Oedipus limps into Labour debate

M Kettle turns up again,no doubt after a while off to grieve, think and reflect. He is ready to pontificate again. To remind readers, his dad, A Kettle, was a Prof of Lit and a marxist, hence the reference to Oedipus:.

The plain truth that underpins everything about Labour today is that it lost, extremely badly....the apparent frontrunner published a manifesto of vacuous generality, which posed no difficult questions and lacked substantive proposals for doing anything differently. On the basis of that article, if Rebecca Long Bailey is the answer, then Labour is asking the wrong question.

Kettle seems to forget  that his own campaign, developed ad nauseam in the Graun, asked all the wrong questions and offered disastrous alternatives too. Try this from 20 October 2109:

The lesson is that Brexit won’t work.  [You silly people have had your fun,now pack up your toys] ...Brexit won the vote. But it’s an ideology not a policy. When its supporters tried to turn it into policies, as they are still trying to do, it fell apart.

And the famous policy from 2 Dec 2016:

Chip away, every day. Every time something new and troubling happens, make it clear that things would be different if Brexit were stopped. This week’s immigration figures showed a pre-referendum surge. Without Brexit this wouldn’t have happened. Hate crimes have proliferated. Brexit shares the blame for that. When inflation rises and growth slows next year, make sure Brexit’s role is spelled out. If ministers abandon the single market in favour of migration curbs, make Brexit’s responsibility clear. Unless anti-Brexit campaigners have established in the public mind that there is a clear and viable no-Brexit alternative, they won’t be in a position to make the most of their opportunities.

He now proposes:

Labour’s period of reflection needs some ground rules it currently lacks. These include: a recognition of the gravity of the situation, an obligation to answer difficult questions, a dispassionate study of the facts [odd for a journalist] , an open-minded approach [even odder for a Graun journalist]  a willingness to admit mistakes, the avoidance of slogans, and the willingness to listen to others – who should include Labour’s opponents and (increasingly the same thing) the voters

Was Brexit the main problem? It was one of them [!] but Labour’s Brexit problem was its longstanding ambiguity, not its pro-European approach...the Corbyn programme was not believed either. Competence matters, and Labour had not put in the hard yards on that....Millions of people who want a better government and a different kind of society don’t see Labour as the answer, let alone as all-knowing and all-virtuous, for the simple reason that right now it is neither.

Superbly unself-consciously:

The answer is not a more politicised media but better standards.

That apparently includes [?]

we members of the Amalgamated Union of Commentators, Columnists and Allied Pundits [who] should stop talking about Labour as “us”  

Rather similar tone, overall, to the post-marxists who convinced themselves to shake off any guilt, make marxism fun and enjoy consumerism once they ditched their fathers' faith and embraced identity politics.