Blair's a fool to fight his own

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1000393,00.html

Tony Blair has to decide if he really is Labour, if he does like his own party and wants them to like him. This is worryingly uncertain. That doesn't mean beer and sandwiches with Bob Crow or breakfast with Jeremy Corbyn: most of his party shares his opinion of the old left. But it does mean no more running against his own side with ersatz Tory ideas, when after six long years he should by now have scorched the roots of Thatcherism and planted social democracy in the national psyche. Can he change? There is a streak of bloody-minded obstinacy - maybe it's a warped Christian puritanism, a martyrdom - that will not allow him the pleasure of being loved by his own party.

The prospect of a much-reduced majority next time begins to alarm the backbenches. The hundred or more MPs who stand to lose their seats if Labour voters stay home in high dudgeon will press for whatever might make Labour trusted again. Tony Blair always points at those Tory seats which you still pinch yourself to believe are now in Labour hands - Wimbledon, St Albans, Hove. His third way, he says, delivered these by never frightening Tory voters with tax talk. But will he lose them now not through dangerously leftwing policies, but by losing trust in policies constructed without conviction? By Labour voters abstaining? Under his coconut palm in Barbados, he has to choose whether he wants to fight with or against his own people.

Period.