A blog by Luke Akehurst about politics, elections, and the Labour Party - With subtitles for the Hard of Left. Just for the record: all the views expressed here are entirely personal and do not necessarily represent the positions of any organisations I am a member of.
My columns this week:
posted by Luke Akehurst at 3:59 pm
Labour Party activist since 1988 - firmly on the moderate wing of the party. Member of Labour’s NEC 2010-2012 and since 2020. National Secretary of Labour Students 1995-6. Parliamentary candidate for Aldershot (2001) and Castle Point (2005). Hackney Councillor (Chatham Ward) 2002-2014, Labour Group Chief Whip 2002-09, Chair of Health Scrutiny 2010-2014. Supporter of Europe, NATO/nuclear deterrence, Israel, electoral reform. Guardian reader. Dad. Oxford resident. Unite union member. Employment history as a Labour Party Organiser, Local Government Political Assistant, Director at a Public Affairs company. All views expressed in a personal capacity. The rest will become evident from reading the blog.
4 Comments:
Luke makes some very good points.
Competence is the thing that really matters for Labour to win.
The 1992 result clearly shows that abandoning principles does not necessarily make Labour electable.
Instead, it demoralised people and made Labour look unprincipled.
The competence issue was accidentally raised in a recent newspaper article by Roy Hattersley:
"I freely admit that we had no idea how to deal with the Sun's vulgar abuse" he said.
Why the hell not? It is not as if it had never happened before.
In fact, it had happened loads of times. Labour should have looked into this problem after the 1983 election.
Why on earth would people trust a clueless party to run the country?
1:02 pm, April 12, 2012
An excellent piece on '92 with exactly the right lessons learned from that catastrophic defeat.
10:08 am, April 13, 2012
Anonymouis were things like rentionalisng council homes principles, it was Tony benn convincing the Loubr party we lsot in 79 becasue it was' tleft wing enough,Although Kinnock endorsed much of hte 83 Mnifesto, teh Publics Top 5 issues were the Economy, Defence law transport and low tax,Altohugh most of htese had been sorted by 92 as Kinnock was more interested in Schools NHS, which were the Publics 7th and 8th most inportant issues,it wasn't unpricnciple it was just hwe was seen out of touch erven, if hed' changed his mind on Eurpoe defence, coucnil homes etc.
5:49 pm, April 14, 2012
johnpaul:
On the subject of council houses, this is another issue that Labour should have seen coming. One person who did was Joe Haines, interestingly enough.
The Labour Party has often been identified with bureaucracy and drab uniformity. It should have recognised this. Does it really matter if front doors are a different colour?
So perhaps some plan to allow people to buy their council houses would have been appropriate. The devil is in the detail and the money would have to have been used to build replacements.
On the subject of nuclear weapons, the Labour Party was wrong to support them and did not benefit from doing so.
I trust this helps.
1:33 pm, April 16, 2012
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