Noticed this gem from The Times:

Clarification

A report (“We will kill our hostages, Sunni group warns Iran�, January 5) suggested incorrectly that Syrian support for Hezbollah was to blame for murders in Lebanon. It should have made it clear that Syria is blamed for the assassinations in Lebanon.

Somehow I doubt the complainant who prompted the clarification is going to be any happier.

Apropos of my earlier comments on the Lib Dems, I think its becoming perfectly apparent that there’s no one in Lib Dem ranks with the balls to pick up the assassin’s blade and mount an open and honest challege to Kennedy’s leadership of the party, hence we now find the office juniors ganging up on him in an effort to force him out without a contest.

Not so much an orange revolution as a yellow one then.

Bob Piper’s on sparkling form this morning in relation to Phillip Gould’s letter in the Grauniad; ‘This is the moment of New Labour’s victory‘, responding to Neil Lawson’s article from Thursday; ‘Labour has run into the sand and can’t depend on Brown to dig it out‘.

I can’t help but agree with Bob’s assessment of the situation:

The consequences of this realignment [Cameron’s shift to the centre] in British politics could prove catastrophic for our democracy. What it says is that all future elections will be a fight for the votes of a few hundred thousand people in middle-England. The political parties don’t have to give a fig for the voters in their traditional heartlands. New Labour doesn’t need to tailor their policies to win the votes of whippet breeders in Barnsley, welders in Wolverhampton, or building workers in Bootle. The same is true of the Tories in the Shires. They know that even if they put up a monkey in Buckingham the Tory faithful would still turn out in droves to vote for it (you could say that John Bercow was living proof of that). No…. neither party has to fight for those votes, what they are both after are the votes of those people in the middle-ground of politics.

What we are seeing is a diminution in the democratic options put before the electorate, the descent of the British system into supermarket politics.

Place a Tesco and a Sainsbury’s supermarket side by side and how do you decide where to shop? The differences between the two are at best marginal and you end up choosing one over the other for marginal reasons - maybe you go to Tesco because their milk’s a penny cheaper than next door, or maybe you prefer Sainsburys because the sell-by date on their apples is a day or two longer, or perhaps you oscillate between the two depending on which one has more ‘buy one, get one free’ offers advertised in the window. However you decide, what you end up with are the same products, the same items - the packaging may differ slightly if you buy the ‘own brand’ goods but these invariably come from the same supplier no matter where you shop.

There are things I both agree with and disagree with in Neil Lawson’s article but one thing I can certainly accept is the overall sentiment, that we need to revisit and review our view of socialism and left-wing thought in general - driving right back to first principles where necessary - and consider how it may fit into and become relevant to the 21st Century. Whether that’s a task suited to politicians and political think-tanks is another matter entirely, although I was pleased to see the name-check given to Zygmunt Bauman which, at least, presages some interest in the Labour movement in considering where we go from here from a more philosophical standpoint.

Gould, on the other hand, seems trapped in the kind of dangerously absurdist zealotry that one finds all too often amongst ardent Blarites.

Eight and half years in power does indeed support the contention that Labour has ‘won’ to date both politically and strategicly, although how much of that apparent victory has come solely due to the obvious disarray in opposition ranks that has render the Tories unelectable during that period is open to question.

His claim that ‘New’ Labour has won in an ideological sense is, however, frankly absurd, not least as suspect he wouldn’t recognise the true ideological base of the New Labour project if it got up an bit him on the arse. If New Labour can be said to have an ideology at all, it is one that is far from modern - indeed it’s one that belongs originally to the late 18th and early 19th Centuries and, in that respect, pre-dates Marxism.

‘New’ Labour is, in essence, a Saint-Simonian project best characterised by Saint-Simon’s own formula that ‘The Government of presons will be succeeded by the administration of things’ - a formula which lies at the heart of positivism and influenced both Marxism and, ironically, the latter day doctrine of the global free market through its roots in ‘logical positivism’ which is, itself, largely the translation of Saint-Simonian ideas into economics.

Not really modern at all, then but then for all Gould’s protestations that:

Lawson talks of making history, but to shape history you must first understand it.

An understanding of anyone’s ‘history’ but their own has never been a Blairite hallmark as Gould so ably demonstrates in the rest of that paragraph:

And the mistake that Neal has made is not to understand the strength and power of New Labour. It was never, ever a “gamble on power over principle”; it was always, from the very start, an intellectually coherent, policy-rich project which sought and found new progressive solutions to the challenges of new times. That is why it has sustained itself through three election victories and why the Conservative hegemony of a generation has so dramatically imploded. If we do not understand why we won in the past and the scale of our victory, all the thinktanks and pressure groups in the world will not secure our future.

