UDI from the proto-empire

Brexit: the fundamental issue is the UK vis-à-vis Germany

Brexit is not hard to understand.

1. The Germans are overt players again

Germany is waking from its decades of political hibernation. Its long atonement for the crimes of Nazism. The years in which it hid pursuit of its national interests behind the EU project, passive-aggressively ceding political leadership to France.

The new emerging Germany is finally ready and willing to be the European hegemon. Ask Greece.

2. The French know their place

The French elite, under Macron, has already capitulated, providing ideological cover to the German project with its narrative of transnationalism and 'ever closer union'. It's rather like the UK relationship with the US although the French have more influence over Germany.

La France profonde is increasingly restive.

3. The British: global financial reach + indifferent regional manufacturing

The UK elite, from its vantage point of a global financial nexus, knows it could never dominate Germany in Europe. But neither does it wish to be dominated. Its European strategy has always been transactional and divisive.

4. A political UDI suits both sides in the EU

A rising Germany is happy that the UK, a game-spoiling rival, is withdrawing from the ring. The French likewise.

The more globalised, financialised UK sees a least bad outcome in maintaining optimised economic access to the European market for goods and services. The British (English? .. London?) elite is therefore broadly happy with the May government's Brexit strategy and is content to spend the next plurality of years fine-tuning it.

Despite the aspirations of UK Remainers (fans of the Macron project), there has been no concerted pressure from the major EU powers (Germany, France) for a second referendum. The 'People's Vote’ has been theatre, reflecting a lack of purchase on the core of UK elite opinion.

5. Labour should tactically prop up the May government

If Labour were smart, they would abstain on the early December parliamentary vote on the May proposals.

This would avoid complicity in the risk of an uncontrolled hard Brexit (which would dismay their Momentum base and be strongly opposed by the UK elite) while exposing May's reliance on Labour to get her own policy through.

The three-way civil war inside the Conservative party would intensify and the Tories would look even less a viable government.

6. Plus ça change ... in the short run

As the UK transitions out of the EU in March 2019, all the cans will have been kicked down the road for another few years.

The May government may well stagger on to the next election (due 2022), spinning its administrative wheels with no consensual Tory vision or roadmap whatsoever - and with Labour salivating and preparing for government.

The United Socialist States of Europe

In the mid-1970s when I was trying to escape from teaching, I applied for an executive officer job with the Civil Service. I took the tests and attended an interview where I was asked, "What do you think about Britain being in the Common Market?".

I was conflicted: I was still a revolutionary socialist so I knew the party line was: 'No to the Europe of the capitalists, for a United Socialist States of Europe!'.

On the other hand, I was a disillusioned leftist and inclined to doubt that insurrection was likely to engulf Europe any time soon. In any case, I quite liked the idea of Europe: I'd had some great holidays there.

I responded without conviction that I thought the Common Market was not a good idea for Britain. No doubt that was why I didn't get the job .. (only kidding: there were a thousand reasons for the Civil Service not to employ me).

The left is now all at sea over Europe though; the pristine ideological purity of half a century ago has been shredded.

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If the UK capitalist class was truly united in wishing to stay in the EU, that inconvenient referendum result would have been subverted or reversed well before now.

It's certainly true that almost all economists believe that being part of the customs union, with a say on policy, offers by far the best prospects for the UK economy. It goes with the flow of globalisation, increased market size, lowered transaction costs and just-in-time logistics.

But the UK bourgeoisie has never been quite so committed to that predominantly political project which the EU truly is. The path to ever greater convergence, towards that famed economic and political integration into a 'superstate', is in practice one of transition to a unified European polity under German dominance.

With its global interests - the tepid afterglow of Empire - the British establishment always wanted the economic benefits without the political subordination. That balancing act has become ever more difficult as Germany has become more assertive and other members states more reliant upon it, more subservient to its power one might say.

