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Date: 10/05/15
Rounding Up (Part Two)
So, whither each of the parties in the next year or three?
The Conservatives have already started staking out their policies (which may include staking the non-productive poor out on anthills just for the general amusement of the gratin and readers of the Daily Mail). The axe will swing, the Health Service (at least in England) will fall; the Human Rights Act will be shredded (replaced with a British Bill Of Rights which - being British - will consist only of those rights which The Great And The Good will deem it fit for us to have, and which themselves may be withdrawn at any time in the National Interest™); even more parts of our supposedly independent penal and legal structures will be thrown to the jackals and effectively off-limits to anyone who doesn't own anything smaller than, say, Berkshire; there will be a replacement for the most redundant weapons system in existence; tenants will be soaked (possibly in sulphuric acid) whilst the land-bankers and buy-to-let parasites thrive; the City of London will continue to be a hyper-capitalist onshore offshore-island state untouchable by either legislation or any last, lingering tendrils of probity; the State will be able to snaffle up all of your private electronic communications without just cause or legal redress, said information to be shared with foreign governments and corporations; and the bile, the hatred, the sheer inhuman screeching of the press will continue and be augmented with no prospect of meaningful control being imposed (the Murdochs and Barclays must be appeased at all times). The BBC itself may be dismembered, although that may not be as great a loss as the more starry-eyed would perceive it to be, it having of late become overtly what it has been on the sly from its inception, i.e. The State Broadcaster.
There will be a few cautious opinions expressed in private within the Party by those few who are capable of seeing a wider picture, and by those remaining intellects with sufficient experience to know how transitory political dominance can be; but they will be easily hooted down by the pack of ravenous blue-arsed baboons who see one narrow election victory as proof of their fitness to rule evermore.
And so it is likely that hubris will once again be followed by Nemesis. It is worth remembering that the incoming government is in a far more tenuous position than its predecessor. Its majority (16) is lower than that with which John Major had to work over two decades ago, and we know how that turned out, don't we boys and girls? It would only take a couple of inconvenient deaths and/or scandals to trim that majority down to unworkably thin levels; and this is before we consider another matter where the comparisons between the early nineties and today are worth noting:
Europe.
Having nailed not only his colours but his balls to the mast, Cameron is now obliged to stage that fateful in/out referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union. He has no choice because - although the personnel (Bill Cash aside) has changed - the Europhobes in the parliamentary Conservative Party are as loud and insistent as ever, and will demand that the question be put. If they don't get their way, either key abstentions or outright defections to UKIP would quite likely follow, and there goes the majority. Even if that didn't happen, the loss of credibility in Cameron would be crippling, just as it was for his precursor.
Consider the repercussions of such a vote, especially remembering that the Great British Public are under-, mis- and utterly mal-informed about the whole issue of the EU - and about things 'foreign' in general, come to that - by print media whose owners have so strong a vested interest in the outcome being 'No' that one cannot possibly expect a genuinely informed choice being made by that vast majority of the population which still gets - and, astonishingly, believes - its news from those sources.
Just supposing that the result of any such plebiscite is that England votes quite strongly to leave, Wales and Northern Ireland vote on balance to stay, and Scotland shows a substantial majority in favour of staying in as well. In the same way that the 'UK' nearly always gets the government that England wants by sheer force of numbers, the answer would be deemed to be a sizeable 'No' to continued membership. Where would that leave Wales and Northern Ireland? Ultimately, outside the EU, as they would have no discernable clout. But Scotland would be a different matter: as Nicola Sturgeon has said that another independence referendum would only take place if there were a significant change in material circumstances, and such an outcome would clearly constitute such a change, the SNP - now the overwhelming political expression of the will of the people of Scotland - would surely be entitled to demand a fresh vote on the matter. Any attempts by Westminster to prevent a second referendum taking place would be cloddish, stupid and futile (and are therefore highly likely given the increasing hostility to Scotland and its inhabitants being displayed by the London élites - even those who one would have thought would know better). If and when such a referendum were to be granted - even if through gritted teeth - then the likelihood of it having a very different outcome to the 2014 one would be pretty high. And so David Cameron ultimately would go down in history as The Prime Minister Who Broke The Union, which must be a most unwished-for epitaph for him.
Labour's problems are more intractable in a way than anything Cameron will have to face: 'Dave' can, after all, offer huge bribes of patronage and preferment; Labour, out of office, can offer nothing more then the odd peerage.
