We don't need this realpolitik

Whether the Labour PLP likes it or not, the electorate will be offered a collection of mildly socialist reforms that has arguably not been on offer since the end of the Second World War. And why not?

While Tony Blair won two elections under the banner of ‘New Labour’, his ‘third way’ brand of politics was arguably as dead as a Dodo long before he resigned as Prime Minister in 2007. The Iraq war being just one reason why. Arguably, it was Ed Miliband’s failure to completely disentangle Labour from the political pragmatism of ‘New Labour’, including Blair, Brown, Mandelson and Campbell, that also cost him the 2015 election.

Despite the ‘pragmatic’ style of politics New Labour liked to think it projected, such pragmatism failed to improve life for many of Britain’s poor nor its middle classes, and did very little to protect the rights of British workers.

In reality, it offered a brand of political pragmatism akin to a woman having to put up with domestic violence from her partner, simply because she has nowhere else to go and no one to turn to.

It’s a political pragmatism that totally accepts the dominance of the dominant, without recoil and without exception, but hoping a few extra crumbs will be dropped from the table of the high and mighty in return for the favour.

Paul Dodenhoff

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