“Positioning over action”

CoffeeHousers sometimes chide us for getting a bit over-excited when we describe articles as “a must read”, “essential” or “important”.  But the opinion piece by Philip Collins, Tony Blair’s former speechwriter, in today’s Times, really is all of those things.  Collins’ central point – that the Brown administration has elevated “political positioning over action” – is not a new one, but he expands from there to summarise the entire span of the New Labour years, and throws in plenty of healthy references to Sigmund Freud too.  Here’s a key passage:

“When Mr Brown commends [Anthony] Crosland’s idea of equality, he does so on the grounds that it provides the Labour Party with its main dividing line from the Conservatives. He doesn’t like equality because it’s a good idea. He doesn’t like it because it’s right. He likes it because it’s politically useful.

This tendency to elevate political positioning over action will, in time, be the diagnosis of what went wrong.