Whither The Labour Party?

The Labour Party have just been defeated in the UK election this week. The post-mortems will begin through the medium of a leadership election as the unsuccessful candidate Ed Miliband has resigned in defeat. As usual such a post-mortem will not address the real underlying issues and yield a leader who will in all likelihood be just as unsuccessful as Miliband.

1) Although they won the election, the Conservatives don't have a large majority so they potentially become vulnerable in Parliamentary votes on contentious issues if their own contumacious back-bench MPs decide to flex their own muscles and defy party discipline. Exactly the same as at the start of the last Parliament when the UK had it's first coalition government in 36 years. However, then Labour was so consumed by its own leadership election process that took a year or so, they were unable to apply any pressure on the fledgeling coalition government in its first year and it remained relatively unscathed. Labour has to avoid that this time round and maintain a rigorous opposition.

2) Proper post-mortems do not get conducted through the process of a leadership election. First of all the debate is internal, through MPs, Trade Unions and party members. The aspect of a proper post-mortem that is omitted, is actually consulting with the public. Asking those floating voters why in the end they didn't vote Labour. These are the crucial opinions and they are overlooked. The internal debate is only conducted with an eye to which wing of the party as represented by which leadership candidate will triumph in the final selection voting process.

3) The failure of a vaguely Left-Wing Labour election campaign has been pounced on by Labour centrists as proof that only their way can deliver Labour any future victory. This of course completely overlooks that a Centrist Labour Party has no real reason to exist. Tony Blair as a Centrist was only successful because he came to power in a period of economic boom. This boom was predicted by all economists as the corollary of coming out of the bust of the 1990s, when people were feeling bruised and fed up with the longevity of the Conservatives in power and weary of various scandals that had afflicted that party. They were ready for a change and it coincided with economic growth. But when the country is an a period of economic sluggishness, when savings are needed which implies a level of austerity, people will trust the Conservatives over Labour to deliver these cuts, because Labour are morally torn about cutting welfare and public services. Now you can argue with the narrative of austerity, but a Centrist Labour party's craving to appeal to the middle classes means they will not rock the economic boat of austerity. Yet they cannot outtrump the Conservatives in that sphere. It makes no sense to try and out-Tory the Tories. Austerity with a smiley-face.

4) So the alternative is to be a Left-Wing party, which Ed Miliband was accused of by his opponents with both Labour and Tory circles. He wasn't in many ways, because he accepted the austerity narrative as above. He just wanted to try and ameliorate some of its victims, such as those on zero-hours contracts, those accessing foodbanks and the like. But none of this plays to those in middle England, in the market towns that they desperately need to convince to have any chance of winning a parliamentary majority. England is a conservative (small 'C') nation, of Napoleon's famous shopkeepers and entrepreneurs. Any sniff of a Left-wing government is going to have those people fleeing for the mountains and doing everything they can to 'stop the socialists' gaining power. It's hard without an economic crisis seeing Labour ever regaining government.

5) At present, a left-wing Labour party has no real principles or ideology on which to base itself. The moment Tony Blair succeeded in expunging the 1918 Clause IV as a founding principle (so much so it was printed on every membership card) was not only the moment 'New Labour' replaced (old) labour, but the moment all its history was erased at a stroke. The history of its origins, its principles and what it stood for. Now whether you subscribe to the principle of Clause IV "To secure for the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service"  is not really the point. The point is it has ceased to stand for anything principled or distinctive, so that even when ed Miliband tries to take the party more leftwards, it's completely without context or focus because it's not based on any bedrock of belief. 

6) Looking at the demographics of the Labour Party MPs returned in the election, it has utterly become a party of the cities. All the major conurbations of England are solidly Labour. It has virtually no representation in the smaller urban areas and now nothing in a former heartland Scotland. London is a Labour City, yet London is a very rich (and expensive) city which goes against the grain that Labour can't appeal to the middle classes, although it is also hard to see what inhabitants of Labour constituencies like Hampstead or Islington have in common with inhabitants of Northern constituencies like Stockton and Bury. That makes it slightly schizoid in make-up. Scotland rejected Labour because it wasn't left-wing enough, London votes Labour because they like this cosy left-centrist Labour. London is of course the most ethnically diverse of all cities in the UK and draws much support from these communities, while there is also an element of having the wealth and privilege to desire to share some of that wealth with the less fortunate in a way that Tory voters in say Peterborough or  Swindon don't seem to feel. If London becomes more exclusive due to its property prices and hogging of the job market, if more oligarchs from around the globe buy expensive holiday homes, then that natural Labour tendency may evaporate and Labour will lose its second major core of parliamentary seats as it has just done in Scotland. How does it knit together  a strategy to represent Northern cities, Scotland, the wealth of Londoners who are already its supporters and then somehow to entice those of small town and middle England to come across from the Tories?

