Endless trouble accessing the Guardian website, hence the slight lateness of this. Thank heavens that, despite all the hysteria, print will never die.
Sir Simon is right. We need a Labour Party. Not a Marxist party. A Labour Party. As to what that used to look like, and could and should look like again, see my two-parter here and here.
Rather more than New Labour's fifteen per cent of thirty-five per cent beckons.
Well of course Print WILL die if people only use the Guardians website. I did in fact buy the Guardian yesterday in the Students Union for 30p......I daresay we are equally effective in klling off Print.
ReplyDeleteOf course amateur bloggers and citizen journalists like ourselves have also contributed to the decline.
Jenkins is of course right. The 1980s battle to make Labour electable was achieved only by draining the entire soul of the Labour Party.
In rebuilding Labour, the core of decency left (Kilfoyle, Mullin, Flynn, Winnick,Marshall-Andrews) looks a better starting point than the risible NO2EU (less than 1% of 35%)
I can only link to the website on here, obviously. But I couldn't enter it yesterday, so I knew about this article in the first place from the print edition.
ReplyDeleteIn fact, I know about most of the newspaper articles to which I link or refer on here from the print editions. I expect that most bloggers do.
And how often do you find anything on the Net for which you weren't looking anyway, more or less? Whereas that happens all the time when reading a newspaper or a magazine.
We can pretty much rule out almost any sitting MP, alas. We need to get new people in next year.
What's striking about Jenkins' article is the silence on the unions.
ReplyDeleteThe silence of the unions throughout the Blair/Brown, with some notable exceptions, has been to the detriment of the movement and the party.
As for the decents - they're perhaps realising that they were fighting the wrong people in the eighties...