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Thursday 23 January 2020

Moving on from the General Election Defeat

Zarah Sultana MP has caused controversy with her suggestion that the entire periods of Labour government under Blair and Brown were simply a continuation of Thatcherism.  She is backed up some writers on the Guardian and in recent comments by Clive Lewis MP.

This viewpoint is something I find frankly bizarre for a Labour MP to hold and probably has seeped in from parties that oppose Labour.  It ignores the fact that the last Labour government simply didn't care about reducing the size of the state as an objective meaning it could, for instance invest unprecedented amounts in the NHS as well as very large amounts in education, local government and other public services.  These often then formed the basis of Tory cuts under Cameron and May which the hard left have protested about without really doing very much to support those achievements in the first place.  I would easily reel off a list including improvements in foreign aid, constitutional reform, rapproachment with the EU and so on that relate less to financial issues.

Some in the Party are struggling to react to the 2019 General Election defeat and to accept that its team decided to accept a General election on Conservative Party terms and ran a campaign entirely under its own control and the result was the biggest disaster for Labour in living memory.  Processing these facts is essential to the recovery of the Party under a new Leader.

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