Rolling coverage of all the day’s political developments as they happen
9.18am BST
It’s such a quiet day this morning that on the Today programme they resorted to reading out poetry, Keats’ Ode to Autumn. The Commons is in recess, and the main political parties are getting ready for their party conferences. Labour’s starts at the weekend and, to mark it, the New Statesman has published a special edition, leading with an article by David Miliband, the former Labour foreign secretary, despairing at what has happened to his party. Like the Ode to Autumn (which an academic on Today said was partially influenced by the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre), Miliband’s article laments loss. But, unlike the Ode, it’s not great poetry, and it’s much more specific.
Miliband makes the routine claim (for people from his wing of the party) that Jeremy Corbyn is “unelectable”, but he gives the argument a new twist. Rather than claiming that Corbyn’s policy objectives are fine, but that Corbyn is just the wrong person to be able to implement them (which broadly was Owen Smith’s argument in the leadership contest, with some exceptions), Miliband says that Corbyn has the wrong policies.
The party has ended up pre-New Labour in policy and culture, when we need to be post-New Labour. This year’s leadership election has spent a lot of time debating how to “bring back” various lost icons, such as nationalised railways, rather than focusing on new ideas for the future.
The main charge against Jeremy Corbyn is not just that his strategy is undesirable because it makes the party unelectable. That is only half the story. The real issue is that his strategy makes the party unelectable because it is in many aspects undesirable.
Politics blog | The Guardian http://ift.tt/2dcQWbn
Sig Nordal 