How Labour have implemented the 2005 Conservative Mainfesto

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Yes, yes it does. LibDem please.

...who support privatising the Post Office, savage cuts to the Welfare State (or at least the parts of it that, you know, help working class people, as opposed to the sort of people who vote LibDem. They would, of course, expand it for them) that go beyond anything that the Tories dare to speak of these days and in general taking from the poor and giving it to the middle.

And this is just under Campbell. The next LibDem leader will almost certainly be further to the Right than him.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

A lot of these are stretching things a little (more than that in some cases) and don't cover more than a fraction of government policies (I would also add that they don't cover more than a fraction of the Tory manifesto either, but it was a rather small document, wasn't it?), but there's only one I'll comment on specifically:

Pensions

''A Conservative government will increase the basic state pension in line with earnings rather than prices, reversing the spread of means testing.'' Conservative Manifesto 2005.

Too costly, said Labour...But wait for it.

''And to honour those who raised us, I can affirm our commitment to restore the link between the Basic State Pension and earnings.''  Gordon Brown. 2007 Conference Speech

The Tories were hardly the only people to call for the return of the earnings link (and, significantly, they only called for it when they were in opposition), quite a few people in the Labour Party and in the Labour Movement have done so as well (and for longer).

And, of course, this is the problem with some of the other things listed here. Most of these policies are either, in some respects at least, quite different to those in the Tory manifesto or, as far as I can tell, clearly influenced by other things.

I should add that I don't actually support all the listed policies.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Labour members will support any policy if it's a Labour policy no matter how new, where it came from, how right wing or how many u-turns have been performed on it which is a great shame as these things go.

Oh, so we're all sheep are we? How nice.

Your slur isn't true, btw (if you can't find Labour people who aren't 100% happy with everything Gordon-related, you can't have been looking for very long), and completely misses the point. Most people who join (or strongly support) a political party (or the Labour Party anyway) do not do so because that party has a collection of individual policies that that person happens to like the like look of.

I'll happily state here that I would have voted Labour in 1983, despite disagreeing with a majority of the manifesto and being almost militantly opposed to certain policies inside it. The only exceptions would be in constituencies in which the candidate was a member of Militant (or someone who might as well have been), in which case I would have had to vote SDP (or spoil my ballot).

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Al, I didn't mean it like that and I apologise if it came across that way.

Ah, that's O.K.

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By inertia, you mean the fact that only the remains of the Hard Left has expressed any concerns about the direction in which Brown is taking the Party? In which case;

1. Labour's core voters (including rank-and-file blue collar Trade Unionists and those Party members (ie; a majority) who aren't activists) aren't expressing any concerns because, with, perhaps, the exception of That Photo with That Woman, they don't really have any concerns with the direction that Brown is taking the party in. Brown comes across as someone with respect for Labour traditions in a way that Blair never did, and most of the policy changes since Brown became P.M are as popular with working class voters as the lower middle class ones that Brown has certainly targeted.

2. Much of the above is true of activists as well (or at least some of them), but there are other reasons as well.
An understanding that an election isn't that far away is an obvious one (disunity before an election is obviously not a good thing), another is that things seem to be going alright at the moment (Harold Wilson's comment about a horse-drawn carriage is still fairly accurate), while a further factor is that the Brown leadership represents a blank slate as far as factions and so on go; for the past decade or so most of that stuff was built around attitudes to Blair and, obviously, aren't relevant anymore... especially as Brown almost made a point of not purging former supporters of Blair from positions of influence when he took over in the way that everyone had sort-of being expecting.

This situation won't last forever; never does.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The problem is Labour isn't a 'Labour' party, it's not socialist, it's not social democratic and it's not christian democratic (not yet) it's reactionary.

For that I'm going to cease to take anything you say about political issues seriously. Have fun in your own little fantasyland though.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

Al, that's bordering on the childish and I would have thought better of you. Instead of being dismissive if you disagree with me calling Labour a 'reactionary' party, a party that reacts to the opposition and events rather than setting it's own agenda, give reasons why they are not and i'll take them on board instead of just dismissing them off hand.

When I see the word "reactionary" used I assume that it has a capital R. As you don't seem to have used that version of the word, I take back what I said.