I say it's an impossible job and Labour has no real sense of any identity here in the early 21st Century. Nor will its leadership contest likely to furnish it with one. I don't know about a 1000 year reich of Conservative government, but it's hard to see it being limited to just the next 5, 15 or 25...

Second Class Citizens

Britain has for the last two parliamentary terms, one Labour, one Conservative-Lib-Dem coalition, had a black hole of debt. Although the current Chancellor George Osborne claims a growing economy will fill this hole, whoever triumphs at the next election will almost certainly tackle it with a swingeing raft of austerity cuts.




The problem with this, at least as manifested under the current government, is who suffers from the cuts. Despite government claims to the contrary, we are not in this together. Irrespective of the maths which deem cutting benefits and services of the poorest and most needy will reap the required amount of savings, rather than increased taxes on the rich, and passing over the ideological strand behind this decision, the problem is what it says about the people you will target for savings and those you won't.




Mrs Thatcher also inherited a financial black hole. She went about it through a mixture of increased economic growth (share ownership, the financial Big bang, buying council homes for private ownership) and cutting back services and benefits (local government funding, the arts, student grants, unemployment benefit). Everything had to be justified in terms of the free market. Did it turn a profit, or did it cost the State to provide? People were formally costed, either as productive, or as a drain, as a burden to the State. The productive elements of the working class were welcomed with offers to buy shares and council houses and to do everything on credit (for which we are now paying with our debt crisis). Those less well-off were pretty much left to sink in unemployment, sink housing and failing schools. And before you think this is merely a case of Thatcher or Conservative-bashing, Blair and Brown did nothing to reverse these policies of any significance. Those places that rioted in London in 2011 were the same as had rioted under Thatcher in the 80s. This was the next generation, the children and grandchildren of the earlier rioters. Nothing had materially changed within their communities in 30 years.




With Mrs Thatcher having executed the first raft of cuts to welfare benefits and services, what else remained for the current government to make savings on? They have gone far further than Thatcher ever did, targeting the disabled, people in social housing with spare rooms (a punishment for not buying your Council House?), police and army numbers cut back t5o the bare bone and despite Lib-Dem promises, an increase in student loans to pay for tuition. Yet no one is held responsible for the economic crisis that blighted so many people's lives against which this backdrop of cuts was taking place. The Power companies went unchecked on their price rises and recently laggardly response to the collapse in the oil price. Unmerited bonuses to executives leaving their jobs in failure are also allowed to proceed, unless the resignee has the grace to forego what they are entitled to, their reward for failure.


So here's the thing. All people having been costed. the decision has been made that money will be clawed-back from those at the bottom of the economic pyramid, those more vulnerable and needy, rather than those higher up. This implicitly, or maybe even explicitly, avows that such people are worth less to the government and the State than those higher up the ladder. A two-tiered system of favour and prejudice if ever there was one. The calculation is these people cost the state more and are likely to return less to the coffers, therefore they are the ones ripe for plucking for savings. Rather than tax those more able to cope and who can contribute more to State coffers. This is what happens when people are reduced to financial assets or liabilities. What does it behove a State to do to earn the loyalty and allegiance of its citizens? Not to scare off the rich with higher tax rates, or to provide a minimum level of help and assistance for those who are the worst off in society? If the rich can be frightened away so easily, then they are not really that committed to Britain, but only to their money. If the poor have their safety net shredded and ripped away from them, then that is not a State I want to pledge my allegiance to either.


This is not the politics of envy, this is the politics of decency and propriety. The terrorists win if in the campaign to defeat them, we sacrifice so much of what it means to be free and living in a democracy. Similarly, Great Britain ceases to be great if under economic burdens it strips away every welfare benefit and service that makes us a civilised society that looks after its most vulnerable citizens.


Oh and don't be fooled, if Ed Miliband acceded to power, he might tinker around the edges with things like a freeze on power prices, but he would still make swingeing cuts because he had to. How much would he tax the rich when push comes to shove? Blair didn't. Brown didn't. they are too scared of alienating some of that cohort who they know they need their votes to obtain power.


