Pragmatic, Not Ideological?

Even only a few losses to abstention would be enough to cost it many seats or the chance of regaining many more, and Labour will actively lose votes by having given up on the massively popular policy of taking rail, mail, water and energy back into public ownership. 

Public ownership is being used across Europe to alleviate the cost of living crisis. Keir Starmer may not know that this is fundamental to the pursuit of economic growth and to investment in public services, in which case he ought not to be presenting himself as a potential Prime Minister, but it is inconceivable that Rachel Reeves does not know it. He may or may not be ignorant, but she is clearly dishonest.

That policies were unpopular at one General Election does not necessarily mean that they still would be in the changed circumstances of the next. There may well be at little economic growth by the time of the next General Election, so what would Labour be offering then? If public ownership of our key national assets is either uneconomic or uneconomical, then why are transnational corporations and foreign states so keen to own them? They make plenty of money out of them.

In any case, the only unpopular thing about Labour's pitch in 2019 was the only part of it that had caused that Election to be held at all, two and a half years early, namely Starmer's unilateral announcement of a second referendum on EU membership in order to bring on that Election, guarantee defeat, and supplant Jeremy Corbyn, who had frightened the Deep State out of its wits by coming within 2,227 votes of leading the largest party in the hung Parliament of 2017.

Whether or not he means a word of it, Starmer has formally reverted to the 2017 manifesto policy of withdrawal from the Single Market and the Customs Union, so go through the 2019 Labour manifesto and consider that every word of it has been set aside. Any policy that was in it, absolutely any at all, is dismissed out of hand by the present Labour Leadership purely and simply because it was in that manifesto. Instead, not only is Labour deploying the illiterate and abusive language of "the Magic Money Tree", but it is doing so against Patrick Minford.

The call to be "pragmatic, not ideological" adds philosophical illiteracy to the economic illiteracy. And whatever else the Labour Right may be, it is not bereft of ideology. That faction's very existence understandably bewilders people. After all, there is no Tory Left, not really. At no level of the Conservative Party has anyone ever been as far to the left as most Labour councillors, almost all Labour MPs, and practically the whole of the Labour Party's staff, have always been to the right.

That is the Labour Party. It always has been, and it always will be. Thankfully, no one is obliged to vote for it. Make our own arrangements. Here at North West Durham, where in any case there is no sign that there is going to be a Labour candidate at all, vote for me.