As I said in a previous blog, no political party is quite so good as self-immolation as the Labour Party. The membership as well as their representatives are richly diverse, the Parliamentary Party has often been at odds with the NEC and the wider membership over the years, and it remains the only major political party to have two such extreme wings involved in the party; ex-Communists and capitalists occupy the same ground in a party always seeking out change and evolving in response to external influence and societal pressures. To some this is a healthy, pluralistic modern way of operating, to others an unwelcome distraction which always aims to avoid displeasing as opposed to pleasing as many members as possible.

The aftermath of the most recent election has resurrected the, now biblical feud between the New Labour remnants of Tony Blair’s time as leader and the more traditional elements of the working class labour movement. The so called “modernisers” have sought to paint the election as a failure of left politics, as the inevitable result of a party that had shifted leftward and didn’t take the country with them. Relative to the liberalism of New Labour Ed Miliband was certainly leftward, relative to history and reality he was not, and the Labour members as well as the nation generally are much further to the left than the Blairites would have us believe.

The places Labour lost ground most spectacularly was from anti-austerity, left wing candidates. The oblivion faced in Scotland was matched similar by the strength shown by the Labour left candidates in England who outperformed their rivals by campaigning on traditional left wing issues. The new intake of Labour MPs on the whole increased their majorities from the previous incumbents thanks to having a grass roots connection with their areas through Trade Unions and local campaign groups. New MPs such as Richard Burgon, Louise Haigh and Kate Osamor sold themselves on platforms of traditional working class Labour values; so many of the new intake are reconnecting with “traditional” labour principles that in essence traditionalism is now becoming the new modernising.

The fact is the Labour leadership were neither right nor left, determined to occupy the centre ground with half-baked policies that were not brave nor radical. Opinion polls showed that Ed Miliband’s personal ratings soared at those times in which he drew attention to injustices and unfairness in our society; whether through Rupert Murdoch’s near monopoly on our media to huge corporate profits and inequality more widely. But from these statements he was always pulled back from making a policy shift which would deal with them. I mentioned earlier about Labour being to the right of public opinion and the table below shows where the public is vis-à-vis nationalisation as just one example, and yet Labour could still not bring themselves to us the “N” word, coming up with squalid compromises such as price caps and windfall taxes.

Labour never gained control of the narrative which said that the financial crisis in 2008 was Labour’s Financial Crisis when the reality was a global financial crash of epic proportions which Labour helped to alleviate with quantative easing and re-financialisation of banking capital. A wider discussion can be had about the wisdom of this action, but that is an academic debate about capitalism itself, and no political party at the time was advising this policy was wrong headed. Labour, and more to the point Gordon Brown’s, quick reactions protected people’s savings and pension funds at the expense of tight fiscal rules constructed in times of plenty. The only legitimate fiscal policy that the Labour government can be criticised for is not recreating a manufacturing base through bank regulation, the crisis hit us harder than most because we had come to reply on financial services overwhelmingly for our business tax base; although manufacturing taxes still raised more income for the exchequer even in 2008, it had dropped alarmingly and consistently over the previous decades. Countries like Australia were largely immune to the crash because of their manufacturing sector which vastly outperformed their financial services, services which had all made a home in the essential tax-haven of the City of London.

The Tories have consistently attacked public services and opened them up to ever more competition, marketisation and private speculation; this should have been an area ripe for Labour to attack them on, but once more the past actions of Blairites meant Miliband had one hand tied behind his back as David Cameron could just retort with the line “we’re just bringing Labour’s reforms to their natural conclusions”, which they were, New Labour that is. The New Labour ministers still in the party have much more in common with David Cameron’s scorched earth public policies than they do with a responsible approach to our social infrastructure and a desire to reduce both the income and wealth gaps created and nurtured by consistent right wing fiscal policy.

The media too are trying to turn this in to a left wing failure while ignoring the facts. Their interests are obvious to anyone with a passing interest in communication history; the decreasing plurality in our media has made formerly respectable institutions the playthings of foreign billionaires who are part of the elite set to benefit from further mono-political representation for issues only the wealthy care about – less regulation, lower taxes, lower spending, increased privatisation and the cementing of the military-industrial complex to enhance the spread of ideologies that lead to capitalistic takeovers of foreign, sovereign nations, more commonly misconceived as “spreading democracy”. If the media as a pack support one party then you can be fairly sure that what they want will not be good for working people, in the same way that when share prices jump, as they did the day after the election, you can use this as a safe barometer for knowing when the working class has been well and truly shafted.

Potential party leaders such as Liz Kendall and Tristram Hunt have spoken about a re-evaluation of the link with trade unions, forgetting conveniently (especially Hunt, a historian) that the Labour Party grew from those very unions. Sure enough the acronyms have changed but the movement remains the same, to gain decent terms and conditions of employment for workers in all walks of life, and to assist those too vulnerable to work or not in work for short periods. This is what Labour stands for, it is supposed to be a shared goal between the party and the unions and yes, they may differ over how to achieve it but the fundamental goal of equality is iron clad, or should be but too often New Labour have tried to distance themselves from this, pretending that inequality doesn’t matter and toying with the language of the right in terms of social security, disabilities and asylum seekers. Capital cannot create equality, the whole point of capitalism is to secure maximum returns for the minimum amount of people. If your goal is not to raise people out of poverty, make, keep them healthy and provide a safe environment for them to live a fruitful and worthwhile life through state intervention then you do not belong in the Labour Party.

There is lots of “soul searching” and “change” going on right now in Labour; they lost millions of votes and thousands of members during the New Labour years; the one thing Blair and his cabal were good at was spin, and now they are trying to spin this in to a second coming for some neo-liberal Labour messiah. The new MPs, Labour members, trade unionists and rank and file voters and fellow travellers cannot let the right massacre the party’s values once again; the party is too important and the issues too great to start a right wing defenestration of everything that separates Labour from the Tories. The people want change, but they want it from the left and only Labour can provide that.