‘[T]he Conservative hegemony of a generation has so dramatically imploded’ - ???

Clearly Gould fails to understand the full consequences of that particular statement as, presumably, he believes the Tories to lack any real history, or sense of history, beyond the advent of Thatcherism in much the same way as he lacks any sense of Labour Party history which pre-dates Blair.

Thatcherism was not so much an ideology in its own right as a political virus that infected the Tory Party with ideology, a virus it’s found hellishly difficult to sake off. Strip that away, as Cameron is trying to do and what do the Tory’s become?

Not the shiftless, rootless political adventurers that Gould supposes. No, they simply revert to type; the Conservative Party becomes, once again, conservative. They return to the pragmatism and utilitarism of old, the part of them that still believes that they are only natural party of Government - only they can do what is right for the country because only they have minds unclouded by ideology and radical, irrational systems of belief.

Remove Thatcherism from the Tory equation and where to they go? Straight back to Hume, Berkeley and Locke.

The desperate irony of Gould’s letter, his greatest conceit even, is his apparent belief that Cameron is but a wolf in sheep’s clothing whose outer raiment can be stripped away to reveal the same old Tories of the last quarter-century beneath. Funnily enough, as I recall, that’s pretty much what the Tories thought about Blair back in the dog-days of the Major government, and look where that got them?

If the Tories aren’t taking ‘New’ Labour seriously then neither is Gould taking them seriously either - a mistake the Labour movement certainly cannot afford to make.

What Gould fails to appreciate here is that ‘New’ Labour is as alien to the Labour Party as Thatcherism was to the Tories - albeit something that will, perhaps, be less damaging in the long run as the Labour Party has never quite bought into it to the extent that the Tories did.

And therein lies the real danger Cameron poses. Where ‘New’ Labour was, and still is, a departure from Labour Party traditions and values, Cameron’s brand of ‘compassionate conservativism’ 0 what used to be called ‘one nation conservatism’ is really only a reversion to type for the Tories, a minor variation, if it varies much at all, from their natural philosophical inclinations - and once one understands that one also understands that talk of a ‘New’ Labour victory is wholly premature. After all, what value is there in such a victory if it turns out, as is certainly possible, to be the kind of phyrric victory that returns a Tory government at the next election.

Not that I suppose that will ultimately matter overmuch if Cameron sticks the course and successfully steers the Tories away from further relapses in to Thatcherism, as the likes of Gould will no doubt be joining the Stephen Pollards of this world and fucking-off to join the Tory Party anyway - which is at least a possible silver lining to this particular cloud.

Perhaps the least surprising revelation in the whole Lib Dem leadership debacle is that Charles Kennedy ha been receiving treatment for a drink problem, not simply because its been pretty much the worst kept secret in politics for the last two or three years but because the mere fact of being leader of the Lib Dems seems more than sufficient, in my estimation, to drive anyone to drink.

There’s been a crushing inevitability about recent events which, if we’re honest, has little or nothing to do with Chatshow’s personal life.

As has become increasingly apparent, the Lib Dems ‘best electoral performance’ in years has turned out to be simply another false dawn built on the Lib Dems being the least worst alternative for former Labour supporters pissed off with Blair’s uber authoritarianism and propensity for telling porkies over Iraq. All they realistically achieved last May was to carry over the kind of protest vote they tend to pick-up in mid-term into the actual General Election but not in sufficient numbers to put a big enough dent in the Tories to cast doubts on their position as the main opposition party.

The main political charge against Kennedy is that he’s failed to capitalise on their electoral success last May, but what did he realistically have to capitalise on? Nine months on can anyone remember what any of the Lib Dem’s manifesto policies were other than the 50% top rate on tax and local income tax - a policy so unformed and sketchy that even Kennedy couldn’t explain how it was going to work - both of which have been unceremoniously ditched since then.

I don’t think it can be said that Kennedy’s ‘dropped the ball’; I don’t think he ever had it in the first place - or if he did it was taken off him near enough straight after the election by the Tory leadership contest.

It is ever the fate of the leader of the number two opposition party to be the spare wheel in our current Parliamentary system. Even the one set-piece occasion where he could put himself and his party over, PMQ’s, is loaded against him; the entire set-up is built on the main gladitorial contest between the PM and leader of the opposition which gets the lion’s share of the attention, especially in the media. By comparison, Kennedy’s role is that of a support act to the main performance, in boxing terms he’s the ‘nobbins’ fight held over by the promoter until after the main event as cover against the title fight turning out to be a damp squib.

