Skip to main content

The strange death of the Labour Party

So many things going on in the markets... and even as the North Korean regime tries to start a war, the Spanish banks fall to pieces, the Greek economy falls into smaller pieces, yet still the death throes of the Labour Party attract my attention.

Oooo... Please, please: choose a Miliband, no pur..lease!

I so want the Labour Party dead.

These are identikit professional politicians - bloodless, passionless and unprincipled, they represent why the Labour Party lost its soul the day they chose Tony Blair as its "leader". That discount Caudillo trampled any basic principle that the Socialist Party ever had (although as a fairly fierce anti-Socialist, I can't say he was exactly wrong). Now Labour want to choose either the clumsy Tweedledee of thoughtless me too-ism or the doltish Tweedledum of thoughtless opportunism. They think that the Coalition will eventually fold and that then they can sweep in triumph back to the power from which they have been temporarily excluded...

Err.. The Coalition has not simply put the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives into government, it has put the Liberal view of the constitution into power. This was something that only ever had to happen once. The accountability of greater freedom, the openness of a more powerful franchise: all of these are part of the programme that Her Majesty The Queen outlined today. The Labour Party has no answers. They think that the game is still the same.

But it is not.

Labour not only face the more than 60% of the population that voted for the coalition parties. They face a completely different political game.

Labour might retreat into populism: greater restrictions on immigration, more invasions against the free market, more anti-Europeanism, but the fact is that the balance that the coalition is striking is about right: Labour will either look extremist or, even worse, simply wrong. Even if they simply continue to plough the furrow of Blair-Brownism, the battle has moved to a different field.

So: the question emerges: How do they oppose?

Actually, the answer in those terms is simple: They should choose Diane Abbot. Only she has the popular touch. She has warmth and charm. She is bright and so clearly not a product of the political machine.

Such a total contrast to the bloodless Milibands.

But Labour won't touch her.

"Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad"
Labels:

Comments

Newmania said…
Well for good or ill you are certainly right that this feels like something quite new


I have been impressed with the Lib Dems in power thus far .David Laws in particular.
8:22 pm
Cicero said…
Quite an admission, given the way we crossed swords in the past, Newmania. I, in turn, must offer a generous admission, that I was wrong about David Cameron too. The point is that the coalition has turned out- as we in the Lib Dems certainly hoped- to be more than the sum of the parts... if the nutters amongst the excluded Tories can be kept under control, this could be the best government in nearly 100 years.

Heaven knows, our country needs it..
10:01 pm
G Eagle Esq said…
N'mania " .... I have been impressed by the Lb Dems ..."

Cicero ".... I was wrong about David Cameron too ..."

Salve, Magister Cicero

I flatter myself that I agree with you and the incisive Magistro Newmania on so many things

.... apart of course on whether Tenterden should be towed into the North Sea and sunk to form a Breakwater protecting the Norfolk Coast from the erosions of the Sea & Socialism

AND I hope that your (plural) optimisms prove to be vindicated

BUT the Night is Young .....

We have seen only a minimal gesture towards the massive reductions required in State-Over-Spending

AND INDEED we must not forget the wisdoms of our Roman Ancestors :

CARTHAGO EST DELENDA

Vale

Aquila non Candida
7:16 am
Newmania said…
I don`t see it quite that way , its an interesting subject , but I share your enthusiasm overall
7:35 am
Left Lib said…
Hang on. I thought THIS government was going to pass populist policies on immigration?
Indeed, isn't it David Cameron who is now in thrall to the previous New Labour Rupert Murdoch?
It is clear that the reason that you want Labour to die is that you don't like it. However that in itself is the not reason that will cause Labour to die, should it in fact do so.
It was the Liberal Democrats who supported the nationalisation of Northern Rock, before even Labour managed it. It is nice to have socialism as an option when all else fails.
2:06 pm
Ian R Thorpe said…
I too would have loved to see Diane Abbott in with a decent shout. But of course she never had a chance. I wonder if her candidacy was simply a ploy to prove to skeptics that a smooth succession for New Labour's aointed one was being orchestrated by the Prince Of Darkness Peter M.
8:21 pm
Post a Comment

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 ...
1 comment
Read more

The Will of the People

Many of the most criminal political minds of the past generations have claimed to be an expression of the "will of the people"... The will of the people, that is, as interpreted by themselves. Most authoritarian rulers: Napoleon III, Mussolini, Hitler, have called referendums in order to claim some spurious popular support for the actions they had already determined upon. The problem with the June 2016 European Union was that the question was actually insufficiently clear. To leave the EU was actually a vast set of choices, not one specific choice. Danial Hannan, once of faces of Vote Leave was quite clear that leaving the EU did NOT mean leaving the Single Market:    “There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border. We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave.” He declared: “Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market.” The problem was that this relatively moderate position was almost immediately ...
Post a Comment
Read more

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 ...
20 comments
Read more