Day Zero

So it's pretty much day zero for Labour. I think any amount of reshuffles and policy announcements are doomed to fail. It's too late. There was a chance, when the economic situation took a turn for the worse, for Labour to set out their status as the defender of the disadvantaged. They could have taxed the rich greater and quicker, they could have explained how this money would go into securing jobs and maintaining high spending on the NHS, education and infrastructure. They could have reformed banking more, riding the wave of public anger. There was a moment for Labour to set out what they've always (in theory) been for. As the Compass group's recent statement said: "What is so frustrating is that this is a centre left moment. The politics of free markets, greed and individualism got us into this mess." They should have followed Obama's lead. But they didn't. They got confused, they sent out mixed messages.

Why was this? Partly because of the leadership's culpability in deregulating banking, but mainly because the top of the party - ministers, secretaries of state - are so worried about chasing votes they've forgotten what they believe in. The core of the party, the local activists, backbenchers, diehard supporters all know what they believe in because it's never changed. For better or for worse they've never had to chase votes, but even still, for those that have, there has to be a point where you forget all of that and set out, clearly, what it is you believe in.

Of course, they've been so irritatingly wimpy that we don't know what most of them believe in anymore. And we don't have time for them to attempt to prove to us that they do believe in something and show us what it is. There is real thinking going on in grassroots Labour politics, collected around the Compass group that my friend Tom is involved with. As Chukka Umunna, Labour party candidate for Streatham in the next election and Compass management committee member, put it in a feature in the Observer recently, "This government has redistributed more money from rich to poor than any government since the war, but would you believe it? No, because we've been shy of saying so and shy of saying why the hell we're doing it." We need people like Umunna who will get up and, as the Observer put it, "win the argument for a different way of doing things, an argument that it [Labour] should have been making over the past 11 years."

(Umunna is a regular contributor to the Guardian. Here is a collection of his articles).

UPDATE: Oh and re: new BNP MEPs: