This paragraph, from the ever insane LabourList, is an outstanding example of getting pretty much everything wrong:

There is a tremendous appetite in the Parliamentary Labour Party to debate where we went wrong, where we went right and most importantly where we go next. Often it feels like it descends into academic discussion while schools and housebuilding programmes are cancelled out in the real world, but there is a serious point behind it. Somehow it seems the Tories have managed to convince people that the only way out of the recession is to make savage cuts."‘We have a huge deficit that we have to repay", the argument goes, "so the cuts are inevitable". It’s easy to see how this sort of belief takes hold; it’s a straightforward return to Thatcher’s "balancing the household books" approach. If you owe money, you pay it back.

Let's start at the beginning of this paragraph. Firstly, I'm not seeing any appetite whatsoever within the Labour party to discuss where that party went wrong. On the contrary, there seems to be an ongoing failure to discuss the elephant in the room - that they actually lost the election. We hear about how the Tories didn't win outright, or that the Lib Dems somehow betrayed the Labour party by going into a coalition with the Tories. We don't hear about how the electorate turned against the Labour party after 13 years of power.

This sense of denial comes across in the second sentence of the paragraph. The author is missing the point that all the Labour can really do now is engage in academic debate since they are out of power. If the coalition wants to cut programmes, then they will do so. The Harman led Labour party can do nothing more than howl in empty impotence as this happens, because they are now the opposition rather than the government. In fact, it would be healthy for the Labour party to get lost in a haze of debate about their failures, because that's the only way they might be able to work out where they went so wrong, and how they might be able to win back the British people.

And the argument about how the Tories believe they can cut their way out of the recession is not quite correct. The Tories have got to make cuts because the Labour party spent far too much while in power. The Tories aren't so much worried about the recession as they are about the country going under. Cuts are inevitable and they do hurt: however, this debt does have to be paid back. And all of this is the fault of the Labour party; a bit of internal debate might help to show them that this is the case.

The simple fact is that if you spend money, you do have to pay it back. The last Labour government laboured (no pun intended) under the delusion that you could, like a political version of Viv Nicholson, spend spend spend without having to face the consequences. The reality is this money was always going to have to be paid back; anyone who says otherwise is hopelessly naive. And when that naivete occurs in a party governing a country - as it did under Gordon Brown - it becomes negligence. Criminal negligence.

There is a real need for an effective opposition in this country, and realistically only the Labour party can fulfill that role at the moment. However, in order to be effective, the Labour party also needs to be credible. And it cannot be credible as it continues to deny that spending cuts were inevitable and the fault of the Labour party. The future of the Labour party lies in highlighting which areas of government spending should not be cut, rather than attempting to deny that the cuts were inevitable and have become essential. The sort of delusional bollocks that appears on LabourList - day after day, week after week - simply shows that the Labour party hasn't clocked that politics in this country has fundamentally changed. It makes them look obstinate, naive and completely out of touch with political reality - which are among the key reasons why they were so comprehensively rejected at the last election.