So apart from the most devoted servants of international finance capital in the City (the George Osborne wing of the Tory Party; the Blair wing of Labour) there is a kind of strategic paralysis gripping most other sectors of the capitalist class.

So-called soft-Brexit, which is essentially the status quo ante but with even less political influence in Europe (or, even more disengagement, to put the positive spin on it), is thus the favoured option.

Smaller, more national and regional businesses get little of benefit from the EU and lack lobbying power there. These are the stalwarts of the Tory Party in the country and the most enthusiastic Brexiteers.

Meanwhile everyone is now familiar with the plight of the traditional, relatively unskilled working class, marginalised by higher-skilled, younger and more energetic competition from Eastern Europe. As they have been pressed back into the reserve army of labour, their resentment has fuelled a visceral 'leave' sentiment: a problem for Labour and a tantalising opportunity for the Tories.

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I don't have any views as to what the revolutionary left ought to be campaigning on here. The theory says that you should base your line on objective political analysis, not the vagaries of sentiment of your base-support. Since the EU is just as much a capitalist/globalisation project now as it was 45 years ago, the orthodox Leninist-Trotskyist position must be to oppose it.

But this implies that there's a viable strategy to supersede capitalism (a United Socialist States of Europe!) which can be meaningfully counterposed - and there is not.

The alternate argument, heard from those bright young revisionists in Labour's Momentum, is that socialism has to build on capitalism - it will be even more global and harmonised etc - so we obviously have to back all movement in that direction under capitalism. This reflects the naive idealism of their middle-class professional base which I myself exhibited (and suppressed) in my interview with the Civil Service.*

I'm not here to give advice to British capitalism on their optimal strategy: they don't need much assistance anyway to converge on 'soft-Brexit' as their preferred way forward.

But any institution which lionises George Osborne, Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel is going to find me heading rapidly towards the exit.

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* What's wrong with that argument, I hear you say? Simply this: the purpose of capitalism is always and everywhere the valorisation (the self-expansion) of capital. This single-minded dynamic often cuts across broader human interests and values as you may have noticed.

We don't have to completely roll-over for every project of the haute-bourgeoisie to get the benefits of their development of the productive forces. There's a reason they're called 'the bubble'. With effort they can be constrained and diverted.

Preobrazhensky's lessons for Corbyn?*

PDF

With the Labour Party possibly, or even likely, to form the next UK administration, attention turns to how seriously to take their economic programme. I mentioned the Marxist economist, Michaels Roberts's views in my previous post. He reflects the Marxist orthodoxy: that attempts to implement socialist policies within the framework of a capitalist economy and state create a protracted economic and political crisis. Either the workers movement will transcend capitalist relations of production (OK, this is a euphemism for socialist revolution) .. or there will be a catastrophic defeat for the labour movement ushering in a period of reaction and a new rise in the capitalist economy.

I agree those are the alternatives and would expect the latter outcome with overwhelming probability.

It is, however, interesting to think about the nature of the economy after a successful socialist revolution. Unfortunately, the only example we have is the extremely atypical case (as regards 21st century advanced capitalism) of Soviet Russia in the 1920s.

Yevgeni Preobrazhensky was

"... a member of the governing Central Committee of the Bolshevik faction and, its successor, the All-Union Communist Party, Preobrazhensky is remembered as a leading voice for the rapid industrialisation of peasant Russia through a concentration on state-owned heavy industry.

"Closely associated with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition movement of the 1920s, Preobrazhensky fell afoul of the secret police during the decade of the 1930s, suffering expulsion from the Communist Party and internal exile in 1932 and a new arrest ending in execution in 1937 during the Great Purge. ...

"He argued in The New Economics that the USSR had to undertake the "primitive accumulation" that early capitalist societies had had to. That is, the peasants' agricultural surplus had to be appropriated to invest in industry. Thus the Soviet Union had to undertake by planning in "socialist primitive accumulation" what England had undergone by happenstance in the 17th century.

