People don't want more Blair
Or so the received wisdom has it. One could argue that they in fact voted for more Blair, in the shape of David Cameron.
it really isn't clear that people have an appetite now for a Centralist Labour party.
It's very hard to see how you argue that the electorate gave a majority (a majority, for fuck's sake) to the Tories as a protest against the Labour Party not being left wing enough.
It is still very hard to see a better analysis than Jonathan Freedland's from a few weeks ago:
www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jul/08/george-osborne-budget-stole-labours-election-promises-living-wage
Of course, like every budget, this one has losers. They include the aspirant poor and young who will now lose their student maintenance grant – and will have to rack up yet more debt if they want a higher education – as well as the minimum wage worker who’s younger than 25. The disabled person who’s deemed not quite disabled enough will now lose around £30 a week, as she or he is downgraded to ordinary jobseeker’s allowance. Public sector workers will have to make do with a 1% pay rise for the next four years, just as they have for the last three. Given the way inflation is expected to rise, that translates into a pay cut for those on the public payroll. And woe betide the child luckless enough to be born third or fourth into a poorer family after 2017. There’ll be no more public cash for them.
Osborne is not bothered by any of that. The losers can go crying to Labour. The way Osborne sees it, Labour can go right ahead and be the party of losers, of benefit claimants and whinging state employees. Knock yourself out, says the chancellor. That would leave the Tories as the workers’ party, Labour as the welfare party. Labour would be noisy and passionate, leading a thousand heartfelt marches against “the cuts” – and nicely on course for yet another election defeat. All the rest of the political terrain would belong to the Conservatives.
It distresses me beyond words, as both a head and heart Labour voter, that this is true. I voted for the "Longest Suicide Note in History" in 1983 and I suspect that, were it on offer again (with the insanity about the EEC/EU removed) I might vote for it again, and had I been a member of the Labour Party I would have voted for Bennite candidates.
But the result of that ideological purity was Thatcher, with a massively increased majority, putting to the sword unions, industry and the heartlands of this country. That manifesto was not only impossible, but resulted in the devastation of this country. Would a Healyite Labour Party have done the same? No, it wouldn't. I didn't pay the price of decadent, self-indulgent posturing: I was an undergraduate in a shortage subject at a good university, and after I graduated I had a very nice job thank you very much. But the result of that moment of purity was eleven more years of Tory misrule, in which people less fortunate than me - miners, shipbuilders, public sector workers, children in secondary education - were completely fucked over. Those of us that supported "real" Labour in 1983 should reflect on what the consequences of that decision were.