I have read this post three times ... and I still (almost) agree with it.
I must have strayed into an alternate universe.

If you put a 1000 monkeys in a room with a 1000 typwriters....etc......etc.....?

I mostly agree with it as well, although I don't believe the British are ready for fundamental shifts to the left anymore. Blair realised this and we ended up with the lesser of two evils and we managed to get our hospitals and schools rebuilt. This is where David Milliband would have worked. I have always seen the radical left as uncompromising and self destructive - as well as being not particularly popular. Tony Benn, as revered as he seems to be now, was as potent a weapon in the Tory nal as Saatchi and Saatchi.

Politics - Ideals diluted by necessity
Ed Miliband (he may be a really good bloke/ politician) will NEVER be prime minister.

The time is right for conviction politics. People are fed up with weasly politics. Someone who is willing to stand up, talk bluntly and follow it through would work now / in the very near future.

Labour need to start winning arguments. The Tories came up with the politics of envy. The time is ripe for destroying the "politics of greed and selfishness." Will they have the guts to try to win an argument on those grounds? Have they got the personnel to win any argument? Probably, no and no.

Replace both with the "politics of dancing" and the job's a good 'un

Modern politics is without principle, it is governed by public opinion and seems to change with the day of the week or wind direction.
What we need, regardless of ones political preference, is some politiciand who are prepared to be unpopolar in the short term, but for the longer term good of the country.
Going back to expenses, I have no problem with any expense claim that is a genuine out of pocket cost, but dont take the "p".
and 26K in benefits is staggering. Many people have to work damn hard to ged a fraction of that !

The big difficulty with basing your political strategy on standing against "greed" is that most people are greedy, or stupid enough to believe the money train will let them on at some point in their lives (the housing market is one example of where for a second everyone thought that the money train had stopped at their station). Thatcher played on this to perfection with the "generous" selling of assetts we already owned back to us (well, when I say "us" I mean mainly really rich people who made a fortune). Also, a very strong counter argument is that people who go out to make themsleves wealthy generate employment and tax revenue, which is largely true. Capitalism needs subtle modifications that it would be hard to sell and even harder to actually communicate clearly. You only have to look at the universal fake thickness shown by political commentators last week when Mr Ed started talking about spending commitments Labour couldn't make 3 years before any chance they would be in power - "does that mean Labour now support the cuts? I don't understand? Suddenly I'm deliberately thick so I can make more of this than it is" etc...etc...etc...

I think "conviction politics" are the last things anyone needs, dogma is never flexible enough or caring enough to suit the demands of running a diverse culture and economy. Blair - love or hate - tried not to get tied down and that gives you options - you can pick the best options, not those that are restricted by your "convictions".

I think people misunderstand Blair on this point. He wasn't a flip flop politician or one that avoided conviction for the sake of being uncontroversial. Blair was similar to Thatcher in that he was convinced in his own sense of moral right and wrong and did not bother if that went against public opinion - see his stance on the Euro and EU, tuition fees, academies and of course war in Kosovo and Iraq, where he was against the tide of public opinion on all fronts but never tried to soften his stance.

A lot of Blair's convictions were fairly uncontroversial in terms of they were shared by a large proportion of the population, centre leftish but authoritarian on issues of law and order and security (although he proved himself to the right of public opinion on security once the paranoia post 9/11 had set in).

Blair was always talking about welfare reform in his early years in office as well, but New Labour's welfare reform was more about rewarding the low paid for taking work, with tax credits etc. This at the time was fairly popular as it was the "hand up rather than a hand out" and it was seen as reducing the poverty trap where it paid people more not to work than take low paid work. Unemployment fell considerably during the era of 1997-2007. However now, those low earners that are benefiting from tax credits, get demonised as being families that scrounge support off the state instead of living off their own low incomes, and the Tories say that there are too many families getting subsidised by the state.

It will be interesting to see over the next couple of years if the welfare bill goes up or down. I suspect, as it did in Margaret Thatcher's time, that for all the Tories welfare reform, the overall bill to the taxpayer will rise.

Change "convictions" for "principals", should we all not have some principals ? ok these may change over time, but there has to be a starting point for our beliefs.

Principals? Principles?

I hate to be a pedant, but hate ignorance more.

Unfortunately, if they are unpopular, they don't get elected in the first place.
That's why the bstrds lie through their teeth to get elected.

I fully realise that it would dilute the 'left' vote, to the point of not being returned to power in the foreseeable future but I am ever more leaning towards the unions cutting thier funding to Labour and using the money to field their own candidates.

All politicians are overtly pandering to "the middle", while covertly propping up the rich and ignoring the poor. Labour should remember that the party was born out of the trades union movement, a movement that still contributes 50% of its funding.

Won't be necessary according to the man himself on TV this morning for every one in the NHS is fully supportive of his party's reforms and he had lots of facts implanted in his brain to spiel out in evidence, well he convinced himself anyway.

Even when the interviewers pointed out that when the likes of midwives start calling for industrial action then you might be losing the popular vote in the NHS his only reply was "Ah yes, THE UNIONS don't like what we're doing, but their members do..."

Ri-iiiight.

Could be an interesting summer ...

They're good at that, the Tories, having lots of impressive "facts" and figures to quote from.. Unfortunately most of them are either plain wrong or way off the mark. According to DWP's own figures 0.5% of DLA claimants are fraudulent. According to IDS it is 94%, this was then duly reported in the DM as "fact". All propaganda shoite imo.

The really annoying thing with a statement like "94% of claimants are fraudulent" is the follow-on question that the politicians never ask of the civil servants which goes something like "If you're so sure of that figure then why the fook did you pay all the money out in the first place and are you willing to be personally responsible for getting it back ?"