"This theory was criticized politically and associated with Trotsky and the Left Opposition, but it was arguably put into practice by Stalin in the 1930s, as when Joseph Stalin said in a speech that the Soviet Union had to accomplish in a decade what England had taken centuries to do in terms of economic development in order to be prepared for an invasion from the West. This argument is disputed by Trotskyists and Soviet historians."

I'm interested to understand his theoretical analysis of economics in a society no longer based on generalised commodity production so have added Preobrazhensky's book to my reading stack (already way too big). Given the current revival of interest in Marxism - as the ideological foundations of neoliberalism continue to fray - perhaps it's time to issue a new edition on Amazon and Kindle?

There are some hard-liners in the Corbyn leadership (McDonnell and Milne) but I suspect that in office they would behave more like a traditional European Socialist Party. But who knows?

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* What are the lessons? I haven't read the book yet, but perhaps that he should refrain from at least the gratuitous killing of the kulaks?

Why Jeremy will win

Watching Andrew Marr's insightful TV programme about recent political history in Scotland, I was struck by one of his observations: that the decline of Labour and the Trades Unions was a direct consequence of deindustrialisation. Scotland, he said, is now a post-industrial country with all the political and cultural diversity which comes with that.

Something else I read, relating to the evolution of the Labour Party (I have forgotten who wrote this): the Labour Party has walked away from its working class base and been colonised by its other historical support group, the urban leftist middle class.

OK, you knew that, but the real point was what came next: the middle class is largely unaffected by whichever party occupies government. Consequently, its political activism is fuelled not so much by righteous indignation on behalf of its own (mostly aspirational) problems, but by idealised, sacralised issues, often relating to other, less fortunate segments of society. [Example].

So do we think the future is more social, economic and political atomisation, more middle class overproduction and more cultural-tribal politics .. movement politics?

Or are we going to revert to the kind of proletarian solidarity formerly found in industries such as ship building and the mines?

To ask is to answer.

Forget those socialist-realist posters of cloth-capped workers united in storming the barricades. They are history.*

We have seen the future and it is Jeremy.

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* Those posters have been history for a long time. This 'present conjuncture' so reminds me of the politics of the late sixties and early seventies, a time of protest, demonstrations and exciting left-wing politics.

The weasel Owen Smith's fundamental problem in this leadership election is that he thinks the 'Jeremy problem' is lack of competence in an electoral/parliamentary context.

Listen up, Owen! The new membership doesn't care about remote parliamentary antics - it's the movement, stupid!

Vanity

Keith Vaz, the vain and oleaginous Labour MP, has been 'outed' by the Sunday Mirror as a user of 'male escorts'.

The story is typically sordid.

"Labour MP Keith Vaz paid for the services of male escorts, the Sunday Mirror has reported.

"The married father-of-two paid for the men to visit him one evening last month at a flat he owns in London, it claims."

It looks like he's in political trouble.

"He also described it as a "privilege" to be the chairman of the select committee, which monitors crime and drugs policy, for the past nine years.

"I will of course inform committee members first of my plans when we meet on Tuesday. My decision has been based entirely on what is in the best interests of the committee."

The Express takes up the story,

"The paper revealed footage that showed the MP meeting with two Eastern European male prostitutes, who he told his name was Jim and he worked as a washing machine salesman, for sex eight days ago."

But in liberal bubble-land where disgust and shame barely register, I don't quite see why this is so problematic.

• Homosexuality? Check, OK. 
• Sex workers? Check, OK.
• Party Poppers? Check, OK.

He appears to have done nothing illegal.

So why all the fuss? Jeremy Corbin, being consistent, says it's "a private matter."

I wonder what The Guardian will make of it.

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[Trigger warning: link below not safe for work; generous use of four letter words, asterisked here]

Peter Watts discusses at length an interesting dilemma:

"Did you know that Blindsight contains 73 instances of the word “f***” and its variants? I’ve recently been informed of this fact by a high-school teacher down in a part of the US that - well, in the name of protecting the identities of the innocent, let’s just call it JesusLand.

