I hope that if we have learnt anything together over the last nine years it is that things don’t only get better. My argument with progressives is not over values but over the realities of defeat, loss and of dispossession. We need to have an awareness of tragedy and the presence of evil as a real and living possibility in our politics and in our lives. The popular energy is with the Right. It is now possible to think of the loss of the Labour Tradition as a mainstream political and governing force. It is worth thinking about the scale of this loss and what it would mean.
The Labour Party was the most successful anti-fascist party in Europe. It achieved this by retaining its purpose as the political representative of the labour interest. It was the party of the labour interest, by the labour interest and for the labour interest. It defeated fascism by facing down communism, without surrendering to liberalism. It refused the offer of a popular front and defied the pressure to be an exclusively progressive party. We were Labour.
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