Keep The Tories Out. deja-vu all over again.

As the reality of a future Tory government looms ever closer more and more people, many of whom really should know better, are once again climbing aboard that rusty old train to nowhere - Vote Labour To Keep The Tories Out. It's as if all of the neo-con policies of New Labour have been forgiven and forgotten at the first whiff of Old Etonian grapeshot. Blair, Brown and the rest of this sorry bunch of City Spiv front men have presided over a redistribution of wealth that Old Labour politicians can only have dreamt of - trouble is it was a redistribution from the less well of to the already wealthy. Times have changed, but nothing about New Labour on the back foot makes me at all hopeful that a further term in office would make them any more likely to question the basic tenet of Blair/Brown philosophy; all hail the market. And yet. And yet hidden deep in the Labour Party is a vein of collectivism and a current of decency that recognizes that there is more to politics than political careers. You don't see much of this tendency these days, certainly not on the Front Bench, and maybe it is doomed to forever be just another fringe meeting. Socialism - remember that? It's the part that all those mandarins of twenty years ago thought made the party unelectable.