This is just more waffle though. We are no closer to any kind of specifics.

Cameron for example tried to stay just to the right of Labour policies. That is what is going to happen in the centre of politics.

loool for thinking his post though weak on any actual content, is anything like your 1/0 everytime posting.

There's always a bit in middle but when parties fight on principles we see differentiation.

We can see it now and it's a prerequisite for winning the argument. If the tories have to follow then that means them moving towards the left.

Labour would restore the 50p rate, introduce a mansion tax, roll back privatisation, maintain Britain’s membership of the EU and impose spending cuts of about £7bn.

The Tories would avoid tax increases on the wealthy, extend privatisation, stage a referendum on whether to leave the EU and impose cuts of about £33bn.

=Labour are tory light.

So 1/0.

My claim that when actually pushed to provide any meat to the tory light claim it often evaporates is being evinced by every post you have made since.

Still no actual content.

? No labour are no longer Tory lite. There is a different order of differentiation now compared to labour under TB

Both Labour and Tories have often sought to build an alliance that encompasses the middle ground. Theresa May is still doing this. She seems to be winning.

Tory Lite just seems like name calling to me.

Apparently the BNP call UKIP "plastic nationalists" I am sure there is a justification as to why UKIP are basically the same as the Labour Party. I am sure their justifications make sense to them.

In the real world there have always been big differences between Labour and Tory programmes.

These arguments could just be seen as pointless and academic but in a few weeks time Labour will have a decision to make. Len McCluskey will say we have done well that we are on course for victory in 2022. Hopefully some people will think about what kind of opposition Theresa May would like and will choose a different path for the party.

Thinking that anything to the right of Corbyn is essentially the same as the Tories is a recipe for Tory government in the foreseeable future. If you are on the left and honestly don't think that matters then i seriously question your judgement.

Something like that except the battle in labour will be whether to continue to argue for what the left believes in vs doing whatever is needed to try to win power.

I'm not against some compromise but if it becomes all about winning at all costs then it's a disaster.

As I said before I don't buy the premise that a left wing party never wins - not unless we don't have one very often.

That's a false dichotomy - we need to be thinking about what we can actually acheive

It's not false at all.

I agree we should be thinking about what we can achieve.

To achieve anything we need to be thinking about how to be elected - but that's not the same thing as "winning at all costs"

We also need to be arguing for what we want to achieve - which doesn't mean never being elected.

These aren't as binary as this discussion might be taken.

The context of immigration is that a supply of appropriate labour can't be found in the home country. It is a business need. Commonwealth or EU, there isn't much difference, this is about how politicians deal with political opponents, the media, the impact on communities.

In addition to Blunkett, who was a really poorly placed bad egg as home secretary, and if his approach was the exception I'm surprised he lasted long at all. But of course New Labour was far more strategic than this. Attacks on asylum seekers, muslims and economic migrants was all fuel to the fire for the BNP. Sadly, former anti racist Peter Hain also joined in with slurs against muslims and immigrants. However Margaret Hodge went too far even for her colleagues:

"Education Secretary Alan Johnson has added his voice to attacks on trade minister Margaret Hodge over comments she made on housing allocation.
Mr Johnson accused her of "using the language of the BNP" after she said British families had a "legitimate sense of entitlement" over immigrants."

The BNP guy replied to Hodge:

"I am indebted to you for having the gumption to tell the truth about housing allocation."

I agree about arguing for what we want to achieve - But we have to win an awful lot of arguments before the electorate will choose anything like the current Labour programme.

And the danger of uneectability is real. there are many parallels with 1983, it took anther 14 years before Labour was elected then. It could easily take that long now particularly if Labour digs its heels in and says our policies are right and the electorate is wrong.

We can never really resolve what ifs but I don't think that the victory of 1997 was in any way inevitable. Tony Blair got many things wrong, but one thing that he got right was that the electorate needed to not be afraid of the consequences of voting Labour.

I agree with one of your earlier points that the Blair government's treatment of assylum seekers was very poor. I would also not defend everything that labour politicians said about immigration but I think the argument you make that that statements of Labour politicians contributed to the rise of the BNP is weak.

In fact it's arguable that the fact that mainstream politicians were talking about immigration made it harder for them to capitalise on the issue. This article

http://www.newstatesman.com/politics...hat-killed-bnp

argues that: "Unlike the most successful far-right parties, the BNP failed to link immigration to a wider political narrative"

And there are many ways that Labour opposed racism in the Blair years

The causes of extremism and racist violence are manifold. If you had to say on a scale of 1-100 how much responsibility should New Labour take for the rise of the BNP what would you say? (honestly)

That was not now and is a list of policies under Miliband whom Tomj referenced as evidence of being tory light.

