A big q for Keir Starmer and his team: can you break with Corbynism while meeting the unprecedented crisis of the pandemic?
The former might please the commentariat, but carries of the risk of being outflanked *from the left* by the Tories. The old rules are dust now.
The former might please the commentariat, but carries of the risk of being outflanked *from the left* by the Tories. The old rules are dust now.
There's a new consensus around state intervention in the economy - but lots of room for Johnson (or whoever follows him) to slide right on nationalism, an increasingly authoritarian political culture, surveillance, and the erosion of civil liberties.
Replaying last year's culture wars - Lexit vs Remain, inter-factional headbanging - is a surefire way to consign the Labour Party to irrelevance. Big ideas around ownership, automation, the universality of services and income are what's urgently needed.
Some of the widely derided policies of the 2019 manifesto (free fibreoptic broadband, huge investment in green infrastructure, a realignment of wages, survival, and leisure) took only 3 months to go from scattergun retail offers to overdue, urgent, and even tame.
Learn from the mistakes of 2015-2019: chief among them being indecision, indeterminacy and a tendency in times of crisis to get stuck in the weeds and lose the big picture.
