The UK general election of 2019 – Aftermath.

Posted by Pointman on December 14, 2019 · 13 Comments 

If you’ve any interest in politics, you tend to read into the history of it. You’ll end up reading The Conquest of Gaul by Julius Caesar, Machiavelli’s The Prince, On War by Carl von Clausewitz, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and yes, even My Struggle by the jumped up Austrian corporal who kicked off a roughly estimated 50 million death toll.

Let’s leave aside that tired old saying about those who don’t read history are doomed to repeat it. What you’re really looking for are patterns, because by recognising and becoming familiar with such patterns, they will inform your view of the world. There is an unfortunate habit of assuming that political landscapes are somehow eternal and unchanging, but it’s totally false. Where are the Whigs of yesteryear?

There is an aberration I’ve seen in the business world once or twice, and once you spot it, you bale the hell out of the aircraft before it hits the ground. The upper management have become totally fixated on progressing their careers, their stock options and playing power games, but in the meanwhile nobody is keeping an eye on the shop, which like any enterprise will founder when the leadership is absent.

In an analogous fashion, that’s how political parties die off like the Whigs of yesteryear. The leadership becomes inward looking, politically irrelevant but internal doctrinally crucial issues become of paramount importance, the views of the electorate that they were originally representing become irrelevant, the infighting becomes vicious, but one day there’ll be a big car crash at an election, and then it’s all over.

The Labour party is in the throes of such an event after their worst electoral showing since 1935, but the question is was it a near death experience or an extinction level event? As I write this, we’re only a couple of days post the election, but the initial signs of having a big rethink about what went wrong do not look promising.

Their leader, and biggest doorstep liability, Jeremy Corbyn, hasn’t resigned and the coterie of idiots around him are still firmly in control of a party whose influence no longer extends outside the fashionable burbs of north London. Student politics are all well and good when you’re pushing nineteen, but they just don’t sell to an electorate who have to pay their utility bills every month because they’ve realised there’s no such thing as a free meal.

I used to go around our house automatically switching off carelessly left on lights by our children, but I noticed as soon as they reached adulthood and had to start hitting regular bills in their own domiciles, there were no longer lights left on around the place.

I’m not convinced the Labour party is redeemable at this point. It’s been too thoroughly politically reeducated and the remnants of what would be termed the centrist left have been severely culled. There is an internal party firmly entrenched in it called Momentum which is calling all the disastrous shots and busy going into full denial about the workers of the UK waving the V-sign at them and their policies.

There’s a possibly hopeful precedent there for the party. At one point, and before the advent of Tony Blair and New Labour, the party had been thoroughly penetrated and subverted by another party called called the Socialist Worker’s party (SWP) with the usual extremist communist agenda. The first objective of making the party once more electable, was to prune them out ruthlessly. Once that was done, it paved the way for three straight general election victories.

The difference between that situation and the dilemma presenting itself to Labour these days was that the SWP, while having considerable control at the local constituency level, had never really managed to worm their way up to what would be termed senior management level in the party, so they were relatively easy to get rid of.

Momentum on the other hand are the party within a party who occupy all the highest levels of leadership and like all fanatics cannot be reasoned with. They’ll keep on doing the same stoopid going nowhere things, pursuing the same dumb policies, making the same mistakes, while all the time totally confident that the workers of the world will eventually unite around them.

The only survival way out for Labour and the notion of representing and protecting the working class from rapacious capitalism and greed is good globalism will be a schism in the party. The more rational elements in it who’ve still got one foot planted in the doorstep realities of that demographic will quite possibly give up and create a new party more closely aligned to the original founding principles of the Labour party.

Time will tell, but the real takeaway from the electoral disaster is that popular sentiment is very definitely moving rightwards in a populist nationalist direction and any party that ignores that reality will be facing annihilation in the privacy of polling booths, rather than the beguiling and self-congratulating environment of la vie online where anything however improbable seems possible.

I think there’s a huge lesson for the DNC going into the 2020 election. Letting the squad with their socialist policies be the commonly perceived face of the party will prove disastrous. Their chances from the start were slim anyway, but a mistake like that will rob them, like Labour, of their traditional heartland constituencies, and bouncing back from a disaster like that is ten miles of very hard road.

You’re looking at a complete rebuild of a party.

©Pointman

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