Bernard Ingham: Blair and Labour start a new chapter in political fratricide

On the one hand, we have today the "great publishing event of the year" – Tony Blair's memoirs, including, no doubt, some inevitably divisive account of his brotherly love for Gordon Brown over 13 years. On the other, voting starts in the Labour leadership election where relations between the Miliband brothers seem to deteriorate before our very eyes.

In this way, the party has managed to open a new political year by highlighting for all to see the fractious nature of its leadership.

This familiar prospect is unlikely to break the habits of a lifetime. I do not rush out to buy political memoirs. You can get the flavour and juicy bits from the newspapers. The narcissistic can also satisfy (or outrage) their egos by dipping into the index in WH Smith's.

In any case, memoirs are, like revenge, a dish best served cold – and years after the event when time lends some perspective to self-serving accounts of modern history.

I have to confess that the only tomes I have read through from cover to cover – because I was contracted to review them – are Margaret Thatcher's The Downing Street Years, which I treat as a textbook, and The Path to Power.

You will not, therefore, find me in the queue for Blair's The Journey, even if I might thereby marginally add to the coffers of the Royal British Legion to which our former Prime Minister has kindly, if controversially, dedicated his profits.

This is not to say that today is without significance. But its distinction is not one calculated to do Labour – or the country – any good. Indeed, I expect both events to underline Labour's political bankruptcy. This has now lasted for a good 30 years and is very damaging to our democracy.

By nightfall, I do not expect to know any more clearly what Blair stood for – or thought he stood for – or what is likely to drive the Labour Party of the future. So far as I can see, every one of the five Labour leadership candidates is as vacant as Blair ever was about their

abiding purpose and the philosophy that guides them.

You could do worse than blame Thatcher for all this. She ended the 30-year-old political consensus established by Clem Attlee. This, for all its good points, made Britain a failing corporate state run by the Government, the CBI and the trade unions, which governments tried to curb through Barbara Castle's In Place of Strife and Ted Heath's dead letter of an Industrial Relations Act.

Thatcher proved there was another, initially painful though ultimately successful, way of running Britain and to their credit both Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair tried to adapt to it. In doing so, they

confirmed the split in their party between the Left with an out-dated socialist agenda and moderates inspired by impractical idealism larded with oodles of state-sponsored compassion. This remains.

Blair got away with it for years because a Thatcherite economy delivered prosperity but he was utterly incapable of defining New Labour's credo. I expect he still cannot do so. After all, the conference he called as Prime Minister was unable to tell us what "The Third Way" was all about.

This has left his potential successors in a vacuum. Because of their limitations they are unable to fill it, except with a New Labour banner (D Miliband) and anti-capitalist rhetoric (E Miliband). The other three – Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Diane Abbott – feel obliged to make obeisances to a trade union movement that keeps the sorely straitened party afloat and so in a position to try to dictate who should win – surprise, surprise, Ed Miliband.

This is simply not good enough. But it never can be so long as the bulk of activists are determined to live in a frankly inglorious past, in hock to the unions, distrustful of the people and believing only the state can provide.

We have seen Labour's idealistic pale pink socialism that latterly dare not speak its name tested to destruction. We have not yet seen anything to take its place and I'll bet my bottom dollar Blair's memoirs will not even offer clues to a more enlightened future.

Without a guiding philosophy political parties are as dangerous as a tanker that has lost its rudder. They produce not direction but fratricide.