"The ubiquity of “F***” -  not just in Blindsight but in other contexts as well -  carries a number of ramifications. For one thing, it implies that the characters who use it have better vocabularies and language skills than those whose mouths are squeaky clean. It also means that they probably have a greater tolerance to pain.

"And in the case of this particular teacher -  here in the Twenty First Century, for chrissake - it means she could lose her job if she taught Blindsight, unexpurgated, to her advanced English class.

"Apparently high school students in her part of the world are blissfully unfamiliar with this word. Apparently all sorts of calamities might ensue should that precarious state of affairs ever change."

Blindsight is a fascinating book, looking at deep conceptual questions of evolution and consciousness. In the conservative south of all places, the cuss-words would be the least of it.

The reason I mention Peter's little anecdote here is buried deeper in his post.

"As it happened, Omni had recently stuck my name on a list of “Greatest Sci-Fi Writers of All Time”, right up there with Orwell, Wolfe, and Le Guin. It was completely bogus, of course— my name doesn’t belong anywhere near those folks, not yet at least— but somehow it had slipped in, and maybe that would be enough to classify Blindsight as a “classic”? No?

I just love this little piece of authorial vanity. It's called humble-bragging, no?

She bought her vote

I have just registered Clare as a Labour Supporter - cost £25 - so she can vote in the Labour Party leadership election in September.

Last time round, we both paid our £3 although we voted in different ways. Clare will be consistent and vote again for Jeremy Corbyn: for Matthew Parris, it's always about the gays; for Clare it's always about the nukes.

The anti-Trident activist demonstrating a re-entering ballistic missile

I contemplated the anti-Corbyn candidates. One is someone who I could imagine running an SME with reasonable competence; the other is a snake-oil-selling weasel.

I've saved myself £25.

Why is there no talent in the Labour Party leadership? Because it has no vision, no mission and smart, capable, ambitious people do not join pointless organisations.

Corbyn Watch

All those people crowing that Jeremy Corbyn has opportunistically changed his position on Trident, Europe, military interventionism, singing the National Anthem and so on know nothing about left-wing politics.

It's obvious that with the hostility of the PLP it would be insane tactics to insist on such things right now.

There's a party conference coming along, bound to be dominated by the activists and the unions. A little bit downstream we'll be watching the deselection of right wing and centrist MPs. Corbyn (and his more machine-oriented allies) will leverage the new activist base to transform the PLP: a project of at least a couple of years.

What's the rush? They've been waiting centuries.

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S. M. Stirling's second Draka book, "Under the Yoke", has been giving me nightmares!

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It turns out that men are more systematising than women while women are more empathising than men ... you won't be surprised to hear. Intriguingly, these two scales turn out to be almost orthogonal.

Additionally, both men and women studying hard science subjects are more systematising than those studying the humanities. Finally, those who score highly on the Autistic Spectrum Quotient scale (probably this means Asperger's Syndrome) are on the far end of the systematising distribution while also exhibiting deficits in empathising (empathising kind of equals agreeableness in the FFM).

All is explained in this interesting paper (PDF).

Mr Corbyn comes to town

The new leader of the Labour Party

In his acceptance speech at the Labour Party special conference today, Jeremy Corbyn laid out his Weltanschauung. British society, he suggested, comprises a constellation of the oppressed: those on welfare, the low-paid, trades-unionists (mostly public-sector), women, the homeless, and so on. This coalition of the dispossessed camps like a shanty town around the wealthy citadel of political-economic-military power politically identified with the Tories - a British version of Le Pouvoir: warmongering, selfish, contemptuous of the huddled masses and in essence morally evil. The job of the socialist left is to take them on, break their power and redistribute their resources.

