by Kevin Meagher
SO let’s get this straight. New Old Labour, in the shape of so-called Blue Labour, wants the party to return to its rosy red roots while new New Labour, in the shape of the soon-to-be Purple Bookers, wants the party to mix red and blue (but that’s old blue, not new Old Labour’s new Blue Labour blue).
Meanwhile, some of the old New Labourites remain green with envy at last year’s leadership result, hoping that Ed Miliband ends up in the brown stuff.
At the same time, old Old Labour sees things in black and white and simply wants to put clear red water between the party and the true blue Tories and their yellow Lib Dem sidekicks.
Have I got that right?
Labour’s efforts at renewal are starting to resemble a Jackson Pollack painting, with tins of political ideas hurled across the canvass.
But beware. The abiding lesson of Labour’s fraught history is that internal groupings have always been little more than artillery to support the militias fighting the party’s periodic civil wars (an oxymoron, to be sure, given the incivility of Labour’s periodic bloodletting). Their very existence is evidence of competing groupthink within the party, usually wrapped around titanic egos grappling for control.
