Mandy challenges Spart for Labour's soul

Peter Mandelson, ever the pragmatist, last week:

"The 1980s saw the timely privatization of industries that were long overdue for return to the commercial sector. Industrial relations underwent a sea change. The quality of management in our best firms improved, and with it, corporate profitability."

Translation:

• Margaret Thatcher was right.
• Clause 4 Socialism failed. History has proved it to be a delusion.
• Get over it.

"First and foremost we need to foster a new climate for enterprise in Britain. There is no substitute for this – no substitute for the drive and ambition that it brings … it is the single most important engine of economic progress. The recovery cannot be driven by consumer debt or public spending. It will be driven by private sector investment and private enterprise."

Translation:

• Cut the public sector. I said CUT IT.
• The party's over. Stop shopping and get back to work.
• If you haven't got any work, either start a business or get on your bike.

"Enterprise and reward go hand in hand. Much as it shocked many of my friends when I said I was comfortable with people making themselves “filthy rich”, in the context I was speaking I was simply stating a simple truth: that enterprise and effort should be rewarded. It sets goals to spur people and brings gains to us all … there is never a case for punitive taxation. There is never a case for rates of tax that remove the incentive to self-improvement or to build a business."

Translation:

• CUT TAXES.
• Gordon Brown is catastrophically wrong about taxation, just like Healey.
• Inequality is an economic fact and an economic necessity.
• The Labour Party is and always has been economically illiterate.
• No more amateur chumps ('historians of Socialism') running the economy.

Executive Summary:

• The Tories have the right idea.
• The public recognise that and will elect them.
• Gordon Brown would rather die than admit that these are political facts
• After the election, Labour has a choice to make. The way of class war nostalgia as recommended by the Comrades, or my way.
• The first will lead the Labour Party to political oblivion, the second offers some glimmer of hope of survival and of being in government again one day.
• Your call, Spart.

Sub-text:

• I am more employable than any of you yet here I am, when I could be on Wall Street, in a Geneva chateau or on a humongous fuck-off yacht in the Aegean..
• I have proved my loyalty to this Party over and over again. I have nothing to prove and nothing to lose by yelling you the truth.
• If you wish to remain out of office and become a withering remnant of the Party you claim to love, be my guest. Hold on to your comfortable illusions and delusions. I wish I thought they will comfort you out there in the wilderness.
• If you choose to continue blindly ahead despite the reality around you, well, frankly my dears I really couldn't give a flying fuck.
• Your future. Your call.