I think that is a fair and non-biased summary of Jeremy's views. It is a slightly less nuanced version of a Manichean world view you can read any day of the week in The Guardian.

A Marxist analysis would go further and ask which social forces find such an ideology appealing. It's a good question and the answer suggests itself immediately:

• public sector workers, 


• activist intellectuals who feel excluded from the actual reins of power, 


• liberal ('nice') individuals who are not in any immediate danger of deprivation themselves, but whose empathic faculties are fully engaged by those they take to be so much worse off than themselves. 

None of these groups have any problem with spending other people's money.

So now we come to the outer limits of Corbynism. Our Corbynistas make a fine and vehement moral case - there are always problems in the world which break your heart - but they mistakenly believe that they have a monopoly of such concerns. In the end it's economic and technological development which makes the money to pay for social progress. As this is of little interest to Jeremy and his fellow-thinkers, being strategically substituted by their confiscatory tendencies, it follows that those who invest, invent, develop, create value and pay taxes are always going to be somewhat less impressed with the new Labour leadership and its shining city upon a hill.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if Jeremy's honesty, forthrightness and rather strident moral fervour doesn't play rather well on TV and in Parliament. Ed Miliband, after all, frequently had the better of his opponents in verbal jousts though his economics was rubbish. We may as a consequence be in for a repeat of the late sixties when demonstrations, often violent, were common as the disenfranchised youth and unions of the period showed their alienation from majority society.

Well, it's arrived

I've passed the rigorous scrutiny (as has Clare) and my ballot is now ready to cast. The following just arrived by email.

___

Dear Nigel,

You can now vote for the next Leader and Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

You can vote online and your vote must be received by 12 noon on Thursday 10 September to count.

To vote, go to http://www.labour.org.uk/ballot2015 and enter the following two-part security code to confirm your identity:

Security Code Part One: ********
Security Code Part Two: ****

Once you have entered your security code, the website will give clear instructions on how to cast your vote. It takes just a few moments to cast your vote online, and you can do so at any time until the ballot closes at 12 noon on Thursday 10 September.

Vote Online Now

These elections are being run by Electoral Reform Services, who have been appointed by the Labour Party as the independent scrutineer for this ballot.

If you live in London, as well as voting for Labour's Leader and Deputy Leader, you can also vote to select Labour's candidate for London Mayor for the elections being held in May 2016.

On the online voting site, please rank the candidates in your order of preference. You do not need to use all of your preferences, but doing so cannot harm your first-preference candidate. Click here if you want to understand more about the voting system.

Thank you for taking part in these important elections,

The Labour Party
Sent by Electoral Reform Services

Who to vote for in the Labour contest?

This is proving a surprisingly hard question.

1. It's hard to disagree with the proposition that policies which:

• get the economy right
• apply a level of redistribution to maintain an effective state
• ensure social cohesion 

pretty much define the programme of a sensible political party. In the UK, this is called governing from the centre.

2. With a still-damaged economy, most people agree that the current priority is to clear debt-overhang, improve productivity, maintain growth and preserve social cohesion. Broadly that's where the Conservative Government has positioned itself and it's proved electorally sufficient.

3. When Labour was last in office, under Blair, it occupied essentially the same ground - albeit with less reforming zeal on public services. Blair won because the Tories had at that time narrowed their appeal to just their privileged friends and had lost the middle classes. The Tories continue to have the problem that the UK elite is culturally quite different from the mass middle classes; the latter typically find the former old-fashioned and rather repellant.

4. The brutal truth is that there is no political space right now for a successful Labour Party strategy, one which would be correct as in point (1) above (with Labourist nuances) but which would differ substantively from what the Tories are doing. That's why no one has come up with one.

5. The Labour Party in the fifties and sixties was the party of blue and white collar workers. Its powerhouse was the unions, while the TUC was a power in the land. The vast expansion of the middle-class in the sixties, seventies and eighties (fuelled by vastly increased university uptake) undermined the power and social weight of traditional organised labour.

