Until relatively recently, standard British usage meant that describing someone as ‘a progressive’ was more or less the equivalent to branding them a communist fellow traveller. Not any more; we are all progressives now, it seems.

Isn’t anybody willing to stand up for honest-to-goodness barking mad reactionaries these days? It’s not as if they are an endangered species, after all. Surely such a sizeable constituency surely deserves a spokesperson more articulate than Melanie Phillips.

Yet the way things are going right now, most politicians would rather confess diabolism or an entry on the sex offenders’ register than admit to being on the wrong side of this divide.

This silliness reached its apogee in an article in the Independent last Friday, in which Tory leader David Cameron - pictured - attempted to rebrand the Conservatives as ‘the true progressives’:

If you care about poverty, if you care about inequality, if you care about the environment – forget about the Labour Party. It has forgotten about you. If you count yourself a progressive, a true progressive, only we can achieve real change.

Yeah, right. Such faux audacieux attempts to stake a claim to the traditional territory of one’s political rivals is getting so old hat, darlings. This kind of dumbed down 1994 vintage New Labourism in reverse is rapidly losing its power to shock. I’m bored already.

Nevertheless, I bet reading that ghost-written tripe ruined breakfast for many supporters of the rightwing Labour faction Progress, which brands itself as representing ‘Labour’s progressives’.

Meanwhile, the piece came on the very day that the Guardian published Ken Livingstone’s call for Labour to head a ‘progressive alliance’ including the Greens, and hinted that there was room for the Liberal Democrats on board at some point in the future.

Only after posting a critique this approach did I suddenly remember that Cameron offered those very same Lib Dems a ‘new progressive alliance to decentralise British politics’ just six months ago.

One presumes this has to be a ‘new progressive alliance’ to distinguish it from the old ‘progressive alliance’, a term coined by the Edwardians to describe the collaboration of the Campbell-Bannerman and Asquith Liberals and those MPs ‘elected in the labour interest’ after 1906.

Meanwhile, former SDPer David Marquand, writing in the New Statesman in February, has described Gordon Brown’s early tentative overtures towards the Lib Dems as an attempt to construct – what else? – ‘a progressive alliance’.

If you are thoroughly confused by this point, that’s because you are meant to be. The obfuscation is 100% intended. The habitual resort to the P-word by politicians of all stripes is a symptom of a climate in which everybody wears their bleeding green heart on their recycled sleeve and is deeply – deeply, you understand - committed to social justice, even if they are unable coherently to define the term. That’s the essence of progressive politics, innit.

Who was the worst prime minister of modern times? Answers to such a question cannot but be subjective. But whenever this issue is discussed, the name John Major seems to crop up with greater frequency than the man himself would probably relish. A 2006 article in BBC History magazine, for instance, rates him above only Neville Chamberlain and Anthony Eden.

The charge sheets against the latter two can be summed up in one place name apiece; ‘Munich’ and ‘Suez’ respectively. Nothing that Major - pictured - has ever done in his life has been of that order of historic magnitude.

This guy didn’t cynically carve up Czechoslovakia, or even make a complete Horlicks of the invasion of a third rate third world dictatorship by not getting permission from Uncle Sam first. Here was a man who considered the national cones hotline to be the defining moment of his premiership, remember. But there were bungles aplenty.

There was Black Wednesday, for a start. Many commentators, especially on the eurosceptic right will never forgive him for Maastricht, although as a soft europhile myself I can’t really see where they are coming from.

Yet the malaise that surrounded the government during the Major years could not be attributed to one or two single issues, however weighty. The miasma of mediocrity was more pervasive than that.

The over-riding impression was one of a teacher out his depth, completely unable to control the naughty boys at the back of the class. The Bastards, the bonkers and the hardcore Thatcherite wrecking crew were accordingly given the run of the school. As the late Labour MP Tony Banks memorably quipped:

He was a fairly competent chairman of Housing [on Lambeth Council]. Every time he gets up now I keep thinking, ‘what on earth is councillor Major doing?’ I can't believe he’s here and sometimes I think he can’t either.

