The new landscape

As John Prescott is fond of saying, the plates are moving. Two left-of-centre commentators today turn their attention to Labour’s predicament in ways that only emphasise its depth. Steve Richards – always essential reading – sets out the case for electoral reform and freely admits that only parties that are desperate take this issue seriously. Blair, he reveals, once told him that it would be “quixotic” to embrace PR or another variant shortly after winning a landslide by first-past-the-post. I suspect that Steve is right and that a lot of subterranean discussions are going on between Labour and the Lib Dems on this issue. One can only hope that Nick Clegg has re-read Paddy Ashdown’s diaries recently and its account of Blair’s promises that never came true. Remember, Nick: they mean it when they say it.

In the Guardian, meanwhile, Peter Wilby urges Labour to abandon “triangulation”, the wooing of Middle Britain and all the methods of the Blair era and to find its socialist soul once more in Opposition.