Simon's Blog

Two weeks after the most devastating defeat for the Labour party in living memory we have entered a time when all concerned will be eating their babies, by which I mean they are trying to elect a new leader.   Straight after the defeat it was the turn of the Blairites to get their knives out.  This weekend its the turn of the, well I’m not sure what epithet to give them – maybe Unite – to get their retaliation  in.    It is so very depressing and so very predictable.  When will any of these people learn that it wasn’t because they weren’t too right wing, centrist or left wing that they lost.  It was because no one really believed that they could form a government and that even less people thought that Ed Miliband was a suitable candidate to be prime minister.

None of this will matter over the next few months.  Instead what will matter will be purity of thought around subjects that I suspect an awful lot of Labour members don’t really care about.  At the same time they will be reinforcing the notion being put about by the Tories that Labour is untrustworthy, which I suspect is the kettle calling the pot black but it is Labour’s own fault.

The one ray of hope is that they have been here before.  In 1992 they suffered a defeat, perhaps nothing of the magnitude of 2015 but a shattering one nonetheless, yet by 1997 they had been elected with a huge majority after the Tories had  pulled themselves apart over Europe, does that sound familiar?  Of course the Labour party had elected a leader who  proved on three separate occasions he knew how to win an election.   However, Tony Blair seems to be such a dirty word amongst the Labour party that they really deserve everything they are about to get.