It’s a role that requires a towering performance just to get noticed, the kind of performance that’s not only beyond Kennedy but beyond pretty much anyone else the Lib Dems could put up at the moment, except perhaps for Ming the Merciless - although I can’t say I’ve noticed him up to much of late either. Kennedy may not have shone since the election, but neither has anyone else in his party - if there’s blame to apportioned for not making a breakthough on the back of election success that blame should be shared collectively by the entire Lib-Dem ‘front bench’, none of whom could be said to have been any more effective than their leader.

Of course what’s actually precipitated this crisis is not merely doubts over Kennedy’s performance as leader, nor even his now admitted drink problem, but the emergence of David Cameron as the new Tory leader which has seen the Tories dive headlong for the centre ground and, rightly if one is thinking purely in terms of political strategy, put the immediate squeeze on Lib Dem support.

What Cameron has correctly realised is that the key to the next General Election lies in pulling in those voters who habitually vacillate between parties in the centre ground of British politics, the same ‘disillusioned with Blair’ vote that delivered the Lib Dems their best election performance in many years has become the vote the Tories need to attract in order to unseat Labour much as they were the vote Labour targetted in 1997 in order to get rid of the Tories. What differs between Cameron’s approach today and that of Blair in the mid 90’s in the naked aggression with which he has, already, pursued this course. Labour, of course, put the squeeze on Lib Dem territory but did so in a less threatening manner by offering the odd olive branch to the Lib-Dem leadership and Lib-Dem supporters - Blair hedged his bets on victory in 97 by offering co-operation, may be even coalition with the Lib Dems, amything so long as the desired result, the end of 18 years of Tory rule, could be achieved.

Cameron’s approach is rather different, indeed it perhaps the one clear difference in strategy he has to distinguish himself for Blair. Where Labour cosseted and seduced the Lib Dems with gentle diplomacy, Cameron has gone straight for the gunboat approach, set out to annex the electoral equivalent of the ‘Sudetenland’ and push his forces right up onto the Lib Dem borders. Blair’s message was ‘work with us, it will be to your advantage’, even if no real advantage materialised as the scale of Labour’s 1997 victory turned the Lib Dems into an unecessary and expendable appendage. Cameron’s message is ‘work with us or else’, having rightly calculated that the presence of both main parties solidly decamped in the centre ground spells if not oblivion for the Lib Dems then the next nearest thing to oblivion.

And so the knives come out for Kennedy and all he can do is confess his sins, cry ‘Et tu Daisy‘ and call a leadership contest.

Which proves there’s still a fair bit of fight left in him.

There’s been plenty said already on the subject of Kennedy’s decision to call a leadership contest, much to the chagrin of the likes of Jenny Tonge, Chris Davies and Sandra Gidley, much of it wrong.

The perception, in the media at least, seems to be that Kennedy has decided to throw himself on the tender mercies of the party membership while banking on the fact that his main opponents may be unwilling to be seen to be kicking him while he’s down and will stay out of the race - but there is more to it than than. What Kennedy is banking on is not that his public admission that he has a drink problem will work for him but that every competent politician knows all to well the fate of Brutus and Sejanus and that politics is never kind to the assassin (or would-be assassin) - that’s what has the likes of Ming the Merciless and Mark Oaten shuffling uncomfortably from foot to foot and ruling out the possibility of a challenge from their direction. The first rule of assassination is always dispose of the assassin one the deed is done so that no one may see who’s hand really directed the knife.

In all this I wonder if Kennedy really does have the will to go on as leader of the Lib Dems, even if cowardice dictates that he receives no serious or credible challenger in the upcoming leadership contest. Is this contest really a bid to stay on in the top job, or merely the means to extract a little revenge on his opponents by either exposing them for the cowards they are - already achieved in the case of Ming and Oaten - or by blighting their future career with the epithet of ‘assassin’.

Who knows, but tragic circumstances - and this is a tragedy for the Lib Dems and their electoral credibility - call for tragic words and so one much inevitably turn to the venerable Bard of Avon.

Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
I have thee not, and yet I see thee still.
Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible
To feeling as to sight? or art thou but
A dagger of the mind, a false creation,
Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

A thought which must occupy the mind of more than one Lib Dem politician at the moment.