The next election is already being lost.  And the one after.  And indeed the one after that.  John Kennedy once said: “We can’t know where we’re going until we know where we’ve been.”  Well I’m old enough to have been here before: it was the summer of 1979 and Margaret Thatcher was busy rewriting the last Labour government as the Worst Moment in History.

She succeeded – big time – and her rewrite kept Labour out for a generation.  It didn’t matter that the disasters which had led to the fall of the Callaghan government – the biggest since World War II – were not Labour’s fault (there had been an international oil crisis, then a US gold crisis, then another oil crisis, then European stagflation). (more…)