The joyful inter-communal strife which has been lurking in the important sections of the party (that is to say, amongst the wonks and twonks rather than the ordinary membership, who are like unto so much ballast sand for all the difference their opinions can make) is now once again coming into the open, rather than being hidden within the circle-jerking Progress/Blairite wings of the party. Unlike the right, the Left (even that self-described British 'Left' which decries 'nationalism' whilst standing in front of a huge Union Flag backdrop) seems with a glorious irony to be unable to grasp the concept of 'solidarity', so that whilst the various factions argue over the exact rules of the game, the nasty posh boys with their fancy school uniforms have taken the marbles and left. The campaign to undermine Ed Milliband did not originate with the Tory press; it started with the Nineties Set being unable to stomach the thought that 'their' party may be led by someone who was not a True Believer in the Gospel According To Cardinal Blair. Even in the run-up to the election, the articles on such blogs as Labour Uncut (or, to give it a more accurate name, Blairites Unhinged) which were actively briefing against Milliband far outnumbered those which were trying to focus on the campaign itself.
These are people who set the Labour Party up to fail, and succeeded beyond even their wildest wet dreams. And so they are now coming out and openly saying that the reason Labour lost was because it was 'too left-wing', an astonishing assertion to be made by anyone living in the real world and with a political memory which goes back more than twenty years. But then, these are not people who do either: they tend strongly towards the generation which was swept up in the Triangulatory Rapture of 1997, and have never experienced any other way of looking at politics.
It is this toxic presence at the diseased heart of the Labour Party which will make any resurgence difficult, if not impossible: for if aping the Tories in every key policy respect is only going to lose votes to the actual Tories (as people seek, not unnaturally, to cut out the middle-man), then following them even further to the right on, for instance, social security or immigration is not going to gain them anything.
Not that they can see it, of course. So caught within the bubble of thinktankery are they that they believe that what the self-delineated bien pensants say is the way things actually are. And so we have had in the last few hours alone both Umunna (touted as future leader) and that cipher known as 'Carwyn Jones' (the only Labour politician who actually runs a government at the moment, albeit a pretendy one) coming out to say that Labour lost because it wasn't 'business-friendly'. After twenty-odd years, how much further is it possible for Labour to insert its tongue up the rectum of the so-called 'business community'? Isn't lax or non-existent regulation, refusing to repeal a single line of Thatcher and Major's anti-union legislation, subsidising cheapjack employers via the benefits system or getting the big accountancy firms in to write tax legislation which their clients can then sidestep enough?
Clearly not. And yet still they push the line. And, worse still, they clearly believe it, despite a mass of evidence indicating that - in the same way that a clear majority of the populace wishes to see the bringing of the railways and the public utilities back into public ownership - people think that corporations have been allowed to go too far in a number of directions, and need to have their more nefarious or charmless activities curtailed. Instead, we have the constant pleas for Labour to move 'back' towards the 'centre ground' of British politics, said 'centre ground' being somewhere around the only-slightly-silly wing of every Tory government from Churchill to Heath, so far has the ideological map of our land been skewed and mis-projected in the meantime.
It is instructive also to look at Labour's Scotland Sub-region, where Thursday's skelping has brought little in the way of recognition of the untenable nature of the Party's position. They say that denial is the first stage of reaction to grief or bereavement and, just as London HQ seems unable to face the reality of their party having lost in succession its principles, its backbone, its Balls and its Ed, so the remaining rump of the Party in Caledonia appears to be in a similar state, but shading over gradually into the second stage, anger. And so it is that Labour Unionist columnists, bloggers and Tweeters have been laying about them in the last forty-eight hours trying either to deny that what happened happened or to find someone else to blame for the fact that not only are they now deemed to be superfluous, but that their beloved leaders in London have been denied their return to their rightful place. This appears to take the form for the most part of blaming the SNP - or, rather, blaming the people who voted for them - for the fact that David Cameron is still Prime Minister. It is in vain that people point out to them the simple arithmetical fact that, even if Labour had won 56 seats in Scotland, it would have cut Cameron's majority to 14, but nothing much more than that; the delusion persists that it can't possibly be Labour's fault that more people voted Tory in England than Labour; it must be the fault of all those people in Scotland whom Labour took for granted for generations, and how easily they were duped into voting for the Nasty Nats. Insulting the intelligence of the people whose respect and support you need in order to get anywhere is not, it must be said, the wisest tactic ever employed by a political party; but when you do it twice in the space of well under a year, the conclusion by any bystander must be that you are not, in fact, interested in engaging with those people on any level other than that of the blustering bully (or 'Jim', as he's known locally).
