I don’t like what has happened to the Labour Party. I don’t like the pandering to confessional groups, the extreme wokery, the willingness of some of its members and representatives to engage in divisive race baiting or the bringing onboard of Marxists and Trotskyites who once the party worked very hard to keep from positions of influence. The Labour Party is an absolute mess, a biased, arrogant, cynical mess that sneers at traditional values and stuff that most people would say is OK, stuff like patriotism for example.
Some of Labour’s policies such as those regarding border control and migration are absolutely loathed by the majority of the British public, something we can see quite clearly from Labour’s 2019 election disaster. I can’t bring myself to vote Labour I really can’t. Labour is such a mess that I think I’d rather eat my own faeces than vote Labour, such is the disdain that I feel for them these days.
But not having a mass market party like Labour could and should be is dangerous to British politics and British society. Our system requires there to be a government sitting opposite an opposition that can hold the government, that is the party that has the majority in the House of Commons, to account. Labour cannot do this while they are in such a mess and while confessional groups, the Marxists and Trots along with the various race baiters hold so much power in the party. But how on earth can this mess be sorted out? I don’t want to live in an elected dictatorship where one party keeps getting elected because the opposition is so useless that they cannot win.
Parliamentary democracy should mean that there is a fairly reasonable chance that the party which is governing can change. The problem is Labour, whilst still with a relatively large number of members of parliament, is so god-damn awful that fewer and fewer normal people want to vote for them. They are sustained by the confessional communal vote, the votes of idiotic left wing students, public sector employees along with the unemployed and the unemployable. The Labour Party can no longer be described as a party that represents the British working class.
Labour can’t make the leap to electability without appealing to as wide a number of people as possible and that will mean dumping the policies and attitudes that turn off normal people, something that will send the Labour activists into a frenzy. What Labour needs is a Tony Blair who is not Tony Blair if you see what I mean, a person or political grouping within the Party who will make the party electable even if doing so makes the left go crazy. The issue for me is that times are different now from when Kinnock expelled the Trots and Blair made the party electable again.
Blair, as much as his policies have turned out to be disastrous, was able to turn the party around because previous leaders, for example Neil Kinnock, had done the hard work of getting the Trots and the far Left crazies out of the party. Now the situation is very much different. Not only have the Trots and crazies come back but they are now in positions of power and of influence. Sir Keir Starmer is in my view very much in the position that Kinnock was in back in the 80’s. He’s faced with a strong Tory party that is picking up votes and keeping power not mainly because they are doing stuff that the electorate are wildly enthusiastic about, but because the Labour alternative is a thousand times worse. Just like Kinnock, Starmer is leading an unelectable Labour Party. It might well be the case that Starmer will have to be a Kinnock II, a sacrificial leader who spends all his time not winning elections but dealing with the business of making the party electable in the future. Winning an election might be for the next or the next but one Labour leader.
The Labour Party is in an absolute mess. It has abandoned, somewhat gleefully I might say, the working classes of Britain no matter what the race, religion or whatever of these workers. The ‘core votes’ that Labour now chase such as confessional groups, those enamoured of racialist and race based politics and the London metro-Left middle classes, do not represent the nation as a whole and neither does Labour because of their choice to focus on these particular groups. Labour are seen by all too many British voters as being weak. Labour are seen as weak on borders, weak on the economy, weak on social cohesion, weak on patriotism, weak on freedom and most importantly, weak on protecting and enhancing the lives of the very people this party was set up to protect and enhance.
Labour are taking hit after hit electorally and even lost their deposit in the Amersham by-election, something I’d never expected to see. Heads in the party need to be banged together in order to knock some sense into the party and make it a) electable and b)represent the people that it was created to represent. Who would do this head knocking? Damned if I know. Back in the fifties and sixties if a Labour Party of that time had been as awful as today’s party is then it’s likely that the Trade Unions would have stepped in to try to sort out the mess. The problem is that the reforms made by Blair and Kinnock to reduce the influence of Trade Unions on the party mean that there is no outside entity who can say ‘come along now, sort this shit out’. In any event, Trade Unions have far less support than they once did. In 1979 there were over 13 million trade union members which had fallen to 6.4 million in 2019. Most Trade Union members are in the public sector with the UK Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy stating that there are 3.77 million unionised public sector workers as opposed to 2.77 million in the private sector.
With reduced influence and reduced numbers of trade unionists, I can’t see how the Trade Unions, even if they wanted to, could push for the sort of much needed reforms that Labour requires onto the party. I can’t imagine those remaining Trade Unions that are too often dominated by the Left wanting Labour to call for secure borders, the removal of wokery, unbiased and equitable policing and courts, honesty about extremist Islam, freedom of speech or any of the myriad other policies and positions that Labour would need to be promoting. The terrible thing about British politics today is that Labour are not doing what is necessary in order to make them worthy opponents of a Conservative Party that either ignores or pays lip service to these sort of issues, issues that are of great concern to the British public.
