New Labour RIP

I’ve too much respect for my friends at The Times to ask if Rupert Murdoch dictated that this Peter Brookes cartoon appear on the paper’s front page today…

The Thunderer’s leader column makes it pretty clear, I think, that the Times will not be endorsing Labour at the next election:

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown both promised reform of public services that might have allowed the quality of services to be maintained at a lower rate of spending. In the absence of that reform, high spending and the maintenance of a large public sector workforce became the only way of maintaining servive levels. Yet such spending has proven unsustainable.

It is this which led Labour to its fateful decision. At the last two elections it contrasted spending growth with an offer of tax and spending cuts from the Conseratives that it characterised as ideological and unrealistic.