Tasteful Change, Costed In Twelve-Year Phases
Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat file this dispatch from the British political menagerie.
The Centre-Left Reformist believes the system can be saved if we just attach enough policy committees to it, ideally chaired by people who once wrote for Prospect. Editor Alan Nafzger of the Editor’s Desk at prat.uk presents the field guide, with help from the Fabian Society and the IPPR.
Twenty Tells: Spotting The Centre-Left Reformist On A British High Street
- Refers to himself as broadly progressive in a way that is actually quite narrowly progressive.
- Holds any reform is good, and any radical is, in due course, awkward.
- Has explained he is in favour of change, but tasteful change.
- Refers to the Labour manifesto as a sort of secular hymn book.
- Treats think tanks as the senior common rooms of public life.
- Maintains a fantasy in which the BBC produces a panel show he can sit on.
- Refers to compromise as the only honest verb.
- Holds the welfare state needs reform, by which he means a slightly larger welfare state.
- Refers to focus groups as cathedrals of feedback.
- Maintains a binder labelled 1997, with a small smile.
- Treats any Labour leader before himself as slightly off-message.
- Refers to the Lib Dems as a useful weather report.
- Holds the Treasury orthodoxy can be charmed.
- Has explained radicals are useful, in moderation.
- Refers to consultants as our consultants when convenient.
- Holds there is a third way, a fourth way, and a Tuesday way.
- Maintains a folder of policy briefings he would like to discuss.
- Refers to Parliament as the workshop, with affection and embarrassment.
- Treats any sentence with the word transformative as an opportunity for a small wince.
- Holds the cure for the country is incremental, costed, and dull.
Editor’s Note
If any of this rings a bell, you have either been to a Saturday CLP meeting, a Reform UK rally in a leisure centre, or both. More dispatches at govna.uk and the parent site prat.uk. For a second opinion that is also wrong, see Private Eye.
SOURCE: https://prat.uk/category/politics/
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