The possibility that the Labour Party - anywhere in the UK - can turn around the public's perception of them as being weak, vacillating, untrustworthy and of not standing for anything much which might make a distinction between them and the Tories, and do so within no more than four and a half years, is one which is difficult to take seriously. That it seems convinced that the only possible way of doing so is to continue to be plus bleu que Les Bleus means that only a new formation outside of the Labour Party - one which actually grows from the roots up and seeks co-operation with other progressive groups in society, rather than obsessing over ideological purity - is likely to have any impact in support of those who will, once again, get the sharp and shitty end of the stick wielded by the coprolite corporate state.
That the Liberal Democrats were always likely to be in deep shit at this election was never much in doubt. The only eyebrow raising has been caused by the sheer scale of their humbling. This, remember, was a party which was in office - if not in power as such - just a handful of weeks ago. Yet today, they find themselves all but wiped off the electoral map, not just in terms of seats held but also of how far their share of the vote dropped: down to just above 8 per cent in England, seven and a half per cent in Scotland, and a mere six and a half per cent in Wales
Much of the battering they have taken has been due to the perception - not unwarranted - that they have been the aiders and abetters to the most viciously right-wing government of our times. In this, Cameron did his job well: he knew that this would happen, and that all the LibDems' protestations that they prevented the Tories from being even more rebarbative wouldn't work, because things which don't happen can't be seen. Clegg's little legion were doomed from the start to be seen as patsies or catspaws for the rolling back of social and economic progress, and they were also destined to be viewed as unprincipled cowards who could have pulled the plug on that government and left it to scrabble on as a minority, but who were too convinced of their own righteousness and too enamoured of the trappings of importance (as opposed to power, which they didn't really have) to do the deed.
And thus was the trap laid and sprung, and when it went off, then there were eight.
It was a dénouement which was devoutly to be wished to repay the Orange Book ideologues - continuity Thatcherites, in effect - who had orchestrated the removal of Champagne Charlie a decade before. The Liberal Democrat Party, heirs to the progressive spirit of Jo Grimond and David Steel (we'll say nothing about the fellow who, as it were, came in between), became Dr David Owen's last curse upon British politics, a party which - to use Dennis Potter's phrase - loved to tickle, but were afraid to wound, and whose politicians were apostles of the not-very-strongly-held principle. Where, under Kennedy, they had taken a thoroughly progressive line on a wide range of economic, social and moral issues, Clegg, Laws, Cable, Alexander, et al. forgot the necessity of a just economy to bring about a more just society. Instead, they kept in power for five years a Conservative government who were the heirs less to Thatcher than to the hard-faced men who dominated the Tory Party up until 1940.
So it was that last Thursday, they lost not only seats like Manchester Withington, Cardiff Central and Bristol West due to their betrayal on tuition fees amongst other things; they also lost the entirety of their stock in the south west of England and Cornwall, most likely because people there thought that they might as well go via the direct route, and that Cameron had shown himself sufficiently harmless to their interests that they could take the risk.
It is possible to see a way back for them; the old Liberals went through a phase of irrelevance from the mid-1930s to the late 1950s before inventing themselves in a more progressive mould. A return to a combination of economic policies which controlled and directed corporate capitalism into more positive streams added to a proudly-stated determination to roll back the intrusions made by the State into the minutiae of people's lives could play very well in all parts of Great Britain, and the long-overdue defenestration of King Nicholas Of Orange and his courtiers should provide ample opportunity to make a start.
There has been a fair bit of chin-stroking over the last three days as to where UKIP got its support. It would be simplistic - that is to say, just plain wrong - to think that the rise in the Faragiste vote was connected directly to the balancing fall in the LibDems' support. Although some LibDem voters may have gone that way, it is clear that the Kippers picked up chunks of support from the Conservatives and Labour too: you only have to examine the constituency results to see that. It clearly wasn't just disaffected right-wing Tories and those who had previously voted for outright, overt racists who nailed their cross to St. Nigel; the votes garnered in traditional Labour areas has to be addressed, and it is obvious enough that it was disgruntled Labour voters in those areas - people with as much a reason to feel aggrieved at being taken for granted as their Scottish counterparts, but with nowhere plausible to go - who made up the bulk of UKIP's surge.
