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\u00a0\u00a0 The great Bryan Appleyard, surely the most underrated journalist in Britain, has picked up on this Guardian <\/em>survey<\/a> of leading Labour thinkers. \u201cWhither the left?\u201d it cried. And the answers were a tad bathetic.<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 \u201cThe environmentalist wants wind farms,\u201d says Bryan<\/a>, \u201cthe \u2018education campaigner\u2019 wants parental leave for fathers, the economist wants banking regulation, the democracy campaigner wants new ways of funding political parties. These are, in the context of the question, trivia. I suppose you could \u00a0say Will Straw\u2019s thoughts on the size of the state are pretty basic. The problem is, I think, that New Labour confused the left. It knew how to win elections \u2013 something the left had entirely forgotten how to do \u2013 and it did reinforce the nation\u2019s soft left inclination. But, because Blair was very right-wing as was Brown in his neocon statism and his slavish adoration of the City, they could provide no coherent explanation as to why these should be good things. The problem remains that the left does not have an economic argument and, instead, falls back on special whining.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u00a0 \u00a0 Mr Appleyard is not exaggerating for effect. Carwyn Jones who as First Minister of Wales, is as of June 2010 Labour\u2019s most powerful politician (how times change) said that the future of the Left lay in clamping down \u201con dangerous and nuisance driving\u201d and \u201cfighting the idea that speed cameras are a bad thing\u201d. Well, there\u2019s a radical programme, comrades! To the barricades, mes amis!<\/p>\n \u00a0\u00a0 The trouble for the Right is that although cutting public spending and enjoying the spectacle of the European Union falling apart come naturally to Conservatives, they are as lost as social democrats when they have to think about economics. When the banks went down, their free market model went down with them, and there\u2019s no evidence that Conservative thinkers have begun to come to terms with their failure.<\/p>\n \u00a0All sides have yet to realise how big a mess we are in.<\/p>\n <\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/i><\/a><\/p>\n No related posts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The great Bryan Appleyard, surely the most underrated journalist in Britain, has picked up on this Guardian survey of leading Labour thinkers. “Whither the left?” it cried. And the answers were a tad bathetic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":7129,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-818","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=818"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/818\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7129"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=818"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=818"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ondrocks2000.com\/standpoint\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=818"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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