Simon Jenkins not such an arsehole after all

Having elected Jenkins arsehole of the week on 27 July for some silly old lefty babble about the military-industrial complex, it seems only fair to highlight an article in CiF today about the sudden, utter irrelevance of the Labour party that is spot-on.

For whatever motive – and reducing a budget deficit is hardly dishonourable – Cameron is seeking to redefine the individual's relationship with the state, more radically than anyone since the 40s. I may think the government should stall on some cuts, such as cash benefits, while the economy is stagnant. But when state revenues are static, claims rising and government indebtedness gargantuan, only those blind to reality refuse to discuss the structural basis of public spending.

David and Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott can only blow a collective raspberry. They rabbit on about who said what during the Iraq war or the credit crunch. Like Stalinist courtiers they accuse each other of varying degrees of disloyalty to Blair and Brown, asking who said what, where and when. They try to curry favour with public sector unions, most of whom are way ahead of them in realism on government services. The candidates are intellectually barren.

Even on the left's own terms, the coalition is challenging the road ahead for redistributive socialism. It is raising the spirits of Beveridge [author of the wartime report that provided the blueprint for the Welfare State] and [Labour party intellectual] Crosland. What should national insurance mean with an ageing population? How can we afford "higher education for half the people"? Which services could be paid for by the individual or discrete communities, rather than a universalist government? Labour's answer is metronomic: leave it all to the state … the state … the state. This answer has run into the sand. It has driven the country into a worse plight than Greece or Spain.

All I can add is a query: Crosland? Are you kidding? The champagne socialist who told his wife: "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to destroy every fucking grammar school in England. And Wales and Northern Ireland"?

Although Crosland - on paper - was opposed to the top-down bureaucratic centralisation that has always been the defining feature of socialism, Jenkins just can't see that the root of the Labour party's irrelevance lies in the arrogant "man in Whitehall knows best" attitude that his hero displayed when in office.