What Labour wants

So far, the best decision taken by the Labour Party, through its parliamentary group and executive committee, has been to allow a long period of reflection instead of rushing to elect a new party leader, as some in the inner core at the ĊNL would have preferred.

A rushed election would have dealt power to those who control the party machine, which is to say, those with the power of incumbency. Power games are the last thing that Labour needs, especially ones called by perennial busybodies who stay out of the light while the visible faces of the administration take the flak like fall guys.

Still, that danger remains clear and present, as people who have done so much to institutionalise Labour as the party of opposition strive on to impose their choices, as they did when they orchestrated the May Day charade of 2003, to say nothing of 1992.

The party does not need reform. It needs new thinking. And new thinking should ask the right questions. What has been going wrong? What does Labour want to be?

To start with, Labour wants a leadership that does not confuse renewal with renunciation. There are those who say times have changed and the focus on the working people is passé. That's nonsense. Social classes will always be with us. Market society is about competing interests, and sectors that are not naturally empowered need their access to power in order to be able to compete. True, people's aspirations change, as does the response of political parties, and parties have borrowed and adapted so much from each other that the difference in principles or policies is not always clear to the naked eye. But Labour's place in the equation remains vital to the dialectic of moving forward between essentially different positions. Besides, all is not as fair as depicted in the election billboard fantasies and, anyway, the present is not forever.

Labour wants to be believed. Yes, of course, its detractors have demonised it along with its leader and will continue to do so whatever happens and whoever leads it - although some are less targetable than others. But blaming the enemy for losing the battle is as futile as it is idiotic. However wronged the party may feel, however unjustly maligned, the fact remains that the majority of the people did not put their trust in it. It follows that the first rule about regaining credibility is to choose a leadership that is impossible to associate with those who have lost the party its credibility to begin with.

Labour wants to stop being frightening to those who do not support it. Justly or not, too many people are afraid of Labour, as proven by the fact that thousands who had had enough of the PN preferred to abstain rather than vote Labour. Electors want to feel less of the state on their backs. Labour has to loosen up. More poignantly, it needs an open what-you-see-is-what-you-get countenance. To find out what's frightening and who, it should ask the outsiders as much as the insiders. Some will argue that outsiders will give you wrong advice. Fair enough, so don't ask the wrong outsiders.

Labour wants to stop being patronising. Once upon a time the party and the country needed strong leadership because the challenges were big and urgent and people were less educated but mostly because many people were too busy surviving to enjoy the luxury of participatory politics. That has changed and will go on changing. Young people, in particular, despise preachers because they are accustomed to interact. The more words you throw at them the less they listen. The last thing young people want to hear is that their future has been mapped out for them. Power to them: it's why we pay taxes for their education.

Labour wants to be modest. It's an old-fashioned thing but it still works. Labour does not need leaders to make the party their personal project - yet again. It wants a leadership geared to be its servant and which understands that loyalty must be won daily.

Most vitally, Labour wants to be right. It needs a leadership with a record of good judgement - and consistency. For too many years the party has made deadly errors of judgement when there were enough friendly voices warning that it was riding for a fall.

In bouts of irrationality, those who made the errors shunned and cast off those who were proven right when they should have honoured them.

There is still a rump core that continues to do so, using its power of incumbency to keep them at bay while chattering about inclusiveness. The leadership contest may well boil down to one between those who are right and those who are wrong. Easy contest, if fought with reason and fairness.

So endowed, the new leadership should be capable of making the one great historic leap which has eluded it for decades. It is not enough to think small, in terms of winning the next election.

That too, of course, but for having had to languish in opposition for a quarter century, Labour deserves to re-emerge, not as a useful opposition that occasionally and exceptionally succeeds to break the monotony of Nationalist rule but as the clear and untroubled party of government. Entrusted to the right hands, it should be easy. The Nationalists cannot stop it, though others can.