British politics is fractured and chaotic – but at last it’s brimming with ideas for the future |
“Wouldn’t it be great if Tony Blair kept his mouth shut about the Labour party?” Readers may have cheered that Guardian letter-writer’s response to yet another infuriating assault by Blair from the outer-stratosphere of nowhere. Isn’t Labour in enough trouble with a life-or-death byelection against the forces of darkness without incoming fire from its former leader?
Actually, no. His intentions may not have been benign, but Blair does Labour and national politics a favour, prising open the political omertà preventing serious discussion within parties. There can’t be a new prime minister installed without an honest reckoning of the precarious state of the nation.
Wes Streeting’s resignation and Andy Burnham standing for Makerfield have blown the doors off Labour’s “no discussions here” era, and Blair’s epistle spreads that debate beyond the confines of the Labour party. Pamphleteering is back, and essays and counter-essays enliven a parched intellectual terrain. If ever there was a time for freer discussion and bigger ideas, it’s now.
A new pluralism is in the air. Streeting praises Burnham effusively about his campaign and his introduction of new ideas, feeling liberated from a “suffocating tyranny of silence” inside a “barren government in terms of values”. Burnham pledges to abandon the “straitjacket of the whip” and, even more revolutionary, he won’t send MPs “into TV studios with lines to take on everything”. Can that toleration of ideas........