Of course, the BBC History rankings predate the time Gordon Brown finally got the set of keys Cherie reckons he constantly rattled over Tony’s head. So today I asking readers to comment on where they would insert the incumbent in the rankings.

It struck me this morning that there are certain parallels between the Major and Brown. Most obviously, both became unelected prime ministers after succeeding rather more charismatic predecessors who had won three elections on the trot. To be fair, the Tories were returned to office under Major’s leadership in 1992; it’s now looking doubtful whether Brown can repeat the trick for Labour.

Both give the appearance of being beleaguered PMs, holed up in a bunker and essentially powerless in the face of incoming flack. Brown has even acquired his own set of Bastards. Frank Field and friends now fulfill the same symbolic purpose as Teresa Gorman and that whackjob backbencher bloke from Northampton North, although they are mercifully not quite so obviously unhinged.

But there is one comparison that clearly doesn’t come out in Brown’s favour. In 1995, Major attempted to assert his authority – and the word is assert rather than reassert, because he never had much to begin with – by resigning the party leadership and inviting his critics to stand a candidate against him.

In the event, Major won by 218 votes to John Redwood’s 89, with 12 spoiled ballots and ten abstentions. The gambit didn’t quite work; even that margin was deemed unconvincing, and the removal vans were pulling up at Number Ten just two years later.

Would Brown – who, remember, secured the Labour leadership by coronation without putting his popularity to the test – have the guts to do the same? And would it make any difference if he did? Comments, please.

If anybody were cruel enough to conduct an ideological paternity test on Ken Livingstone’s article in the Guardian this morning, the resultant DNA read-out would surely see a bloke called Georgi Dimitrov hauled before the Child Support Agency and landed with a hefty maintenance bill.

Let’s skip the bits where Livingstone (pictured) offers the de rigeur exculpation for Meltdown Thursday. As the man points out, his share of the capital’s vote went up by both relative and absolute measures. There’s no gainsaying the psephology, so on that score alone, the ‘it wasn’t me guv’ routine has to be entirely convincing.

The money paragraph is probably this assertion:

Following May 1 some people are posing the choice as between moving ‘to the left’ or ‘to the right’. This is not the right question. Labour must place itself at the centre of a progressive alliance that can solve the problems facing the country.

The notion of being ‘neither right nor left but in front’ is one of the most malleable memes in modern political rhetoric; over the past two decades, we have all heard variations on this theme trotted out by Greens, Lib Dems, and even the fascist right.

It’s hackneyed beauty is in its very evasiveness, the way in which it loosely promises everything to everybody and yet simultaneously nothing to nobody. This is non-positional positioning, vacuity elevated to the level of principle.

In this specific case, it translates to an argument for getting the Labour Party in London – and by implication, nationally as well – to bring the Greens on board, and hopefully the Liberal Democrats too.

Although there is no reference to Respect Renewal in the article as such, Livingstone has earlier dropped hints that there is a place for George Galloway inside a city-wide Big Tent, if only because it remains the beneficiary of a not negligible mosque-directed block vote.

It is also plain that the City would be a welcome, indeed critical, component in any lash-up. Livingstone makes repeated reference to the support he enjoys from big business. Yet the labour movement does not merit a single mention.

Given the omission of any reference to working class organisations – and I fail to see how this omission can be otherwise than by design – the implication is that trade unions are not regarded as core constituents of the progressive alliance Livingstone has in mind.

This is qualitatively new in terms of the history of projects of this type. For the first time since 1935, when Dimitrov harangued the seventh congress of the Comintern with a call for what has since become known as popular frontism, the working class is not accorded even a walk-on part in such a schema.