UKIP may be the ultimate 'protest vote', the equivalent of the Poujadistes seen in France half a century ago. Although the party was not by any means a media creation, it certainly benefited from the fact that the media saw it as A Good Story, and the constant appearances on Question Time and suchlike bear gardens certainly promoted Farage's stock. Appeals to 'common sense' (which usually means in this context, "These are my prejudices and I don't need to justify them") and to plain speaking (which usually means in this context, "I don't care who I offend, so swivel on it") were always likely to have some pull in a society whose political discourse is usually set by tabloid hacks and celebrities.
But that doesn't entirely explain it. I mean, can we believe what the self-deluding 'Left' would surely have us believe, that the UK contains 3.8 million racist arseholes? Hardly. Instead, UKIP seem to have been the receptacle for the votes of those who cry, "A plague on both your houses!" to Conservative and Labour alike. These are people who may well have voted LibDem in 2005 and 2010 but, having come to see the Liberal Democrats as being no different in essence, have looked elsewhere and - suspecting the Green Party would turn out much the same - have plumped for someone who - for all his background in private schools, the Tory Party and the City - at least speaks fluent Pleb.
Where they go from here is, of course, difficult to estimate at the moment. It is possible that - given the ongoing disillusionment with the main three parties, and the inability of the public to influence things very much for the next five years - the party may grow to at least the levels attained by the LibDems during the first decade of this century. Conversely, they could dwindle away into irrelevance as "events, dear boy, events" - developments which we cannot even begin to imagine today - change the great game of Westminster politics. Perhaps an 'Out' vote in an EU referendum followed by Scottish independence would turn UKIP into effectively an English Nationalist party; or maybe a 'Yes' vote even in England would not only shoot their fox, but stuff and mount it as well, its head lined up on the wall of the museum of politics alongside the Common Wealth Party and the National Front.
A lot may depend upon its leader. Farage has tried to stand down but they won't let him go, presumably because they know that any possible successor would turn out to be even more flaky than he is. I wouldn't have seen him staying away for long in any case.
I'll turn next to the two 'minor parties' which seem destined to remain so: The Greens and Plaid Cymru.
That the Green Party had a pretty good election is not in much doubt. Despite the mis-steps of Natalie Bennett, they had a solid core of achievement to draw upon in Caroline Lucas being one of the more effective operators during the last parliament. They also seem to have used the campaigning skills honed during its 'pressure group' years to good effect.
However, the fact remains that one seat retained and a handful of second places in mostly unwinnable constituencies means that the road ahead for them is a long one. The voting system doesn't help, of course, which is why their Scottish counterparts may well be the only ones to reap the reward next year, where there is likely still to be strong anti-Unionist sentiment which will manifest itself in votes going to SNP for the constituencies and Greens for the regional lists. Otherwise, the Greens rise in Englandandwales is likely to be slow and limited.
Speaking of slow and limited brings me to the only political party I have ever been (briefly and a long time ago) a member of. In an election where the Tories were still largely toxic, the LibDems likely to be turned into Orange Creams and Labour ever more remote, one would have thought that Plaid would have had some reasonable chance of a breakthrough in at least some seats, especially given the wider - and generally favourable - publicity garnered by Leanne Wood.
But - once again - it wasn't to be, and another chance was missed. The three seats they had going into last Thursday were held comfortably enough, but Ynys Môn again eluded them when all the talk that the Labour support in Holyhead had leached away to UKIP proved to be precisely that: talk; Llanelli was a significant failure; Ceredigion was too far from reach even with the LibDem meltdown; and a couple of very distant second places in the fabled Valleys; all this combined with a generally static vote; all this means that the 'Party Of Wales' is still that only in its dreams.
For the people of those Valleys (and elsewhere) still luxuriate in the delusion that the Labour Party they are voting for is still the party of Keir Hardie and Nye Bevan. The fact that it isn't even the party of Neil Kinnock (whose heir got himself parachuted in to Aberavon - an area with which, in fine old Labour tradition, he has no prior connection) seems to have eluded them, and Plaid have always tended to be too 'nice' a party to point it out with any vigour. It's possible that a new cadre of young activists may start to come through, especially with Leanne Wood leading; but that will count for nothing if the higher councils of the party are still dominated by the class of country solicitors and teachers which have held sway throughout a period of stagnation which now reaches back to the late 1970s.
I come (at last, you may think: but believe me, reading this can't be as exhausting as writing it) to the one party whose Thursday night was almost unalloyed gold. Or, rather, yellow. Yes, it's Jockopalypse time!