I’d like some feedback from the erudite and educated readers of this blog as to whether Labour can be repaired and how if that is the case can it be done? I don’t know about you but if I was presented by a Labour Party which had abandoned much of what currently ails it then I’d be tempted to vote for it. Many reasonable Britons would be willing in my view to support a party that didn’t pander to Islam, didn’t call for open borders, wasn’t favourable to pushing the trans cult in primary schools, was patriotic, that respected the rights of the British subject, that actively campaigned for freedom of speech and recognised that some aspects of social conservatism are still supported by the working classes.
The Government need an opposition. The Lib Dems can’t do it, they are the ‘dead parrot’ of the UK political scene, an ex party of government. Modern media and especially social media has allowed the electorate see them for what they are which is a party that is as slippery as an eel covered in Vaseline. We can see the Lib Dems being Janus faced and being one thing to urban voters and quite another to rural voters and a lot of people don’t like that. Sure they will have the occasional by-election success or pick up protest votes, but they are no longer a mass party or see themselves or are seen by the voters as such. Any chance of relevance they might have had was squandered by their opposition to Brexit.
As much as I would like to see a coalition of independents or small parties (even if some of these parties are not to my taste) being the opposition that the system needs, it is difficult for this to be achieved in the First Past The Post electoral system. The bar that needs to be crossed by insurgent parties in this system is very high. A vast number of motivated electors need to turn out to vote for insurgents in order to have a chance of winning a seat.
At present the only party that is big enough, organised enough and has sufficient brand recognition among the public to be a potential party of government is Labour. However it cannot become a party of government until it starts to promote what the British people and not what the Left or their pet voting blocs want. It will still get healthy numbers of MP’s in the Commons if it doesn’t change, but it will not make the leap to government and being a government that the majority can have confidence in unless it changes.
So I ask again. Can Labour be repaired and if so how could that happen.
Nope. Best scenario IMO is for Labour to die and the Conservatives to spilt into Whigs and Tories (or whatever they want to call their modern descendants)
Interesting point. Labour dying off might be the long term scenario but what worries me is that such a split might take decades a long time for the conservatives to split. The only scenario that comes to mind where this could happen quickly and not leave the Tories with no opposition for a long time is if Labour implodes very very quickly causing the Tories to split into factions at the same or similar time.
Share your concerns about the lack of a viable opposition but l’m afraid that l’ve come to different conclusions. ln my opinion BOTH major parties fail to inspire, while the Tories may not be most reliable or trustworthy of friends the Labour Party has, on too many occasions in my lifetime, shown themselves to be my enemy (and don’t get me started on the damage that politically motivated union activists have done to this country). As a result l have only ever been able to vote against a party that l have come to despise.
lt would be nice, just once before l die, to enthusiastically support the party l do vote for.
Like the EU the Labour party is, in my opinion again, unreformable simply because what others see as a fault they see as a feature. This is sad as it has achieved a lot of good in it’s time but during my adult lifetime it seems to have done more harm than good. Over the years l’ve seen out of control unions driving manufacturing out of this country and the privatisation of industries that are too important to be in private hands for the same reason (out of control unions), out of control immigration and yes, out of control finances. More recently, they have enthusiastically embraced every devisive social ideology exported by the USA without even questioning what it is or whether it is valid. Exactly how can a party like this be, in any way, worth saving? It is now rotten to the core – on both wings.
As l said it’s a shame because it does have people that l could vote for, Paul Embery springs to mind but there are others.
While it’s not good for democracy in the short term l believe the best outcome for the country in the long term is for Labour to experience an extinction event at the next general election. There are some major issues which need to be addressed and Labour in it’s current form will just obstruct any attempt to deal with them. Better to give one party a generation in power while a viable alternative can grow to eventually challenge.for government.
I think we both agree that our democracy is broken at the moment but unlike you l believe it’s only hope for recovery lies in the Labour party becoming an electoral irrelevance. Can’t say l like that conclusion much though.
You make some interesting if pessimistic points. You may be correct that Labour is not reformable although there are some like Paul Embury who believe that this might be possible. As we are experiencing a Tory govt who don’t seem that interested in conserving anything and whose policies are little distinguishable from the Lib Dems, I’m seriously uneasy about having no opposition to them. The Tories are bad enough and untrustworthy enough already, imagine how worse they would be without an opposition?
If Labour is not reformable then an extinction event might be what is needed. It would as you say be bad for democracy but with luck something less lunatic and dangerous would replace them.
You are right that l can be pessimistic when l look at some of the ways this country has changed over my lifetime (probably an age thing) but l am also quite optimistic about the future. Yes, there is a mountain to climb but that’s not impossible and we have already taken the first, essential step by leaving the EU. l see the shoots of push back in many of the areas that l believe need to be addressed so, while the country of my youth may have gone forever there is also the promise of a much better future.
As for Bojo and Co’s apparent economic liberalism it may be a winning strategy although l agree the Tories need to toughen up on the social conservatism part. Mathew Goodwin gave a good explanation of why this is likely on Wednesdays Andrew Neil show – worth watching if you haven’t already.