Nor is the progressive alliance justified in terms of any longer-term socialist strategy, however dilute. Unlike the doctrine that underpinned the orthodoxy of Stalinist parties for decades – including the Communist Party of Great Britain’s calls for an ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ – it doesn’t even seem to be envisaged as the first stage of a stages theory. Indeed, its goals are notably timid:

There are three tasks for a government and a mayor - to ensure the country and London are an economic success; to ensure everyone shares in that success; and to ensure that success is sustainable in the long run through improving the environment.

Livingstone maintains that ‘the difference[s] with the Tories are stark’, but doesn’t expand on this point. Little wonder; there is nothing here to which David Cameron could not sign up, at least verbally. With economic success defined in capitalist terms – and the Square Mile will ensure that it would be so defined – the Conservatives even have a legitimate claim to be the best vehicle to bring it about.

The net result of implementing Livingstone’s suggestions would be yet more cartel politics, with the outer limits of its radicalism designated by what is acceptable to hedge funds and venture capital. An ambitious, assertive and confident left could and should press for a whole lot more than that.

Without sounding emotive it sounded like an execution. Then it all went quiet. One guy in a balaclava who looked very professional started putting away his equipment and made a cutting the throat sign to someone else.

- witness to the Mark Saunders shoot-out.

Here are the stories of two deceased men who probably briefly lived contemporaneously in London, but who – until their dying moments, anyway - had little in common otherwise.

One was a public school and Oxford educated barrister on £500,000 a year, who resided in a £2m town house in Chelsea, one of the capital’s richest districts. The other was a Glasgow-born painter and decorator who lived in a council flat in rather less salubrious Hackney.

Imagine a second-rate novelist concocting characters purposely to symbolise given social classes, and you get some idea of the CVs Mark Saunders (pictured) and Harry Stanley.

On Tuesday this week, Saunders – described as ‘a binge alcoholic’ and reportedly prone to depression - knocked off work early began drinking heavily; one evening in September 1999, Stanley – just out of hospital after an operation for colon cancer, incidentally – stopped off at a handy boozer and ordered a lemonade.

Saunders got home and ended up having a bit of a domestic with the missus, another high-earning barrister. Neighbours heard raised voices and then the sound of gun shots. At least this was a genuine firearms incident.

By contrast, Stanley hadn’t had a row with anybody and wasn’t in possession of any weapon. He was, however, carrying a table leg which he had just picked up from his brother who had just repaired it; for some reason, another pub client rang the police to warn that an ‘Irishman’ was concealing a gun in a plastic bag.

As Stanley neared home, he was challenged by two armed police officers. As he turned to fact them, they shot him dead from just 15 yards. He didn’t have time to leave any words of farewell to his partner.

A jury at a second inquest in 2004 returned a verdict of unlawful killing, which was overturned in the High Court the following year on grounds of insufficient evidence.

There is still much to be explained about the Saunders case. But what we do know is that after a five-hour standoff - during which he threw into his garden a cardboard box on which he had written ‘I love my wife dearly xxx’ - the decision was reached to take him out.

Was there really no alternative but to kill? Doubtless we will learn more from the Independent Police Complains Commission inquiry and the inquest. But from the facts as reported in the press today, the move seems strangely precipitous. Couldn’t negotiations have gone on longer? Would not the use of non-lethal weapons have been more appropriate?

Realistically, there are occasions on which the police must be armed. There are even circumstances in which it must be right for the police to use those arms. Surely few would argue against shoot to kill where it would prevent terrorist carnage.

But that does not give the Metropolitan Police free reign to take lives on the basis of caprice, whether the victims be ordinary blokes from Hackney, Chelsea yuppies that suddenly go postal, or immigrant electricians trying to catch a tube on the Victoria Line.

It will be interesting to see if Saunders' social standing makes a difference to the way subsequent developments are reported. At this stage, we need some convincing explanations from the Met. And – unlike the Stanley and de Menezes cases – if somebody made a mistake, he or she should carry the can.

Home secretary Jacqui Smith – a woman who has confessed to using cannabis as a student – has today confirmed that cannabis is to be reclassified as a class B drug.

