“WHERE Labour goes now will affect us all,” Seamus Milne wrote in the Guardian on May 21, when appraising the state of campaigning for election to Labour’s leadership. As he also observed, the declared contenders had visibly moved to the right of the freshly resigned Ed Miliband, whose austerity-lite stance in the run-up to the general election was given a less bitter flavour through his infusion of popular proposals for an energy-price freeze, closing the tax loophole exploited by rich “non-doms,” taxing privately owned mansions and implementing a 50-per-cent top personal tax rate.

Not that the individual “austerity contender” plans delivered to us have been especially memorable. Islington North’s Labour MP and unmistakable socialist Jeremy Corbyn offered himself as a leadership candidate, presentations by the others were filled with New Labour phrases and sparing with radicalism.

Indeed, sketchy policies expressed in trite language (involving tax giveaways to “wealth creators” and admiration for “aspiration”) have been the story. After some withdrawals the austerity contenders were the bookies’ favourites. Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Liz Kendall and Mary Creagh were all shadow ministers under the Miliband regime.