and I would have stood for Parliament if I could have raised £10,000 in well under a month.

And then I gave it all up again, all of three months ago.

Yet here I am, a candidate for Police, Crime and Victims' Commissioner for County Durham and Darlington in 2020.

At the next General Election, vote Labour in every constituency. No exceptions. No excuses. Everything else can be ironed out once we have won.

But what of parliamentary by-elections in the meantime?

There is a case for the organisation and election of candidates, not from fringe Marxist parties, who were opposed to neoliberal austerity and to neoconservative wars without being encumbered by the need to make the Labour Party's internal compromises.

If such candidates were to be elected, while those of Blair and Osborne were not, then that would greatly strengthen the hand of Jeremy Corbyn both within the Labour Party and in the country at large.

And that, in turn, would be to the benefit of everyone who wished to keep the debate open to alternatives to neoliberal economic policy and to neoconservative foreign policy.

There was no such openness before Corbyn. Nor would there be any without him.