Hopefully, Jeremy can use the closeness of this result to argue for a clear break with Blairism

[Ken Burch]

14. Yvette Cooper could never be a left-wing prime minister

She was the second-most right wing candidate(after Liz Kendall) in the leadership race.

Moreover, if she(or Burnham) becomes leader, they will prevent the restoration of internal democracy...and if the party retains a Blair designed leadership, if the party conference is kept powerless, it will be impossible for Labour to do anything radical or even mildly left-of-center in government.

A Labour government can only be worth electing if ordinary party members have a say in what the party stands for again.

No Blairite politician cares about workers or the poor.

You can't care about workers and the poor and argue that Labour must accept the budget charter and the benefits cap(i.e., if you agree that Labour must agree not to use the only tools any government has at its disposal to help the powerless). You can't care about workers and the poor if you still insist on keeping Thatcher's anti-worker laws(laws that made unions helpless against the management onslaught that has never stopped since the Eighties.

You can't care about those groups if you think the party should be run solely by an cynical, unaccountable, principle-free elite that cares only about what the forces to Labour's right want.


Blairism has nothing to offer and no one in the UK want Labour to reduce itself to Blairism again. The center ground is a soulless, passionless dead zone now. Everyone knows now that social an economic justice can't coexist with market values and that no use of military force can ever have progressive or humane results again(as the total failure of the bombing campaign in Syria to do anything at all to stop ISIS has demonstrated.

If Labour is not to be a member-controlled party, if it is not to be an anti-austerity party(it couldn't be anti-austerity under any of the leaders you have said you prefer) it can't be worth having...because if it can't be those things, Labour has no reason to exist.

"Not quite as brutal" isn't anything. Neither is "We will cut slightly less".