Charles Clarke has an aricle on the New Statesman website - I assume it will be in Friday's magazine.
If I read it correctly, a shorter version would run: "You don't have to be part of a Blairite plot to think that Gordon Brown is a disaster and to want to get rid of him to save the party."
I suspect he hopes that when Brown does go Labour will turn to an experienced former minister who is not identified closely with either Blair or Brown. And who has large ears.
Just William politics sounds the sort of thing that this blog would approve of. Clarke condemns it thus:
As various commentators consider Labour's prospects, the term "Blairite" is being deployed to characterise the policies and personalities of some who question the party's current direction and urge Labour to face the future. Like "Thatcherite", the word is not used kindly. "Blairite" (even "über-Blairite") is a lazy and inaccurate shorthand. It is intended not to illuminate but to diminish, marginalise and insult. It was, for example, the stock phrase used by the Brown political briefing team to traduce David Miliband's Guardian article in early August.
Moreover, this misleading language damages the vital need for Labour to move on to new, post-Blair ground. Those journalists and politicians who use it are fighting the last political struggle, the War of the Tony Blair Succession, in a way that owes rather more to Just William and the Hubert Laneites than to the challenges of modern British politics.
1 comment:
Surely it is Clarke who is thcweaming and thcweaming until he is thick?
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