I respect Tony Blair much. Indeed, he won three impressive election victories for my Party. Indeed, I like him as a person. I find his account of his family in ‘The Journey’ very moving.

However, as Frank Dobson MP points out in the video below, Labour started to lose support in the early 2000s, long before the Iraq War. I am in two minds about Tony Blair’s path to power. I believe it was important that the public were on his side, and you need to have the genuine support of followers to be successfully in power in government rather than to be simply in office. On the other hand, having vivid memories of Thatcherism in his heyday, prior to the Poll Tax, I believe that a donkey could have beaten John Major in 1997. I’m only surprised he won in the first place, which is indeed a tribute to him and the Conservative Party.

However, I firmly believe that New Labour was wrong on economics. The field of behavioural economics provides that there are irrational customers, and that’s all ‘rather complicated’. I am not interested in getting bogged down in an erudite discussion of ‘Nudge’ at this point – I disagree with Nudge too, as it happens.

Whilst it is comforting to think of things in terms of the supply-demand graph, real economics provides that price, cost and value have different definitions in modern economics. Furthermore, the Nobel Prizes for economics in 2001 and 2002 respectively, with Joe Stiglitz and Dan Kahneman, offer a convincing argument for information asymmetry in decision-making and loss aversion in decision-making.

This is particularly relevant now when it is erroneous to compare apples with bananas in the NHS. It’s difficult to compare the costs and value of chronic dementia care with the cost of a hip operation, and it may be dangerous to leave this entirely in the hands of a free market which operates under law to maximise shareholder dividend. If I had to pay for the medical care for my six week coma due to meningitis in 2007, I would owe the private health company millions probably. I think we do need some sort of shared risk/insurance system, but the NHS currently is not paid out of National Insurance to my knowledge. The sooner the Blairites appreciate this the better – otherwise their exercise is being run by shabby marketing people who don’t even understand economics like good marketeers do.

Despite some low points, I am still very proud to be supporting Ed Miliband. I voted for Ed, and indeed this video is of Frank Dobson at his last ever hustings when he was campaigning to be leader of my/our Party. And yes, and I came top in the MBA in economics and marketing last year in case you’re wondering..