6. Following these social changes (a testimony, by the way, to the success of capitalism in increasing all-round wealth) Labour politics moved to the Guardian agenda: identity politics and support for diverse 'victims and causes'. A rainbow coalition model always had the potential to destabilise the party: redistribution from those with wealth eclipsing any concern as to how that wealth might actually be produced in the first place (the not entirely trivial question of how a successful capitalist economy can be facilitated). The danger?  A fervent but self-limiting voting base, as Angela Eagle tried to point out in coded language the other day.

7. A party comprised mainly of a coalition of needy pressure groups is not that useful a project to safeguard the future of the UK. All parties tend to get captured by their natural backers despite the best efforts of their smarter leaders to undertake a truly national project. When that happens, it's vital to have a ready alternative. So when the reforming Thatcher government decayed to the ineffectual Major regime, we had a fresh-off-the-shelf Blair government to restore competence and re-address neglected concerns. The same will happen eventually with the Cameron-Osborne project.

8. OK, so we finally get to the point. Which is the least bad candidate to ensure that a future Labour Party will be fit for purpose?

• Jeremy Corbyn is the worst candidate, because his passionately-held beliefs have essentially nothing in common with policies and strategies which actually work. A Corbyn leadership will lead to a cul de sac* at which point the party will have to have the discussion alluded to above in far more desperate straits.


• Andy Burnham is not a good choice. All politicians are open to the accusations of hypocrisy and lack of principles, but Burnham seems to make an art form of it. I am inclined to believe he really is an unprincipled hypocrite standing on retrograde, statist and deeply-unhelpful policies.


• Liz Kendall has neither the stature nor the ideas to take the party anywhere. Blairism was a model of Labour centrism for the 1990s; Labour centrism for 2020 and beyond has yet to be defined and I can't see Kendall playing any role. To start with, arguing for Blairist continuity going forwards is the stupidest political stance imaginable in the current febrile state of party opinion.


• This leaves Yvette Cooper: machine politician, wife of Ed Balls, essentially invisible in this campaign. Three strikes there then. Paradoxically, electing a competent minder might be just what the party needs for the next few years. It has to wait out a Tory decline before it has a real chance of power again - and Yvette might be the one to take it there and oversee the new thinking required.

9. For deputy, one should vote for someone who can reach out to the membership and bring them along. Angela Eagle wouldn't be a bad choice; according to the latest polls, Caroline Flint might have a better prospect of heading off the malign Tom Watson.

(See what I did there? I ended up with three women candidates and their gender didn't even cross my mind until this exact moment).

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* Adam Smith once wrote: "There is a great deal of ruin in a nation" by which he meant that mistaken policies take a while to wreck a strong economy. But at best they don't help and in the worst case, over a period, wreck it they can. We should not indulge utopian fantasies masquerading as political programmes.

The Nice but Dim Party

Having each paid our £3 registration fee as Labour supporters, we were invited to come and hear Angela Eagle (candidate for deputy leader) in Bath this evening. In my lazy way, I had imagined a vast hall, with perhaps a thousand people from across the south-west, but it was not to be (see pix below).

Angela Eagle (deputy Labour Party leader candidate)

About fifty turned up in the end, at Friends Meeting House, Bath

In the end, about fifty people turned up at Friends Meeting House. I would say that it was about 2:1 women, and that the men were of that pleasant, agreeable type who make you welcome at parties. If the meeting had been a person, it would have been a forty-to-fifty-something woman brimming with empathy for the disadvantaged and fired up with moral fervour for Jeremy Corbyn, whose leftist inspirational campaign exactly captures her mood of trampled-upon values.

As Matthew Parris observed in a Times piece a few days ago, Mr Corbyn articulates with passion and conviction the genuine worldview of rank-and-file Labour Party supporters - this view is wholly based on emotion and values and they do viscerally believe it.

