We'd be in real trouble without an effective opposition and regular changes of government, so even though I'm glad about this result, I'm worried about Labour. Boundary changes and, perhaps, some reform of the BBC will work against them, and even though the large number of new SNP MPs will, necessarily, include some car crashes I can't see Labour sweeping back in Scotland soon.
The party that was born in an industrial landscape that no longer exists, and that fell prey to a mid-twentieth century nationalisation fallacy that destroyed volume car production, prevented heavy industry from modernising so it died (Thatcher was just the undertaker) and closed the branch railway system, has only come close to re-inventing itself in a sectarian identity politics most people find repulsive, and that has led to obscenities like Rotherham.
UKIP's appeal to Old Labour voters was apparent, not least in the 'uneducated' east coast from Clacton to Hull, where they came second in 120 constituencies. They made sweeping inroads into councils without denting Tory gains. Old Labour always was a 'stop the world I want to get off' party, yearning for a past of jobs for life no less fictitious than the Express's nostalgia for the 1950s. UKIP gives that voice more effectively than Labour, today.
Worst of all for Labour, though not so obvious, were the liberal supporters who couldn't vote Labour, or who did so holding their noses. Most of them were prevented only by tribalism from voting Conservative. How long can that last? How long can a party with Lutfer Rahman-supporting UNISON as Kingmaker, that has refused to expel Livingstone, that only expelled Galloway (for Christ's sake) when he called for mutiny in the armed forces - but not before then - keep their loyalty?
Even thoughtful Labour partisans adopt tribal positions on questions like the EU, the Human Rights Act, the NHS , Welfare reform. Even when they write about Labour's need to stop hating the provinces and the self-employed trades, contempt drips through. There's still the unexamined narcissism that believes the poor are hated by the Tories, and only they can provide clean hay and warm barns - the notion people want to stand beside them rather than beneath them doesn't seem to occur. The idea that the general rise in prosperity means more and more people don't just want that, they expect it, is unimaginable to them. The idea that the people who know most clearly that there are freeloaders and scroungers are the fucking working class who live next door to them isn't anywhere near their horizons.
Backwoods Tories are, literally, dying off. Oddly, and entirely unanticipated, demographics favour the Tories. They're becoming more liberal because the illiberal ones are pegging it. Labour didn't realise that immigrants are actually natural Conservatives, ambitious, hard-working, socially conservative.
I don't want fifty years of Conservative government with UKIP emerging as the main opposition. I'd like an increasingly liberal Conservative Party kept like that because the main threat is further to the left. I'd like a party that is still too close to inherited privilege and wealth moderated by meritocratic and liberal pressure.
But unless Labour guts itself, there's a possibility - no more than that - of it becoming irrelevant.
And what party has ever gutted itself?
No comments:
Post a Comment