The wages of spin

Damian McBride, Derek Draper and LabourList (a propagandist mirror of the much more independent conservative.home) are so utterly embarrassing for the left. They're symptomatic of a party hierarchy that's totally lost sight of its purpose and of any strategic aims. Rather than communicate the positive benefits of a Labour government, or the genuinely evil aims of the Tories, they've decided, because they all read Guido Fawkes and the other nasty-minded Tory bloggers, that the voters don't care about ideas. Instead, think these toads, gossip and ad hominem attacks are what matters in politics now. They're so tragically old-fashioned it's sad. They read Fukuyama's The End of History in the 90s and believed the argument that socialism was dead and capitalism had won. Once there's no ideological debate, party politics becomes a matter of marketing, of triangulation and of personalities.

But capitalism is utterly wounded now. The Tories have a clear line on this: taxpayers should save capitalism and the rich, and then everything will be alright. Labour are screwed because it took so much psychological effort to become capitalists that they can't get out of their 90s mindset that anyone with a Blackberry and a second home is automatically morally and politically superior to us all. So the party minions like McBride et al. ape their opposition and waste their time with silly stunts, persuading everybody that there isn't a single politician out there who actually cares about the country rather than himself. Actually, there are - people like Paul Flynn, Norman Baker and Dennis Skinner.