With friends like these

Banished for their unspeakable crimes against the universe, the Lords escape with the intention of destroying it for their own ends, aided by selfish humans and renegade time lords, but are thwarted by a plucky Scot whose only concern is for humanity. But that's enough laboured metaphors drawing on the last David Tennant Doctor Who episode.



I've a proud record of never supporting Labour's leaders. I didn't want Brown to become Prime Minister (a McDonnell/Skinner ticket would be my dream team). I hated Blair before he was even party leader. I thought John Smith and Kinnock were rightwing sellouts.

But. For all their incompetent and right-leaning faults, the current Labour leadership is better by far than the Tory government which I think is going to win the election in May or June. Come the Conservapocalypse, you'll realise that Cameron and his well-fed, privileged Friedmanites (the origin of 'greed is good') mean what they've been saying in recent months. They genuinely believe in 'small government', a term they picked up from the Reaganite (brilliantly cheesy site: needs sound) Republicans.

Like Reagan, they mean big government for bailing out their friends in the banking sector, and big government for the armed service and the weapons industry (proof on its own that socialist economics works), and small government for you: worse schools, worse hospitals, less social security, fewer universities with bigger class sizes and smaller subjects, lower or no minimum wage, lower taxes on the things they spend money on (i.e. big houses) and more taxes on the things the rest of us buy (food).

So you'd imagine, given the importance of this election, that the Labour Party would be united in desperation. Determined to pull together and put aside its differences in one last effort to save this country. You'd imagine wrongly. The only thing Labour any longer has in common with leftwing parties is its capacity to stab itself in the face. Today, failed Blairite non-entities Patricia Hewitt (great voting record, you koala-bothering git) and Geoff 'Buff' Hoon (aka Whoon, identical rightwing voting record) have stirred the pot by calling for a ballot of Labour MPs on the leadership.

I'm all for a new leader. A loud, dynamic, lefty. McDonnell, Skinner, Bob Marshall-Andrews, whoever. But not now. There are reasons to vote Labour (still). What undecided voter, however, will be attracted by yet more internecine warfare? The Tories don't do it like this. They're ruthless and decisive. They assassinate their leaders in the middle of the night. Labour prefers to act like an extended family opening up old feuds at a wedding reception - and for the last few years, it's been embittered Blairites like Charles Clarke, hooked on publicity and divorced from reality. The reality is that the Tories don't care about the working and lower-middle classes as anything other than voting fodder. Hewitt and Hoon have just done their bit to make the Rise of the Torymen inevitable.

Don't be evil. Don't vote Tory.

(Here's John McDonnell's reaction to a previous bit of New Labour spinning):

This is about the fourth or fifth, (I lost count some time ago), attempt by former New Labour apparatchiks to try and reinvent themselves. We have had former Blair/Brown insider advisers Neal Lawson and Jon Cruddas with Compass, Charles Clarke and Alan Milburn with 2020 Vision, and now James Purnell and Jon Cruddas with Demos's Open Left.

No matter how clever the project's title, how well its re-launch statements are drafted and how smart its website, none of them can escape from the objective history of the part they played in creating and supporting the reactionary, political deviation that was New Labour, a political project that has brought the Labour party to the edge of extinction.

Between them all they have either been the architects of, the advisers to, the parliamentary lobby fodder in support of or the ministerial implementers of policies which have left at least half a million innocent people dead in Iraq, doubled the number of homeless families in Britain, privatised more public sector jobs than Thatcher and Major put together, undermined long-cherished basic civil liberties and forced through so brutal an attack on the recipients of welfare benefits that even the Thatcher government refused to implement.

Quoting past Labour party theoreticians, intellectualising justifications for betrayal in the language of an A-level sociology paper, and speaking left while voting right will not wash off the blood of the murdered Iraqis or stem the tears of a single parent forced off benefits or help explain to the unemployed person how they can live on £65-a-week jobseeker's allowance.

Some among this crew realised sooner than others that the only hope for their future political careers was to jump ship from New Labour and to rebrand themselves on the left. They have been assisted by parts of the media that are implicated in delivering the Labour party and the country up to Blair, Brown and Mandelson, and who are also trying to distance themselves from the creature they helped create.