I haven’t seen that Andrew Neil show episode I’ll go look it up today if I get the chance.
It’s easy to be pessimistic, especially when it’s very obvious that there are elements in politics and the adminisphere who are in the words of Isaiah ‘calling good evil and evil good’.
I concur with your view that Britain has taken the first step to improvement by leaving the EU. Maybe the realisation that leaving the EU was the first step to undoing the damage that the Left has done to Britain was what was behind the Left’s screaming hatred of Brexit?
Like you I’m beginning to see pushback. People both inside and outside government are starting to challenge the wilder shores of the trans cult for example, commentators from the world of feminism such as Kelly Jay Keen are asking the question whether the fall in life chances of white working class children as opposed to those from Asian (south Asian and South East Asian) groups is down to these Asian groups having more stable families and I’m seeing more normal people questioning the censorship about things like Islam.
The Tories are doing well electorally at present and I believe that this is partially down to a vaccine rollout that is much more successful than those of EU nations. It also might be linked to voters believing that however bad the Tories might be, Labour are worse. It is interesting to wonder how the Tories would perform if they were up against a truly representative opposition party?
‘ It is interesting to wonder how the Tories would perform if they were up against a truly representative opposition party?’ – Now that is a thought experiment worth having and what l hope will come from the country’s current political realignment.
My guess is that they will rise to the challenge and so long as it becomes a ‘battle of ideas’ the outcome should be good for the whole country. Do expect genuinely talented people from our immigrant communites to shine in this scenario, Kemi Badenoch is one l’d expect to see there, also Rakib Ehsan (see his essay ‘the rise of multi-ethnic conservatism’ at Spiked for a taste), Mercy Muroki (Commissioner for Commission on Race and Ethnic disparities, GB News presenter) and Inaya Folarin Iman (founder of Equiano Project and Free Speech Champions, GB News presenter) among many others.
See, I can be optimistic – some of the time.
I comment as a not particularly “erudite and educated” reader. I have not found percentages for the actual Muslim vote in the 2010 general election, but a survey mentioned in the Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/feb/22/muslim-voters-labour) suggested that around 35% of voting Muslims would choose Labour and around 13% would choose Conservative in that year. Fast forward to after Ed Miliband sold Labour membership for £3 in 2014… According to MEND’s (my apologies) figures for the 2015 general election, 64% Muslims voted Labour while 25% voted Conservative. In the 2017 general election, according to BRIN (British Religion In Numbers), 85% of Muslims voted for Corbynista Labour and 11% supported the Conservatives. Conversely, this period sees the Jewish vote for Labour falling and we know why.
The LabourList (https://labourlist.org/2021/06/starmer-rated-far-less-favourably-than-labour-by-muslim-voters-poll-finds/) reports “Starmer rated far less favourably than Labour by Muslim voters”. What would seem to make him more favourable as Labour leader among this confessional group is an anti-Israel stance or an ethically-blinkered Palestinian stance (same thing), which would again draw rightful criticism as antisemitic bias. George Galloway’s certainty that, if Labour lose the Batley and Spen by-election, it will be “curtains for Keith Starmer” as leader of the Party, appears not to consider that much of Labour may not want to reinvest in antisemitism in order to keep Muslim votes, though the Party may be riven with argy-bargy trying to define “antisemitism” in a way favourable to ethically-blind support for Palestinians. The “idiotic left” of the Party, who currently promote and feed politically on Islamopandering, will throw hissy fits, I think, at “haemorrhaging” Muslim votes, and want leadership to win the confessional ex-supporters back, which will mean again reinvesting in antisemitism and denial of Palestinian culpability. (This is a generic microcosm of what “democracy” without a preceding list of sanity-indicating adjectives looks like, and should act as a warning!) But, alas, my crystal ball goes cloudy at this point and I cannot tell if “Marxists and Trots along with the various race baiters” will ‘exit, stage left’ along with ethically-blinkered pro-Palestinian agitators. Of course, if they do, Labour would be in a good position to go with saner representative policies and attitudes.
The first thing to tackle is the appearance of the party. The majority look like a sack of spuds. If they want to represent people then they need to look like they take care of themselves to then dictate to others.
They need some strong blood who aren’t afraid to confront what is wrong with Great Britain. They need people with conviction and who believe in themselves.
Once this crappy pandemic is over, the Labour party again need to concentrate on traditional values such as employment, education, proper policing, benefits (for the sick), medical care, environmentally friendly businesses and housing, care for the young and old.
There is much wiggle room for making huge improvements in these matters.
But the very first thing Labour should do is to go out and speak to ALL people. Rich or poor, black or white, sick or healthy, and for those they are interacting with to really feel they are being listened to. Not to do publicity set ups with only certain questions answered to make themselves look good.
The trouble is, at the moment the Labour party look shambolic, weak and with certain members being in the party, they are regarded as untrustworthy.
If I think of anything else I will let you know.