So do I have any solutions? Of course not. But I do know a society has to look at itself and decide what its values are, what living in that country means and stands for. And I know treating your citizens as economic indices and wealth-earning units is not the way to go. I also feel Great Britain should lose some of its self-aggrandised credit-rating, not the formal financial rating, but that of calling itself 'Great'. If we are perennially to face a financial black hole and decisions attendant on that, maybe we are not a powerhouse in the world anymore. Without our sense of self-inflation, then perhaps we wouldn't feel such a compunction to fight long-term foreign wars that are such a drain on our finances. Forget our glorious history, in the here and now we are a second division country,  acting and strutting as if we were still in the Premiership of nations. Of course no politician will own up to this because it is electoral suicide. The myth of Britain's greatness is to prevail. So to keep that neon sign illuminated, we punish the weakest and most vulnerable of our citizens, without even providing them a Band Aid for the sake of appearances.

Confessional - #fridayflash

He plucked the sheet from the birdcage. The mynah bird still had its head tucked under its wing. "That time I said I had to drive to Leeds for a meeting, I was actually down the clap clinic getting a prescription". A mixture of drowsiness and not having been exposed to those particular words before, meant that for once the bird didn't come back with a snappily inappropriate retort.

He bounded up the stairs into the bedroom. His wife caught sight of him looming up in the dressing table mirror and turned to put up her arms to warn him away from her facepack. Undeterred, he gently cupped the back of her skull and drew her forward so that their foreheads met. "When I was thirteen, I caught a frog and pulled it to pieces out of some sort of perverse desire to see how it was made". He pulled away and she handed him one of her wet cotton wipes to remove the cream transferred to his brow. She put it down to the significance of this red letter day and offered a silent prayer it wasn't going to be like this for the next three weeks.

Ensconced within the plush leather in the back of the limo, he levered himself forward as he depressed the partition glass. The back of the driver hove into view. "Anytime the family au pair was out the house, I would go to the laundry basket and take out a pair of her stockings and wrap them around my face and inhale. Just once I tried it around my neck and squeezed, but I'll admit, I got scared." Apart from a slight cocking of his head measured by the tilt of the peak of his cap, the chauffeur managed dutifully to keep his eyes on the road.

He pulled on the sash cord and the curtains parted from the plaque. The applause from the old people's home residents was somewhat subdued by their arthritic venerability. But he wrought an even greater bewilderment when he informed them that not only had he smoked cannabis regularly in his younger days, he had most definitely inhaled. He had only desisted from the happy habit when his dinner party circuit supplier had been caught and imprisoned. As he left the building, a wheelchair bound lady winked at him. But it could conceivably have been a twitch.

Perched on a soapbox to address a precision engineering factory's shopfloor, he opened his arms out wide in a gesture of embrace. Then he scissored them back into his chest as he regaled them with details of stealing reams of paper and typewriter ribbons from his first office job. How he had even managed to smuggle out one of the company's two VCR machines. The workforce then broke out into a riot of mockingly trying to lift their hundred weight machine tools and miming trying to stretch their pockets over them. He turned rather helplessly to his host who glared daggers at him.

At the Police Federation he blurted that he'd launched surreptitious spitball after spitball from the observation deck of the Empire State Building and tried to imagine them landing on pedestrians below. At the children's hospice with the camera whirring, he leaned in close to a little girl hooked up to drips and told her he'd started drinking in pubs at sixteen and his first X-rated movie was when he was seventeen. Her medication meant she fell back into slumber while he was talking. The boom mic did however pick up all his words.

On the podium at Pride, he owned that he'd loved taking his children to playgroup as he got to ogle all the breast-feeding mothers. At the Inter-faiths conference he came clean about his Gap year antics. All those interminable train journeys around Europe were spent playing gin rummy for money with his card novice travelling partner whom he had just taught the game and therefore gradually cleaned out of money. An Imam replied that gambling was a sin. A Rabbi stroked his beard and told him he should go make recompense to the man even thirty years later as it was now. A priest took him by the elbow and quietly inquired if he thought of converting to Catholicism. After all it wasn't unheard of within his line of work.

After the polls closed on election day, the country had revealed itself split right down the middle. Half the nation had welcomed his uncommon honesty as evidence of a man who could be trusted to tell it like it is. But the landslide of support his strategists had anticipated was undoubtedly compromised by their man's unfathomable compulsion to confess anything, anywhere, at any time. This had prompted a backlash coalition, ranging from those Dutch uncles aghast at his moral reprehensibility; through those amateur psychologists gauging that he had just too many character flaws to be depended upon for the pressures of high office; down to the pragmatists who merely doubted his abilities at summits and treaties, given the lack of tact and diplomacy witnessed during the campaign. His now estranged wife fell into the first cohort of the naysayers.

His intention to step down from the Party rather than contest the re-run election, was announced on his behalf. Since his aides couldn't be sure he wouldn't be overcome with the compelling urge to confess that retirement hadn't actually been his decision.

from the flash collection, available on Amazon Kindle