Labour used to be like that, but not any more. What has become clear in this animated, energetic week is that Labour is no longer the tribal entity of yore. It has lost the habits of the religious sect, from the fondness for internal blood-letting to the sentimental wallowing in past suffering. It no longer enjoys the purity of the lost cause. Instead it has become something looser -and altogether less familiar in British politics.
Labour seems to be evolving into a force that is less a political entity than a cultural one.
This is quite a shift for the Labour party - and for British politics. We are used to the battle lines being confined to the political parties, Labour v Tory. What has happened this week is a broadening of the struggle, with Labour at the helm of a whole coalition of cultural forces, allied together against the army of reaction. There, elections can turn on issues of feminism or race in a way that is unheard of here. By his invocations of Martin Luther King, Stephen Lawrence and the suffragettes, Blair has begun to give Britain a cultural politics of its own.