Labour didn’t lose the election in 2015…. | Paul Bernal’s Blog
…it lost it a lot earlier than that. It lost it in 2010 – not by its conduct in what was always likely to be a disastrous election, but in its reaction to that election. It lost it through cowardice, through short-termism, and through what must have felt like political expediency at the time. It lost it by failing to challenge the Tory (and to an extent Lib Dem and UKIP) attempts to rewrite history, and to set a new agenda. It lost it by failing to stand up for itself, by failing to stand up for exactly those people that Labour was created to support and protect. It lost it by failing to stand up for the truth – and by failing to challenge a whole range of myths.
This is vital reading.
Source: Labour didn’t lose the election in 2015…. | Paul Bernal’s Blog
Excellent post.
Agree with what he has said but I do feel that a more significant factor was the “fart catchers” that politicians surround themselves with. Had one or two of the advisors and more importantly members of the shadow cabinet spoken up as they are doing now we would have had a clear denial of all the issues mention by Paul Bernal.
Agreed. It’s interesting that they’re all popping up now.
Could they not hear us?
We told them Miliband was a tosser (BOTH OF THEM), looking down his nose and pretending he was a scholar of repute, Balls was simply an imbecile easily brushed off by a runt f**t lying Gideon, the man who has actually bankrupted England.
What a sad pitiful shower we are, to lose out to the most financially disastrous cretins in history; and, what really concerns me, is that those in situ in the party want to pick fights with the unions, mainly because they were never Labour in the first place, just using us as an easy means of getting rich…without having ever to do any work, i.e. Labouring.
IT APPEARS TO ME THAT WE NOW HAVE NO OTHER KIND!.
Include me out of the “we” in your comment.
Too true, as I and many other have said for years, that you disagreed with fairly volubly at the time.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing.
Hindsight, is a wonderful thing and we should keep that in mind when levelling criticism about policies adopted just before and after that election. However, as I’ve noted here before. ‘New Labour’ does, from what I can gather, have a particular difficulty in that it worships ‘free markets’ (though what we’ve got is much more akin to capitalism or markets distorted towards those with sufficient wealth and power to control – or not to control where that works better – how these markets function) to see the deficiencies of what we’re supposed to have; let alone, what we’ve actually got. This severely limited its ability to deal with the greatest collapse of the modern monetary system as an economic problem and a political opportunity. As to do so would be to criticise their own fundamental belief system (and, perhaps, more importantly the reason for their own existence), though, of course, it is possible to criticise something without stating it is still the best system available. However, in Britain, that’s not an easily achieved political reality.
Well, no. New Labour’s handling of the collapse is accepted by economists to have been very good, and to have achieved more, in a shorter time, than the Coalition managed in its five years.
Of course, after the 2010 election, New Labour ceased to exist as anything other than a name used by the Labour Party’s critics.