Tom Griffin (London, OK): Over at Comment is Free, Labour MP Jon Cruddas argues that the Conservatives' emphasis on fixing Britain's 'broken society' is at odds with the party's commitment to free market neo-liberalism:
New Labour has not been able to exploit these contradictions due to its tone-deaf language, its one-dimensional take on Cameron and its own outdated political economy. While its centralising instincts and micromanagement of people have allowed the Conservatives to strike a chord with their criticism of state control. They have been able to portray state intervention - which has to be part of any redistributive politics - as an undesirable intrusion into people's lives.
James Graham believes that Cruddas and his Compass colleagues are the coming force within the Labour Party, but that they have failed to overcome their own 'centralising instincts.'
For all Compass’s warm words about civil liberties, when it came down to it in the counter-terrorism bill, both Cruddas and Tricket voted for extending pre-charge detention without trial. They both then symbolically resigned their places in Compass but it is clear from their website this is nowhere near a priority for the organisation. At the Observer fringe, a big majority of attendees revealed they supported ID cards. The only people arguing for liberalism within the Labour Party are in the Blairite wing, and they are now hopelessly compromised.
For a party that likes to claim that fairness is in its DNA these days, it is clear that they are all too comfortable with the idea of arbitrary authoritarian state control.
In the Telegraph, Janet Daley also detects a revival of Labour statism:
It is going to take considerable strength of nerve and clarity of mind to reject the absurd premise on which this argument is based: to say that capitalism has been fatally compromised by the behaviour of a particular group of irresponsible individuals is like saying that democracy was irretrievably discredited by the fact that Adolph Hitler was once elected to office. I am hugely relieved to see that David Cameron is holding out against this tide.
Of course Daley sets up something of a straw man here. The credit crunch represents something more than a failure of individuals and less than the demise of capitalism. It represents the end of of a neo-liberal model whose faith in deregulation owed more to economists' simplifying assumptions than to an appreciation of the greed and fear of real world markets.
As yet neither left nor right seems capable of articulating a vision of what will replace it.
