Tacitus on The Emperor Galba: “Omnium consensu capax imperii nisi imperasset.” “All pronounced him worthy of the empire, until he became emperor”.
I’d like to be erudite enough to be able to claim that as an original observation, but it was actually suggested in an otherwise dull comment to Phillip Hensher’s exceedingly suckyuppy Independent column praising the newly-powerful Boris for his use of classical allusions.
Is there any way for Labour to regain any shred of credibility as a working class party, after the complete and utter fuckup they’ve made of things? Because if not, Labour is a dead party.
Well, possibly. First, if socialists rejoin the party en masse and use their heft to stack constituency and regional committees – a return to entryism, but in the open. Then if they get rid of Brown and an entire discredited generation of leadership, elect a new, visibly English (as opposed to Scots) and working class populist leader,
My money is still on Alan Johnson as leader. Johnson’s man-in-the-street qualities will serve Labour better in the media, a foil to the plummy Establishment Etonians who seem destined to have power (as so much else) dropped in their laps as an unearned benefit of the electorate’s reflexive disgust with the current government. The Tories have little in the way of actual policies – they are as frozen in the headlights of current world conditions as are all the other parties, and that they’ve done so well so far has been because of a mixture of expert media management and New Labour’s own exhausted disarray.
Politics in the next two years, if economic forecasts are accurate, is likely to become ever more class-based as those that have seek to hang on to what they’ve got and the less well-off, taxed beyond endurance, become more and more angry at the rich and those who enable them.
If the Labour party is to survive the left will have to rejoin the party en masse and force a generational putsch of Blairite/ Brownites. Co-opt the party to rescue the brand, in marketing terms; what other left organisation has the same brand presence? Why try to launch an alternative to Labour when the party is ripe for the plucking? There is a crying need for a party that’ll fight class war and which has an actual working class person leading it, rather than the closeted public schoolboys, incompetent Scots party droids, failed suburban solicitors and legacy Labour pubescents we’ve been subjected to so far.
But Emo Labour hasn’t got the gumption for root and branch reform to judge from the lame reaction by Brown and other Labour types on the news this morning. The only chance that Labour just might survive as an electoral force is if the real left get off their self-involved arses and take over a party that’s weak and ripe for the plucking, purge the Blairites and Brownites and force MPs to push through electoral reform pronto.
Hey, it could happen. I’m not holding my breath though. When push comes to shove most leftists would much rather wring their hands and talk theory on blogs than actually get out and do anything. But if Labour is about to be unelectable for yet another generation, the least the actual left can do is try and make it an opposition to reckon with.
Been listening to the response on Five Live to the local elections yesterday and it has been a non-stop parade of longterm Labour voters saying they couldn’t do it this time, that they either didn’t bother to vote, or voted for the Lib Dems or even the Tories. The straw that broke the camel’s back for most of these people? As I said on Wis[s]e Words last week, it’s the 10p tax.
By abolishing the 10p tax band while cutting the 22p tax band to 20p, Labour basically paid for tax cuts for the rich(er) with tax raises for the poor. It removed the final figleaf of respectability from New Labour, who until then had still been able to argue that despite all their crimes abroad, despite the pandering to the rich and the hollowing out of the welfare state, they were still dedicated to helping the poor. But the moment they shafted the poorest in society to pay for a middle class tax cut while being too scared to raise taxes on the truly rich, the little what differed Labour from the Tories was lost.
Which means Labour has lost their one big scare tactic: “vote for us or the Tories get in”. At this point, whatever the Tories do couldn’t be any worse.
There are mayoral and local elections looming in Britain and true to New Labour form, the Brown government has manufactured a pre-election crisis that requires all loyal New Labourites to instantly rally round the flag for fear of a Tory victory. But they’ve fucked that up too and now they’re about to get an electoral kicking.
This past few days I’ve been buried in the comment threads about the 10p tax band in the British daily papers and mainstream blogs and of all the comments about how New Labour has targeted the least well-paid to fund tax breaks for the more well-off (while handing 50 billion to bail out the profligate banks) this one sums up best the general tenor:
EastFinchleyite
Comment No. 1295787
April 23 21:51
GBRIn my 50s. Skills and energy winding down. What little I make is through being self-employed. Living on savings and investments until company pension kicks in in 7 years time.
No kids. Not married. Not a chance in hell of being one of the “compensated” so I expect to be damaged by this to the tune of £200 per year or more which is £1500 by the time I get to 60 and then at about £100 per year for the next 5 years. After that who knows.
