Skip to main content

The Final Tally.

The last three weeks have been amongst the most interesting and critical in British politics in a generation, but inevitably, I have been so busy that blogging has been very sparse indeed.

In fact I think we have indeed seen one of the fabled tipping points in British Politics that seems to come once in a generation. many will say that the catastrophic defeats inflicted on the Labour Party in the local elections are simply the mark of the swing of the political pendulum. The Conservatives having avoided their own meltdown are now poised to recover. However, I think that this actually understates the chaos in the Labour Party. It is not just in the marginal areas that labour are going down- though the numbers are truly appalling from the Labour perspective. It is in the very heartland of Labour that they are losing their strength. In Wales, they lost control of Blaenau Gwent, Caerphilly, Merthyr Tydfil, Flintshire, Newport and Torfaen, leaving them in control of just two councils in the Principality. In the English Cities, Labour no longer control Wolverhampton, Hartlepool, Reading, and of course lost in London too.

Undeniably the Conservatives are triumphant- gains across the board with some very few crucial exceptions. Those exceptions, interestingly include many places with Liberal Democrat MPs: Colchester, Eastleigh, Cambridge, Purbeck (which covers Mid Dorset), Portsmouth South, Cheltenham, South Lakeland. Meanwhile the Liberal Democrats took control in St Albans (admittedly by a fluke of the electoral system), Burnley, Hull and Sheffield and also did well in Rochdale, Oldham and Stockport- these last four also places with Liberal Democrat MPs. Liverpool was a weaker result, but the party retains control with the defection of an independent. Overall, with the exception of Romsey and the seats in South West London, owing the rather unique circumstances of the London election, the Liberal Democrats have managed to secure their position, where they needed to win.

However, the situation for Labour is bleak indeed. In Scotland- of which much more in a later blog- they seem poised to follow the Conservatives towards destruction. In Wales, they face real challenges for the first time. In the Northern Cities they face pressure from an emerging anti-Labour axis. So, the political atmosphere is now full of Conservative hope, and Labour fear.

Yet this may not be the swing of the pendulum- it may be that the long overdue complete realignment of British politics is underway. Labour have long ago lost their intellectual foundation, and in time the New Labour renaissance may prove to have been the dying fall.

The loss of the charismatic and controversial Tony Blair now draws attention to the fact that Labour are rudderless. The government founded on managerialism is bereft of new ideas and has let the Conservatives take the high ground even in the key areas that Labour thought it owned: the issues of poverty and inequality.

These elections are indeed the beginning of the end for Labour. The question is what can Labour do to avoid not merely defeat, but destruction?

This creates a question to strike fear into the hearts of the Milbank set, but a real quandary for the Liberal Democrats. If the Liberal Democrats can avoid the squeeze, and retain a significant body of MPs, then the platform to change the structure and not merely the political inclination of British politics becomes more open. The question for the Liberal Democrats now is how to articulate the need not only to change the party of government, but also the system of government.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Post Truth and Justice

The past decade has seen the rise of so-called "post truth" politics.  Instead of mere misrepresentation of facts to serve an argument, political figures began to put forward arguments which denied easily provable facts, and then blustered and browbeat those who pointed out the lie.  The political class was able to get away with "post truth" positions because the infrastructure that reported their activity has been suborned directly into the process. In short, the media abandoned long-cherished traditions of objectivity and began a slow slide into undeclared bias and partisanship.  The "fourth estate" was always a key piece of how democratic societies worked, since the press, and later the broadcast media could shape opinion by the way they reported on the political process. As a result there has never been a golden age of objective media, but nevertheless individual reporters acquired better or worse reputations for the quality of their reporting and ...

Liberal Democrats v Conservatives: the battle in the blogosphere

It is probably fair to say that the advent of Nick Clegg, the new leader of the Liberal Democrats, has not been greeted with unalloyed joy by our Conservative opponents. Indeed, it would hardly be wrong to say that the past few weeks has seen some "pretty robust" debate between Conservative and Liberal Democrat bloggers. Even the Queen Mum of blogging, the generally genial Iain Dale seems to have been featuring as many stories as he can to try to show Liberal Democrats in as poor a light as possible. Neither, to be fair, has the traffic been all one way: I have "fisked' Mr. Cameron's rather half-baked proposals on health, and attacked several of the Conservative positions that have emerged from the fog of their policy making process. Most Liberal Democrats have attacked the Conservatives probably with more vigour even than the distrusted, discredited Labour government. So what lies behind this sharper debate, this emerging war in the blogosphere? Partly- in my ...

One Year On

  Head vabariigi iseseisvuspäeva! Happy Estonian Independence Day! It is one year since I stood outside the Estonian Parliament for the traditional raising of the national flag from Tall Hermann tower. Looking at the young fraternities gathered with their flags, I was very sure that Estonia too would soon be facing the aggression of the criminal Russian regime. A tragic and dark day. 5 eyes intelligence had been clear: an all out invasion was going to happen, and Putin´s goals included- and still include- "restoration" of Russian imperial power across Europe, even to the Atlantic. Yet there was one Western intelligence failure: we all underestimated the guts of the Ukrainian armed forces, the ZSU, and its President and people. One year on, Estonia, and indeed all the front line states against Russia, knows that Ukraine saved us. Estonia used that time to prepare itself, should that "delayed" onslaught ever be unleashed, but equally the determination of Kaja Kallas, ...