Posts Tagged ‘Southern Front’

Without a revival in the south there will be no new Labour government

30/05/2012, 07:00:30 AM

by Rob Marchant

It is spring, two years into a parliament, and an activist’s mind turns to…elections (well, we are an odd lot).

Candidates start to be chosen and campaigns planned. We have a much clearer idea of what kind of opponents we will be up against in 2015. A new leadership finds its feet and gets to grips with its medium-term political strategy.

The trouble with the end of an era in politics, as in most other branches of human thought, is that in our rush to turn the page, we’re invariably faced with the baby/bathwater problem. And the next election is no exception.

New Labour is dead, and those of us who were part of it need to be sanguine about the need for moving on. But there’s a current fashion in some quarters of the party to go further: to try and convince ourselves that everything which happened after 1994 was somehow a tragic disaster, an aberration from Labour’s true path.

The truth, as ever, lies somewhere in the middle – it was neither perfect nor a disaster, but it was self-evidently a pretty good thing to be in government for thirteen years. But where Labour decides to draw that line, between what to keep from that success and what to throw away, will arguably determine our fate at the next election.

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