Faced with this squirming mass of barely-suppressed outrage, Angela in general copped out. Describing herself as 'soft left', she refused to put forward any strategy or policies for Labour going forwards. In her view it was too early in the election cycle for policies and she claimed to want to create a Labour Party where ideas bubbled up from an actively-involved membership. Her contribution was big on generic values (niceness, by and large) and demonology of the hated and uncaring Tories (George Osborne appears to be demon-in-chief, Cameron scarcely got a mention).

Angela made one brave attempt to distinguish between a political party which wants to attain power and has to address the issues of the whole electorate, versus a pressure group which simply lobbies for its pet concern.

Angela, I thought to myself, calm yourself, the pass is sold: you spoke to a meeting of overlapping pressure groups - pro-immigrant, pro-welfare, anti-welfare-caps, pro-trade-union .. I think that covers most of what came up.

Clare prepares herself for the meeting (Bath Abbey backdrop)

This does leave me with a dilemma: who do I vote for in the leadership elections next week? I strongly lean towards supporting Jeremy Corbyn, not because I agree with his policies (one Venezuela on the planet is quite enough) but because the Party seems to need to go through the Corbyn experience just to discover in practice why it doesn't deliver their noble (but deeply naive) objectives.

But then there's the argument that the sane wing of the Party needs all the help it can get to pick up the pieces after Jeremy gets in anyhow. But Liz Kendall seems a wasted vote - there is no constituency for her position in the Party's voting-electorate (Blairism is dead) and in any case she's a deeply underwhelming candidate with not an original idea that I've seen.

I'm still thinking about it ...

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Ironically, Clare will vote for Jeremy Corbyn on the single issue of his opposition to Trident ...

Fixing Labour

Mark Mardell wrote an intelligent piece on the BBC website, pointing out that the conventional wisdom as to why Labour lost the election has congealed out as follows:

"Step back from the angst of supporters, and it may not be that hard to see why Labour failed. An economic recovery, hailed by independent organisations as the result of government policy, undid a party that had loudly proclaimed for five years that the coalition's policies would lead to economic disaster. Combine that with an uncharismatic and uninspirational leader, then you might argue no further debate is necessary. Fat chance of that.

Defeat breeds resentment, and this one has opened up old divisions. A chorus of Blairites, led by the man himself, has declared that Ed's problem was ignoring those with aspiration and ambition, failing to appeal to those running business."

This is an incredibly superficial diagnosis, which fails to capture the diversity of trends which undercut Labour's simplistic message during the election. Mardell continues,

"The Scottish wipeout is Labour's biggest problem. Fail to solve it, and Labour can forget ever having a comfortable majority again. It is hard to argue Labour were wiped out in Scotland because the SNP outflanked them to the right with their appeal to the business community and the ambitious and aspirational. But it is true the SNP drew in to people from left, right and centre, just as the modernisers say Labour should. It was the politics of economic self-interest, but cast in a very different light. Tribally sneering at "the reactionary ideology of nationalism" as Mr Blair does, will not reach the central belt of Scotland, the middle ground of Midlothian."

Lenin and Trotsky were quite aware of the anti-imperialist power of nationalism, and certainly didn't reduce it to economic class interest. Nor, by the way, did they consider it reactionary. Below Marxism's radar lies the indisputable dynamic of ethnic social solidarity, perhaps the most powerful emotional motivator in the mass.

Then we come to the second, and quite different fissure - UKIP:

"The increase in votes for Nigel Farage's party wasn't translated into parliamentary seats, but, although it is early days in terms of research, it probably hurt Labour a lot. If we believe - and I do - Matthew Goodwin and Rob Ford, authors of Revolt on the Right, these voters are often former Labour supporters - older, less educated, those left behind on the tides of globalisation, stranded on the shores of post-industrialisation. They may have had too many disappointments to feel much ambition or aspiration. They are a challenge for Labour, and any new leader will spend a good deal of time thinking how to deal with the concerns of Europe and immigration.

