New, Old Labour, not old, New Labour...

We’ve been asked, by our many observant readers, to explain what 'new Old Labour' means...

Well, once upon a time, New Labour was explained to us as being socially left wing and economically right wing. Thatcher, we were told, had won the economic arguments of the 80s, so we would instead focus on social equality.

Silly old Old Labour, in contrast, had things the wrong way round. We were deemed to be socially conservative and economically radical. Precisely what shiny, new, tax-averse, selfish middle class Britain didn’t want.

This gross over-simplification received a curious validation with the graduation of many of the one-time loony left to the upper echelons of the Labour Party.

It seems half the New Labour Cabinet had ‘form’ as 1980’s municipal or pressure group headbangers. The types who always cared more about trendy social equality than economic redistribution.

Put simply, if your cause can fit on a students’ lapel badge you’re in the club.

But if you call women ‘ladies’, think a civil partnership is a firm of good mannered accountants and want to squeeze the rich until their eyeballs pop out, then you’d better go somewhere else comrade!

Your correspondents at this blog have emerged blinking from our bunker, unscathed by a decade’s worth of wish-washy New Labour centrism.

We are resolutely Northern. Unashamedly working-class. Defiantly old fashioned. Contemptuous of political correctness. Exercised about the redistribution of wealth (it’s ALWAYS the economy, stupid). And now we’ve mastered this blogging lark, there’ll be no stopping us raising the scarlet standard high.

So if you’ve had enough ‘old’ New Labour, then watch out for new, improved, ‘new’ Old Labour instead.

‘Cos we’re back!