Ten Hard Truths for Labour

Tristram Hunt is calling for a ‘Summer of hard truths’ for Labour. Here’s ten for starters:

1. The state will be smaller in 2020 and there will be little appetite to increase its size significantly.

2. The 2020–25 Government will be expected to run a surplus.

3. The SNP is a largely progressive patriotic force and to pretend it’s UKIP is futile and wrong.

4. The Tories and George Osborne, their next leader, are now the centreground of politics.

5. European social democracy on the post-war model as a future political vision is a road to nowhere.

6. The loudest voices on the left- in the party and in the media- are plotting a disastrous course.

7. We are about to go through a many faceted technological and economic revolution. Labour has no response to it.

8. The state is still grotesquely inefficient. Individual services are efficient- but the fragmented state wastes £10s billions.

9. The welfare state is cruel and broken. But politics will currently prevent it being fixed.

10. If Labour resists EVEL in England and much greater moves to fiscal autonomy in Scotland it can kiss both countries good-bye.

And you could have read all this and more two years ago had you spent £7 on Left Without a Future?