Ed West Ed West

How bad will a Labour government be?

I’m old enough to remember the sense of optimism, hope and promise felt when Tony Blair was elected back in 1997; not by me, obviously, but I could at least appreciate that other people felt that ‘things can only get better’.

Whether you think they did or not, Blair transformed the country in his own image, just as his predecessor Margaret Thatcher had done during her similarly long reign. No one could say the same of the recent 14 years of Tory-led governments, a period that has been marked by a continual drift away from conservatism both within civil society and in many ways driven by the administration itself.

Labour is a mishmash of coalition interests that will need identity politics to keep it together as a reconciler of contradictions

As I have said one or two times before, you could have woken up from a long coma and had no idea who had been in charge the whole time.

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