When Labour learns to love Tony Blair they will return to power...

First Polly Toynbee, now Jackie Ashley. Its turning out to be a bumper week for the political reality that is slowly dawning on the Labour party.

Tony Blair once said that the New Labour project would only be complete when the Labour Party learned to love Peter Mandelson. Naturally he assumed that after delivering three consecutive and hugely popular election victories, his own position would be unassailable. He also did not recognise the stupidity of the left.

Labour's problem is Tony Blair. The only Labour politician of our lifetime to have inspired a generation with his political vision and aspiration.

When Labour learn to love him, they will return to power.

The LibDems are being crucified by the left, Mr Cable, not the right...

As Vince Cable condemns the Tory attacks on Nick Clegg, he should be asking himself who exactly are his real enemies. In a perceptive blog, James Graham notes

A lot of Labour politicians are hellbent on a strategy that is about destroying the LibDems, even if it means effectively letting Cameron off the hook. There's no getting away from the fact that the LibDems are now seriously weakened, but what has that gained Labour? Look at Scotland. Labour let the Tories win the popular vote in England, which is an absolutely extraordinary failure.

You only have to read Polly Toynbee - doyen of the left and herself a former SDP member - to understand where such vitriol is coming from:And this is a view increasingly found across the left of British politics. The LibDems should never want power. Their job is to be a Labour party mark two - a chill out room for the main Labour event. A pale shadow of top-down, centralised, sclerotic socialism - but without the war in Iraq.

How badly they misunderstood the nature of their swelling support: they were a safe haven for voters not wanting tough choices, nice people with apolitical instincts, trusting Clegg's promised "new politics" would keep their votes clean from contamination. Had the Lib Dems stood apart and stood their ground, loudly opposing Tory plans, objecting to the savagery of the budget without quite bringing down the government, they might have kept their virginity.

In a well argued piece for Saturday's Guardian called The left is practically defined by people who hate Nick Clegg, Andrew Brown points out that on student fees - a cause seen by the left as the the LibDems greatest betrayal despite having been originally introduced by Labour against a manifesto committment 

the outcry against them comes from people who see themselves losing a privilege they had considered as a right. There's a word for that, and it's not "liberal"

He continues,

hatred of Clegg is concentrated on the fact that he betrayed some of the policies he ran on; but he did so because the country voted against them. That's democracy. Sometimes the majority is wrong. Sometimes it disagrees with you. But the majority still gets to decide, as the Lib Dems, in coalition, have discovered. There's no reason whatever that a party with 23% of the votes should get 100% of its programme through. The people who think it should are not being democratic.

As Olly Grender wrote in a piece entitled Don't Vote Against AV because you hate Nick Clegg, a week before the referendum 

both David Cameron and Nick Clegg will still be in the same jobs next week. A vote for or against AV won’t change that

It was published in the New Statesman and aimed squarely at the left - not the right.

The unpalatable truth, Mr Cable, is that the LibDems are being destroyed by the left. Just as Islam reserves the ultimate punishment for apostacy, the LibDems are being crucified by the left. Not the right.

GP commissioning reforms were always at the heart of the Coalition

Huge criticism this week of the Coalition's plans for GP commissioning, principally on the grounds that there is no mandate for such reform because it was never mentioned during the election campaign. This is quite wrong.

Caroline Spelman told the BBC Question Time audience on Thursday that page 46 of the Conservative manifesto outlines the plans and I'm greatful to @sjbaker for his tweet this morning pointing out that the Conservative Draft Health Manifesto published just over a year ago on Jan 18 2010 also says the party will give GP's the power to hold patients' budgets and commission care on their behalf. Seems pretty straight forward to me. It adds incidentally, that they will also link GP's pay to the quality of the results they deliver something we have not yet heard much about...

Well I think it's a nice idea says Polly Toynbee in this weeks Politics Weekly podcast from the Guardian. Surprisingly, she really is talking about GP commissioning of healthcare as proposed by the Coalition and continues in some ways (it is) quite rational that GP's should control the budget because GP's - these are the ones who really spend it - if so in the end their decision to refer someone to X or Y , if someone really needs this treatment, decides what the NHS spends, so it does make some sense. So why so much opposition to the reform? Because its from the Coalition of course. Pure tribalism as usual. 

It is right at the heart of this Coalition government that the people's interest should be put before those of vested interests - the producers. In every area of policy and under various different titles - big society, free schools, bottom-up politics, voting reform, localism - the people are being put first.

Increasingly Labour are finding themselves on the wrong side of this argument defending the producer interest in each case. As Janet Daly points out in a well argued article for today's Telegraph entitled Reform must be rushed, or it won't happen at all, the argument we weren't given enough warning really means we need time to organise obstruction to anything that interferes with our habitual ways of doing things. How very Labour. 

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission

The words political honesty and Polly Toynbee have not been seen together for a long time. Today they made a brief appearance:

(the Liberal Democrats) can't forgive Iraq, or the 42-day jail without trial row, ID cards or what they see as crimes against liberty. They detest Labour's authoritarianism, its baronial fixers sliding favourite sons into warm seats, a thuggishness, a bossiness, the whipped-in policy uniformity. Just look at all the Labour awfulness exposed, partly unwittingly, by the shameless Blair and Mandelson memoirs. There is a lot not to like about Labour, seen from outside. Just look at some of the faces along their benches to be reminded that making Labour likeable again will be an uphill task for the new leader.