Have Labour lost it?

Yes, that’s a young Gordon.

Taking a break from clicking my way through student responses in Edexcel’s Unit 1 exam I have scanned the weekend’s papers looking for quality articles that could be used for the media Monday sessions. If you are unfamiliar with the concept I attempt to get my L6 students to start the week’s lessons by discussing an article they have read from the week’s press. Why? Attempting to connect with Politics as a subject has obvious dividends in helping what’s covered in class make sense, or have a sense of importance. Moreover, examining the work of quality journalists should have net gains in terms of improving political vocabulary and presenting coherent arguments. This is why sourcing one’s news from the tabloids or the free papers (which after all are just the Sun without the ridiculously bold type - come on, have you actually read a substantive article in any of those?) is insufficient if the aim is to improve quality of expression throughout the two years of A level study.

Anyway, I think the best writing on British politics I have seen comes from Saturday’s Guardian. Patrick Wintour writes on how the government’s response to the economic crisis has not left a lasting positive impression on voters.

He states:

‘A strange, funereal mood hung over the meeting of the parliamentary Labour party. It was not just that the Guardian/ICM poll had just put the Tories back into a 12-point lead or that Alistair Darling, the chancellor, used the gathering to give a typically unvarnished account of the state of the recession.

It was the appearance last Monday of Neil Kinnock, Michael Foot and Jack Jones, the former general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union.

As one jaundiced Labour MP put it: “We had the party leader that had taken us to two election defeats, the party leader that gained the lowest share of the vote at an election since 1918 and the union leader that created the winter of discontent and 18 years of Tory rule. It was surreal given what was going on in the real world. Only Labour glories in its defeats.”’