What iis Labour For?

If we ask the question, what is a political party in Britain for, what is its purpose a Conservative will have no difficulty answering. The Conservative Party exists to win and then retain power. Why? In order to bring and retain stability. What is stability? It is a lack of instability. And how i it to be achieved? That depends on current circumstances. The current Conservative party sees stability in terms of financial balance and economic growth. Al other good things flow from that. In the 1980s stability was seen in terms of curbing the power of the state and the trade unions and replacing them with free markets. Sometimes stability even consists of doing nothing at all other than control money supply as was sometimes the case between the two world war. The three great conservative values are power, pragmatism and empiricism. Simple. But ask a Labour supporter what hsi or her party is for and the answere will no lomger come easily. For much of the twentieth century Labour did know what it was for – to defend working class interests, to create social justice, to harness the collective wealth of the country for the common good and to use the state to control capitalism. Since the 1980s, however things have been less clear and never more so than today. As the Labour Party seeks a new leader it seems a good time to re-define the aims of Labour. There seem to be three alternatives: to keep the Tories out of power (echoing Nicola Sturgeon’s clarion call to the Scots), to govern Britain very much as the Conservatives wish to, but with more compassion, or to promote a leftist agenda to eliminate poverty, reduce inequality, curb the excesses of business and defend the principles and the income of the welfare state. Two of the candidates will be eliminated in the first two ballots – Kendall who represents the second option, and Corbyn who represents the third – leaving Cooper and Burnham to fight it out for the privilege of being the leader who fails to achieve the first option, for fail he or she will do as things stand. Both seem to be campaigning on the basis of a plan to win the next election by not repeating Labour’s faults in the last. This leaves us with a huge vacuum. What is Labour really for? Simply defeating the Conservatives may appeal to 30% of the voters but no one else. So Labour is getting its priorities in the wrong order. It first needs to define what its purpose is and then, having done so, find a leader who can carry that out. This means Alastair Campbell’s plan to get rid of the leader after three years if he or she cannot hack it looks rather attractive. It does give the party some breathing space to re-define itself BEFORE ir goes into the next election with the wrong leader and no plan.