The decision has been welcomed by the Conservative Party. As we know, Tory leader David Cameron was at the age of 15 confined to the grounds of Eton College for two weeks after being caught with a joint.

It comes just days after the election of Boris Johnson – a man who admits smoking ‘quite a few spliffs’ as a schoolboy and finding them ‘jolly nice’ – was elected mayor of London.

Former chancellor Norman Lamont has incredibly enough confessed to eating space cakes, while Alistair Darling, the man currently in charge of the Treasury, also knows what to do with three Rizlas and a ripped up cigarette packet.

Under the law as it stood at the time of these people’s youthful experimentation, and as it will now be again, all of them could theoretically have been sent to prison for five years for simple possession.

True, custodial sentences are rarely dealt out to young people nicked with a bag of grass about their person. But as ever with law and order issues, there is a class dimension to how the punishment operates.

When I was a working class teenager in the 1970s, my friends were regularly fined the equivalent of two to three weeks’ wages if the Old Bill found them in possession of small quantities of dope. That constitutes retribution qualitatively more severe than being ‘gated’ for a fortnight at Britain’s top public school.

Today, a caution is by far the most likely outcome in such cases. But as the Metropolitan Police’s own research discovered two years ago, in instances where charges are pressed, black people are disproportionately likely to find themselves in the dock.

In the view of experts such as the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, there is no strong case for reclassification. What is more, with dozens of MPs of all persuasions on record as having used cannabis in the past, it can have little credibility with the public.

This is, in other words, New Labour gesture politics of a potency on a par with such legendary seventies marijuana variants as Thai Stick. In practical terms, reclassification will have no effect whatsoever.

The only proffered justification – advanced by the prime minister a few weeks back – is that it ‘sends a message’ to young people that cannabis use is ‘unacceptable’.

Teenagers, who rarely hold anyone over 40 in particularly high regard anyway, will draw a ‘message’ from this pronouncement, alright. But I suspect it will not be the one for which Gordon Brown is hoping.

Their rather more likely conclusion will be that middle aged white politicos who preach the virtues of doubling already hefty prison sentences for offences they themselves committed 20 or 30 years ago are a bunch of hypocritical old farts. In this, the youth of today might not be far wrong.

They were elected as New Labour and they governed as New Labour; now they seem to be on their way out as New Labour. Sure, there are still two years before Gordon Brown has to go to the polls, and a lot can happen between now and 2010. But – contrary to the D:Ream lyrics – it is not the case that things can only get better. They can also get much, much worse.

In a period certain to be marked by declining house prices - and quite possible set to witness the first full-on recession since the early 1990s – a Supermac-style reliance on ‘events, dear boy, events’ is likely to see the prime minister’s prospects deteriorate rather than ameliorate.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson is taking over at City Hall, while David Cameron looks rather more likely than not to secure victory for the Conservatives at the next general election. Message to goodthinkful on-message New Labour androids everywhere: read that sentence again. Slowly.

Reconnection with the concerns of Labour’s traditional base is not just the right thing to do on social democratic principle, but the only means to avoid two or three successive terms of Conservative government.

A simple assertion of the sort of thinking that was once at the core of Labour political philosophy is now the course that coincides with hard-headed survival instinct-driven pragmatism.

It is no use constantly boasting that Britain has the most flexible labour market in Europe if, for millions of voters, that fine phrase translates into low pay and job insecurity. Remind me again, what exactly is wrong with employment rights at the same level enjoyed by employees elsewhere in the EU?

How can a centre-left government be so prejudiced against public ownership that it only realised the need to nationalise Northern Rock long after the Lib Dems had reached the obvious conclusion?

And leaving aside the fate of individual building societies, what is to be done now that it is plain that market mechanisms leave hundreds of thousands of people – perhaps millions of people – unable to find affordable housing? Would large scale construction of good quality local authority housing for rent really be undesirable?