Whether to share their fears, or confront them will be a big decision."

The third driver of Labour's defeat is paradoxically the very element which informs so much of Labour's own leadership, the trendy-leftism of petit-bourgeois radicalism and the aristo-liberal wing of the party:

"Those members who still proudly call themselves socialist. This is not about Old Labour - they are more likely to be baristas or barristers than boilermakers. It is easy as an outsider, as a journalist, to treat politics as an intellectual game about how best to win power - but many people, particularly the foot soldiers, particularly after the death of purely tribal loyalties, are in it because they passionately believe in winning power to do something specific. Many of them are suspicious of the later incarnations of New Labour, not because it reached an accommodation with wealth and business, but because it seemed to worship at the same altar, to regard the party's core beliefs in redistribution and equality as childish fantasies from a past age.

Perhaps to Mr Blair, they are the problem, people who may equate "ambition" with greed. They might point out that a man who claims to be worth "only" £20m may find it harder than most to squeeze through the eye of a needle to understand their point of view. Most successful Labour leaders will confront the left at some point, but the concerns of this group go to the existential question "What is the party for?"

Mark Mardell is as baffled as the rest of us as to the putative 'new direction for Labour'. I agree with his concluding thought, that these centrifugal dynamics are:

" a reflection on the complex conundrums that will face any new Labour leader, the tearing apart of the old alliance that made up a Labour majority, and so the political need to satisfy groups with very different, indeed, contradictory demands. But looking for a Social Democratic universal theory of everything may be missing the point. What the party desperately wants is a leader who can pull the disparate threads together and articulate them as common purpose.

Whether she or he exists is another matter."

Good luck with that then.

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Update:

"Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy is to resign next month, he has announced. It comes despite Mr Murphy narrowly surviving a vote of no confidence at a meeting of the party's national executive in Glasgow. Mr Murphy said he would tender his resignation alongside a plan to reform the party. He lost his seat in last week's general election as the SNP won 56 of the 59 Scottish seats, leaving Labour with a single MP in Scotland. Mr Murphy said he wanted to have a successor as leader in place by the summer, and confirmed he would not be standing for a seat at the Scottish Parliament in next year's election."

Apparently Jim Murphy was far and away the most competent senior leader in the Scottish Labour Party. His departure at the hands of the left further weakens the 'come back' strategy, not just in Scotland but in the whole of the UK.

The Labour Party leadership contenders

The main candidates to replace Ed Miliband and my extremely unbiased assessment of their strengths and weaknesses.

Yvette Cooper

Possibly the most boring on-the-record speaker in the entire Labour Party. No voter has ever managed to stay awake during the entirety of an Yvette Cooper speech. Not a time to go for the soporific strategy, comrades.

Andy Burnham

Being the political wing of UNITE is a serious strategy for a future Labour victory. Right, Andy?

Chuka Umunna

Smart, well-connected and telegenic, this former lawyer may be the most irritating of the crop. I won't mention smug, vain and prone to flaunting an assumed intellectual superiority he does not in fact possess. Appeals to the Hampstead crowd and perhaps, in an Obama-esque fashion, to ethnic communities with whom he culturally and materially shares very little.

Update [Friday May 15th 2015]. Umunna has now withdrawn in murky circumstances.

Rachel Reeves

One of the better ones, handicapped by low recognition outside the bubble.

Dan Jarvis

Good CV, allegedly. Apart from that, no-one outside the bubble has ever heard of Dan Jarvis, and few within. Update: just heard he's already withdrawn.

Tristram Hunt

Why would this disingenuous posh boy even think of leading the worker's party? Way too pleased with himself.

Liz Kendall

A senior manager once asked his team: "If this guy is as good as you say, why haven't I seen more of him?" Having said that, she is probably one of the good guys here.

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Since we don't know the mission, choosing the mission leader is a little fraught. Should be a fun few months.