In The Shadows

There was no point having Shadow Cabinet elections unless they were going to give us the fun of watching some pointless Blair Babe of either sex humiliated by defeat at the hands of someone like Michael Meacher or Frank Dobson. Not for any political reason in the higher sense. Just for the fun of it.

I don't know why John McDonnell is complaining. As the appointment of Diane Abbott to one of the lowlier positions already in his gift illustrates, Ed Miliband offers the Campaign Group far more hope of appointment than the PLP has ever offered it hope of election. He is returning to John Smith's inclusive approach to party management, and getting rid of Shadow Cabinet elections is one way of going about that while he waits for those still loyal to his unmentionable brother to jump or be pushed into standing down altogether in 2015 or 2020.

But let there be no talk of a "Clause IV moment". That Clause did not mention nationalisation, although it certainly allowed for it; it had been framed so that people who already had nationalisation in mind could read that presupposition into it, even though no one could have read that presupposition out of it. But Tony Blair and his fan club thought that it was about nothing else. So, in repudiating it, they repudiated public ownership in order to repudiate everything that public ownership delivered and safeguarded, notably national sovereignty, the Union, and the economic basis of paternal authority.

Likewise, in repudiating trade unionism, they repudiated controlled immigration and the moderating influence of the wider electorate in the affairs of the Labour Party. Mercifully, that latter, at least, reasserted itself in the victory of Ed Miliband over the Blairite candidate. But it still needs to be reasserted that requiring the production of a union card is no different from requiring the production of a British passport or a work permit, while the closed shop was as important for that as it was for giving the Tory forty-five per cent of the industrial working class a moderating influence in the selection of Labour candidates for the safe Labour seats in which they lived.