Instead of encouraging figures such as John Hutton to deliver his grotesque ‘enrichissez-vous!’ homiletics to selected audiences, even as the government clobbers this country’s five million poorest taxpayers, why not consider ways of making the tax system more progressive?

Just by rediscovering the ideals that must have motivated many of them to become involved in politics in the first place, Labour MPs now have the opportunity to do good while simultaneously covering their sorry asses. Oi, you over there with the slim majority in a two-way marginal; what’s not to like?

It really is true that we are best when we’re boldest, best when we’re Labour. It’s high time that Gordon Brown realised that that should be an operative philosophy, rather than a contrived climax to a conference peroration.

With Labour's share of the national vote yesterday down to a level that makes 1983 look like the good old days, one of the key justifications for delabourisation suddenly looks somewhat less tenable. To revamp the slogan that must have paid for much of Charles Saatchi's art collection, New Labour isn't working.

Blair, Brown and Mandelson always sold their Trinny and Susannah makeover on the basis of electoral success. Plenty of people with enough political understanding to know better insisted that democratic socialism - or even any of form of half-hearted lingering sentimental attachment to bog standard watered-down social democracy - had to be extirpated to propitiate Middle England.

For ye have the poor always with you, and everyone knows that the poor always vote Labour, whatever happens. They are too thick to think rationally about politics, anyway. The Old Fettesians were absolutely confident of that..

And Blairism did win elections, of course. There is no denying that. However, even a decade or more of seeming success is an insufficient basis on which to judge a political project. Given Blair's reported fixation with the notion of 'legacy', the real yardstick can only be the long-term outcome.

The history of the Liberal Party shows us that. After its landslide general election victory of 1906, it must have seemed unassailable; since 1916, it has never been anything more than a sporadic coalition partner. The process took just 10 years.

The paradox of Blairism is that, despite three successive majority Labour governments, the base of the party is utterly emaciated. A degree of community entrenchment that took generations to build has been eviscerated.

Many activists are motivated primarily by career considerations. Today's cadre are full-time councillors, parliamentary researchers and trade union officials, augmented by fresh-faced barristers and disconcertingly eager young PR women with irritating high-pitched giggles and a firm eye on a safe constituency in a former mining area. Looming electoral defeat is not likely to enhance their commitment.

Labour's collapse has been political, too. The James Purnell Tendency even argues that Labour has now become 'ideologically neutral', as if there could be some sort of no non-aligned movement in a society riven by ever greater inequality.

The result has been disastrous policies such as the abolition of the 10p tax band, a proposal that would once have been regarded as so morally repugnant to a party of labour that it would not even merit consideration.

One MP I campaigned with yesterday suspects that Charles Clarke will formally launch a stalking horse leadership bid this weekend, if Ken Livingstone is ousted as mayor of London. That is certainly looking possible. But Blairism without Blair, in a markedly less photogenic package to boot, is hardly the solution to Labour's problems right now.

One minute French students were getting all uppity because of a ban on having visitors of the opposite sex in their dorms; the next thing you know, ten million workers had taken over their factories and de Gaulle's semi-authoritarian state was visibly teetering.

Sadly, I was only eight at the time, and May 1968 will for me personally always be more about Lego then les événements. But for the true soixante huitard generation, what happened in France that year was a defining political moment.

It is probably impossible to underestimate the subsequent psychological significance of these protests for the far left. Its role as a symbol - or dare I say it, myth - is perhaps second only to that of Russia 1917.

Its most common usage in this context is as a counter to the commonsense argument that revolutions simply cannot happen in advanced capitalist countries. May 1968 proves they can, we are told. Well, almost, anyway. But how valid is this case?

Prompted by the 40th anniversary media coverage that will presumably grow to a crescendo this month, I have been rereading some of the leftist literature produced to mark the 20th anniversary in 1988. Much of it, extravagently celebratory in tone, seems to me to overstate results and prospects.

