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The young Blairites
You can read Labour young socialists' views on the Labour party's future here
You can read Labour young moderates' views on the Labour party's future here
More interviews to come on all
Legendary online Blairite Shamik Das, 27, thinks a contest for the Labour party leadership is vital for the party, but implies that no sane man toys with the notion that John McDonnell will be anywhere near it. 'Arrrrgh,' he laughs, placing a hand on a pained forehead. 'Arrrrggh. Arrrrrrrgh. No.'
Das would prefer the debate about the party's future to take place at the deputy-leadership level, with the centre-left's Jon Cruddas at the plate for party members of a socialist bent, and Hilary Benn doing whatever it is that he does for the right. Das will support Benn, but he thinks he can probably stand Cruddas, at least for the duration of a contest. It's true, Das says, that Cruddas has made a few socialist noises in his campaign, but he's so far steered clear of serious fruitcake rhetoric. 'He [Cruddas] is not as barking as some of them are,' Das laughs. 'His [voting] record is quite sound from my point of view.'
Another very big Cruddas plus, Das says, is that the McDonnell crew hate him. Whatever the case, Das is very sure that the party needs to use the opportunity that will be presented by Tony Blair's departure to have a debate. 'It wouldn't look good [for Brown] to have a coronation,' but '[the debate] can't just be in the party between the centre left and hard left.'
It'll be a sad day when old Teflon Tony does finally flake off, though. Das joined the party ten years ago (in Brent), largely because he admired Blair, and the light has yet to dim as far as he can see.
He says there have been two triumphs in particular: Blair's contribution to securing (the on-again off-again) peace in Northern Ireland, and the party's record in delivering public services. He feels the result in Northern Ireland thus far has been especially impressive. 'They've got a communal government, with both sides [involved in it]. You've got the possibility, which was unimaginable [once], of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams in parliament together running Northern Ireland. A few years ago, with Mr Paisley's thoughts, that simply would never happened.'
Das thinks that the delivery of good public services, meanwhile, has been impressive enough to be a key Gordon-for-leader calling-card. '[Brown] has got to go on the economy and public services. That's got to be the pitch.' Das says that as a service user, 'things have improved since Blair - with transport, the health service, although thankfully, I've had not that great a use of it. The school I'm at now (Das is a teaching assistant at Preston Manor) has been been transformed [by its relationship with the private sector].' Das says he's not sure about the specifics of that relationship: 'I think that it's one of those PFIs things.' He says that schools like Preston Manor and Haverstock have been 'completely done up' and are able to work with the private sector to make money by leasing out their new facilities, and so on.'
Das doesn't have a problem with PFIs, or with private organisations providing public services: he thinks the public sector continues in need of various aspects of the private sector ethos. 'I'm not against private capital, or shareholders making money per se. They [the public sector] don't have the discipline of the private sector... sticking to budgets, providing services and facing competition. If you've got a monopoloy, you've got no competition, and with competition, if you're not up to scratch, you wither and die. The actual numbers of frontline staff have gone up [in the NHS in the last ten years]. If these people [private sector providers] want to make money, they are going to provide the best service possible. He says that the McDonnell argument is that 'as long as it's [a service] is publicly-owned, it doesn't matter, so long as those [private sector] bastards aren't making money out of it.'
Anyway, it's all a lot better than life with Thatcher, which was a genuine bitch. Das feels that one of the problems with younger members of the party right now - the ones who want Blair and Blairism out and the hard left in - is that they're simply too young to remember what the Thatcher and Major years were like. They barely remember a time before New Labour, or even a time when New Labour struck the populace as promising - 'they only see what they know as Evil Blair.'
Das doesn't consider the Iraq sortie a mistake - far, far from it. He says a British contribution to the Iraq invasion was very important. 'Looking at it as I did in 2003, with what we knew then, and what we thought we knew. There was Saddam's record, and the post 9/11 situation, the fact that the US would have gone anyway,' and the concerns about Saddam's big and bad weapons of mass destruction. He admits that the fact that one of the reasons that people believed that Saddam had WMDs was that Blair pretended he did is a sticky point.
He moves on.
He says he isn't sure why some on the left thought the UK ought to give the whole scene a wide berth. 'Why would they have been happy for it to be solely American? it needed to have some British presence - as a a brake, a lever.' He does think that Blair has some leverage with Bush, or, at the very least, if anyone was going to have leverage with Bush, it would be Blair. 'If Blair had said no to him (Bush) in 2003, Bush wouldn't have had to listen to anyone. He wouldn't even have to pretend to listen to anyone.' Das also thinks that the impetus for Sunni and Shia insurgents would have been there, even if the US and UK hadn't turned up.
And the effect of Blair's premiership on the Labour party itself? Das agrees that the rate at which members are leaving the party is a bit of a concern. He says people have to remember that the membership 'did go up after Blair got in - probably to about 400,000,' he grins. 'So... it's probably fallen back to where it was before then, although I'm not entirely sure.' He laughs. And anyway, he says - whatever people say about the party, the country itself is sitting firmly in the centre ground, so he does not want to hear any more yap about returning to the left. 'That is why, all those years ago, Blair had to change the party to get elected, because the old model of policies that Labour was following wasn't winning elections. They're [the party left] are all whining about poll numbers now being as bad as they were way back when, without realising that it was their policies that put them there [way back when].'