That the Scottish National Party (note to pathetic London hacks and other pond-life: it's National not Nationalist. Yeah, like you cared) were going to do well was not in much doubt from poll after poll taken in a variety of configurations over a period of two to three months beforehand. If it had been otherwise, why would there have been such an outpouring of bile, such an eructation of outrage, not only towards the SNP but anyone who intended voting for them, indeed any Scottish person at all who was not nose-to-tail with Jumbly Jim Murphy? From the 'serious' newspaper and magazine columnists, the unserious columnists (like that Hopkins woman; imagine Janet Street-Porter with tits), the celebs and - first and foreskin - the politicians, both Home and Colonial. If they hadn't perceived the SNP as a threat, they would have treated Scotland the same way as they usually have done before - as somewhere between an irrelevance and a nuisance.
That this was not likely to work very well to shore up the Unionist vote in Scotland was tacitly admitted by its proponents: after all, they had done the same thing during the Referendum campaign and it nearly turned round and bit their sorry asses off. But that wasn't the target audience. The intent of the strategy (if it could be so dignified) was, rather, to engender fear, loathing, xenophobia and even intemperate Tweets in England. The English national sport of our day being the expression of grievances which have little grounding in reality, it was always likely to work as intended; as, indeed, it did. The idea that the bloody Jockos - who, eight months previously, were being buttered up like Maria Schneider in Last Tango In Paris, and with a similar underlying intent - could come down 'ere finkin' they've got the right to run our country was anathema.
Once the right-wing press had started to run with it, it was only a matter of time before a typical piece of half-baked appeasement on the part of Ed Milliband sealed his fate on both sides of the border: for the English (or, at least, the proportion of them on whose behalf the hacks claimed to speak), it left too much doubt; for people in Scotland, it left no doubt at all, and a Labour Party which was already viewed with deep suspicion could now with justification be viewed with outright contempt. The failure of the Unionist parties to deliver - or ever look like delivering - on the notorious 'Vow' of last September meant that none of those parties could be trusted to put Scotland first. And, unlike in England, there was a well-established and plausible alternative home for the disillusioned.
That Labour had all but thrown in the towel once the first bundles of votes had been tallied in Kilmarnock And Loudon was clear from the inside gen tweeted by journalists and campaigners alike, but it wasn't until the Glasgow seats - most of which had been Dead Red since the days of James Maxton - started to declare around 3am that the scale of the drubbing for Labour became pellucidly clear. Nowhere was safe, not a seat with a previous Labour majority of five figures, not the highland fastnesses of the LibDems, nor even the border hills; almost all the Unionist skittles were not merely knocked down but pulverised and cremated. Those of us who watched were witnesses to a political shift of historic proportions.
That Nicola Sturgeon's smile was as wide as the Firth Of Forth for two days afterwards goes without saying, but she is a canny enough political operator to know that there are dangers ahead. The results elsewhere mean that her party has no formal or direct influence over the direction of Westminster policy. Nonetheless, what they do have is what one might call an ethical or moral power, gained by the overwhelming nature of their mandate, not only in terms of seats but of vote share as well. That power needs to be protected and harnessed in the right directions.
Traps will be laid. Some have speculated as to whether Cameron would offer a very large degree of autonomy to the Scottish Parliament, perhaps even to the extent of the Full Fiscal Autonomy (FFA) much bruited about in the last few months. But it is doubtful as to whether he would go anything like that far bearing in mind what the likely reaction would be from his own potentially fractious back-benchers and the very same press whose sub-animal screams were so much a feature of the campaign. In any case, the SNP would be under no compulsion to accept, especially as the price may be higher than they would be willing to pay, such as acquiesence - if not outright support - for some Tory policy or other.
In either set of circumstances, there would remain the issue of what legitimacy the current Westminster régime could possibly claim for governing Scotland, with just one MP and less than fifteen per cent of the votes. It never stopped them before, of course; hence the imposition of the Poll Tax in Scotland a year ahead of everywhere else, and the resulting popular resistance which got rid of both the Tax and its architect within three years. That, however, was a time when the SNP was weak and quite divided. Now it is stronger than ever before in terms of both seats and membership (over 100 000 now), and so any attempt by the Westminster government to blow the people of Scotland off would be likely to bring the end of the Union more assuredly - if a little more slowly - than the whole European dimension would.
So there you have it chums. "Ave bossa nova, similis bossa seneca", as dear old Terry Pratchett used to say. But the head that wears the crown now may well have cause to lie less easily for a while...
