Old New Labour

Excellent column from Seamus Milne in The Guardian today on the future of Labour under Ed Milliband. The threat comes from within Labour itself:

A powerful grouping among Labour MPs and the shadow cabinet remains convinced, like Blair himself, that the party lost last year's election because Gordon Brown moved away from New Labour – rather than because of the relentless squeeze on Labour's core supporters, Brown's unpopularity and the greatest economic crisis for 70 years.
Their failure to recognise that Labour lost 4 million mostly working-class votes between 1997 and 2005 and that the 2008 crash has changed the rules of the game is at the heart of their "continuity Labour" resistance to the changes needed to carve out a new political economy and electoral coalition.

I supported Ed Milliband in the leadership election because I thought that he was the only person with the vision to get beyond the Old Labour-New Labour fight - who really understood that the game had changed and was serious about doing the hard work of finding a new niche for a center-Left party in a post-Socialist world. The fact that the old New Labourites are fighting him so hard only reassures me that he is doing the job well.