What I got right

All wings of the Labour party which support the notion of Labour as a party aspiring to govern — rather than as a fringe protest movement — agree on the tragedy of the Labour party’s current position. But even within that governing tendency, there is disagreement about the last Labour government; what it stood for and what it should be proud of.

The moral dimension of Labour tradition has always been very strong, encapsulated in the phrase that the Labour party owed more to Methodism than to Marx. When I became the opposition spokesman on law and order in 1992, following our fourth election defeat, I consciously moved us away from a ‘civil liberties’ paramount approach to one that started with the rights of the victim, their pain, their suffering, and put first our moral responsibility to stand with them. Of course the two shouldn’t be in conflict. But nonetheless — tonally at least — I shifted our position and did it for moral as well as political reasons.