Still waiting for something even remotely approaching evidence of Tory lightness from Chez.

I think one the reasons why a lot of Labour politicians said this stuff (and they said what Mandelson and Campbell told them to say btw) was a poor understanding of why the BNP were growing and what their constituent base was. They thrived on low voter turnouts, filling the gap deserted by Labour failing to invest in jobs, training, housing and infrastructure. But their voting base wasn't a direct switch from Labour, and tended to be more self-employed types, ex servicemen, security, former Tory voters. Of course they had some working class support but the narrative of the racist white working class deserted by the political elite and turning to fascism was a false one. Typically New Labour theorists saw the far right as threatening the social democratic vote, hence stealing the arguments of the fascists - that's not to over state this, obviously there was a mixed bag, but it was certainly strategic, rather than ideological. Peter Hain for instance can hardly be decribed a racist, but he was misguided on this and contributed to Islamophobia which fuelled the tabloids and gave the BNP a mainstream legitimacy for their ideas. Hard to say the extent here but I'd say they were more part of the problem than the solution.

I think the reason the BNP failed was the success of the anti-racist movement and the growth of UKIP. The BNP was split everywhere as well, failing to unite the hardcore and mainstream which the anti-racist movement was able to capitalise on.
But we've also seen the rise of the EDL as a hardcore street wing of this movement and the continuation of islamophobia and racism so let's not celebrate too early.

Yes I mentioned the Milliband manifesto as a reference point for a Tory-lite politics. Talking about 'coherent programmes' you can't get much more incoherent than tax increases AND spending cuts. The Labour message was 'we need to accept cuts' and this filtered right down to local councils who implemented them under the Tories. I know, I heard them directly and challenged them many times.

I dont think you get how your accusation is inherently incoherent, to put your statement another way, Labour appeased a cohort that by definition would not vote for them. After conducting a policy diametrically opposed to their agenda and having the right wing media attack them constantly for said policy.

All you have to counter this are a few sporadic statements that amount to nothing as far as evidence is concerned. A completely unsupported claim that it was orchestrated by Mandelson et al, which again = zero evidence.

Some MPs/Ministers were genuinely concerned about the impacts of sudden and mass immigration on communities receiving that immigration. Blunket has carried on voicing the same concerns whilst out of power, which is actual evidence contrary to you claim that it was all a plot to achieve nothing,which is what actually appeasing the ERW would do for Labour, it makes zero strategic or political sense as an objective.

1: Raising taxes and cutting spending is perfectly coherent, you raise taxes so you can cut less. That is point of departure from the Tories. Anyone who thinks the deficit was sustainable in 2010 is in cloud cuckoo land. The tories wanted to reduce it purely via spending cuts and Labour wanted to reduce it with far less spending cuts and increased revenues from taxation.

Of course spending cuts = unpure = 1 = basically Nazis.

2: Of course councils cut their budget, this was due to cuts and freezes in the local government finance settlement, no surprises you challenged them whilst being ignorant of there primary cause.

This is where their approach was wrong. They weren't losing votes to the far right, on the whole, so no there was nothing to be gained from appeasing the tabloids. It was a flawed strategy. And a divisive and dangerous one.

Be careful here, you almost let slip your own views about this. I see you are adopting some of the language of 'genuinely concerned about immigration' and 'voicing concerns'. If by this you mean vicious attacks on the poorest and most vulnerable Roma gypsies then let's tell it like it is.

Cut less. Cut, but cut less. That is the point of the phrase 'tory lite'. Not full blown tory. A bit better, but still heading in the same direction.
The context isn't even relevant because that in itself is a political debate not an economic one (bottomless war chest, bank bailouts etc)

Yes it was a flawed strategy, one so obviously nonsensical they obviously never actually did it in the first place.

Where did I say such concerns were objectively true.

Subjective opinions obviously can be mistaken.

The point is that MPs can visit communities where there has been massive and sudden immigration and come to what are reasonable in that context conclusions, they are reasonable not in the sense of being correct, but reasonable in the sense of belonging to a range of conclusions that can be arrived at via lived experience of being in that place and time. People interacting with sudden change often come to incorrect conclusions about that change becuase they have no distance and detachment from said events.

These thoughts are in a different category of mental ideality to having preconceived dogmatic ideas about race.

So when an MP says something belonging to that range, ala Blunket, and keep saying those things during their life time after their political career, its evidence that saying such things was the result of their own subjective experience and not some over arching plan to stupidly attempt to do the impossible, which is what you are suggesting.

So to be clear to your fascist thought policing, I only brought up the idea of genuine concern to contrast against your accusation of messaging being entirely contrived.