If you want to know how a post-Brown Labour party might take on the Tories, I’d thoroughly recommend the Jon Cruddas and Jonathan Rutherford edited Is the future conservative? It is one of the first things from the left that I have read that takes the Cameron Tories seriously and maps out how the left can fight back.
Here’s Cruddas and Rutherford’s rallying cry to the left:
The future does not belong to the Conservative Party. Right now it belongs to a social democracy that is willing to bring liberal free market capitalism and corporate power back under control. The debate is about how we secure this post neoliberal politics. The left needs to recover its ethical socialism and commitment to equality. It needs the political will to realise ideas for democratising public services and building an accountable, redistributive state. Power needs to be devolved to local government. There has to be a renewed argument for constitutional and electoral reform and the protection and extension of individual civil liberties. The conditions for trade unionism have to be improved and a new internationalism established. Perhaps most of all, and most difficult, the left needs an ecologically sustainable, pro-social political economy capable of generating both wealth and equitable development. The future is for the left to lose.
You can disagree, I certainly do, that liberal free market capitalism and corporate power need to be brought back under control by the state but what you can’t deny is that this offers an ideological framework for Labour to work within. Indeed, one of the problems for Labour is that the two groups in the party who have a vision for the future are the Blairites and the Cruddas-left and there is little common ground between the two. The debate in the Labour party post-defeat is going to be fascinating to watch.
You can download the whole book here .
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