Crucially, many writers fail to grasp that what occured was not a revolution. To say that is not to downplay the importance of developments that genuinely do deserve the much overused adjective 'earth-shaking', just as the classic picture of rioting in the streets of Paris hints.

France in 1968 was a textbook example of dual power, in the sense that Lenin used the term. But it was - again in the jargon - a prerevolutionary situation, not a revolution proper. Perhaps it would have possible to secure a relatively peaceful transition to socialism; the means of production were in the hands of the working class and, given the correct approach, a largely conscript army might have split on class lines.

On the other hand, there were 70,000 troops on the other side of the Rhine, and de Gaulle's cross-border chopper trip proves he would have been prepared to use them if a crunch had come. Nor would other capitalist countries have stood idly by and watched one of their number succumb to workers' control. They too would likely have committed armed support.

What is more, the forces of indigenous reaction could undoubtedly have mobilised the support of millions of people on the right. It would be lightminded to insist that extensive bloodshed could have been ruled out in advance.

Several writers slam the cowardice of the Parti Communiste Français, and maintain that 'correct Marxist leadership' of their precise and pure ideological stripe was the only missing magic ingredient.

But to postulate this is to fail to ask why neither the Trotskyists nor the anarchists secured a mass base, either through their work in the preceding decades or in the course of the struggle. Why do our historians think their outfit would necessarily have done any better? There is more to politics than retrospective transitional demands.

All of this leads me to what I think is the most pernicious effect of the May 1968 myth, namely the idea that there is a serious chance that a small group of revolutionaries can suddenly be catapulted to the bigtime, almost on the random caprice of history.

The 1988 literature on 1968 was full of confident predictions that revolutions were on the agenda, in France and even in Britain too, before the end of the twentieth century. This perspective, to say the least, hasn't panned out.

This post is not intended to say that we will never see new May Days, or even new Octobers; what I am arguing is that France 1968 was an exceptional historic conjuncture that even four decades on has yet to be repeated.

It is essential for the revolutionary left to dream, of course. But given a reality that could see two fascists elected to the London Assembly today, remember that day dreams can be debilitating.

Happy May Day comrades. Sous les pavés la plage.

Labour MP Kate Hoey – once politically close to the International Marxist Group, and pictured left – denies that she is about to defect to the Conservatives. But as a general election that David Cameron now looks like winning comes ever closer, few would be surprised if one or more New Labourite does decide to switch sides.

Remember, at least three - or was it four? - Conservative MPs from the Thatcher period signed up with New Labour under Blair, with two of them picking up ministerial appointments in the process.

My guess is that no more will be coming over, and that the traffic will now be in the other direction. Funny how the one way street always seem to run from the party on the wane towards the party in the ascendancy, and never the other way round.

The early parliamentary ship jumpers are the opportunist canaries in the political coalmine, although instead of dropping dead, they get to chirp on merrily in their new home after the roof of the pit caves in on those they leave behind.

On behalf of ordinary local level activists of all affiliations everywhere, can I just request that these specimens spare us all the anguished soundbites about their gradual realisation that Party X now represents the continuity of the true political principles of Party Y, typically delivered with all the sincerity of a badly faked orgasm?

Obviously, people’s political analyses and prescription can alter over time; after all, the world alters over time. As John Maynard Keynes famously remarked: ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, Sir?’

I have been a member of parties to the left of Labour as well as the Labour Party. But, in ideological terms, the apostasy involved is minimal. My belief system has actually changed little; it’s just that I now have rather different ideas about how it can best be enacted.

What, by contrast, can have been going on in the head of that councillor in Tower Hamlets who leapt the tall building that separates the Socialist Workers’ Party from the Tories in a single bound?

Fortunately, crossing the floor is rather rarer at Westminster than it is in municipal politics. But surely the day on which the first Blairite to see the Cameroonian light cannot be far away.

In its way, it will prove a fitting tribute to the way in which the politics cartel has rendered party identification almost meaningless.