My NuLabor MP is Rudi Vis. Current majority is 741. I used to be a Labour voter; now I will vote for whoever is most likely to unseat him. 370 more like me and you are toast mate. I have been unhappy with this Government’s illiberal policies for some time (ID cards, 42 days, PFI,PPP etc) but really couldn’t bring myself to vote Tory. Until now. They can’t be any more anti-poor than this. Stuff the rhetoric; any party that increases taxes on the poor to pay for reduced tax for higher earners is beyond the Pale. This has tipped me to voting for the best chance of ditching NuLabor regardless of who they are. Even Boris! Bite me and I bite back.
And there’s many many more like him, all prepared to vote against New Labour next week. Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling shouldn’t be feeling smug this morning, although I expect they’re thinking themselves very clever now that Frank Field, self-appointed leader of the glorious 10 pence backbench revolution, has folded in favour of a few empty and entirely conditional promises of ….what, exactly?
In exchange for a letter outlining possible avenues of future potential action that may or may not be possible and which will be kicked into the long grass as soon as the next crisis comes along, Field and his fellow would-be insurrectionists have betrayed millions of the low-paid, who are feeling the pain in their pay statements and overdrafts right now, not in some far-off misty future of indefinite clauses and conditional half-promises.
The 10p tax backbench rebellion may have melted away like so much spring snow, but then it never was a real rebellion in the first place was it? It was just so much political theatre; funny how Frank Field always likes to stage his backbench rebellions when all looks ominous for Labour and usually just before a crucial vote or election, isn’t it?
Crisis? Potential vote of no confidence? Cue Field and his rebels, party whips, loyal journos and Polly Toynbee: “Oh noes! The sky is falling! The Tories might get in! Hold your nose and support New Labour!” But you only have to look at his voting record to see that Field is no old left Labour rebel and that his staged insurrection was just another bit of recycled spin.
Blair did that all the time: faced with defeat No. 10 would provoke a showdown which the government always won because of course the whips know all the MPs’ dirty secrets and can easily pressure backbenchers into backing off. Backbenchers would threaten rebellion, a face-saving agreement (which was really no agreement at all) would be cooked up between backbenchers and Alistair Campbell; the ‘rebellion’ would then mysteriously evaporate, leaving the government looking triumphant whilst at the same time reassuring local electorates that at least their MP wasn’t one of those slimy Blairite bastards. Neat.
It’s a good trick to pull off and more often than not it’s worked for New Labour, because at least when Blair lied and spun he did it semi-competently. But Gordon Brown can fuck up anything, even deceit. In any other political generation a Prime Minister who had been accused of outright falsehoods by a columnist in a broadsheet paper would sue for libel. But of course he can’t, because he is a liar and not just a liar but an incompetent fool of a liar:
A third possibility, of course, is that what Brown said was untrue. After all, once the budget was public on March 21, it did not take long for the IFS and the opposition parties to work out that the numbers of losers far exceeded any figure like 25,000 (publicly, Brown gave no figure for the number of losers in his speech to parliament). Today the estimate is that more than 5 million of the poorest voters have lost out. The gap between what Brown said to Blair and what is now acknowledged is so great that it appears fairly clear that Brown gave Blair false information. My information is that Blair thinks this is the case.
I wondered when Blair would stick the knife in. Kettle goes on:
One can guess at many reasons why Brown behaved in this way – and any theory is not much more than a guess. Maybe Brown and Balls didn’t trust Blair and didn’t want to hand him a reason for reopening the budget and disrupting their strategy. Maybe Brown and Balls, with the premiership at last in their sights, had such accumulated contempt towards Blair that they thought that they could fob him off with false information. Or maybe Brown and Balls thought the number of losers did not matter in the bigger scheme of things. Perhaps they were so fixated on using the budget as a springboard to launch Brown towards an early general election that they thought it made overriding political sense to produce a tax-cutting budget that would cause confusion among the Tories – irrespective of the marginal impact on the poor.
For once Martin Kettle gets it right – they just don’t care.
Take Brown’s continued insistence on no deviation from his disastrous tax policy, regardless of the results and add it to Ed Balls’ “So what?” moment at Budget questions in the Commons and it’s clear as day the current government really don’t give a damn what the fallout from their decisions is, or who gets hurt, as long as Labour hang on to power just that little bit longer.
That truth is certainly sinking in to many voters as a result of 10p tax fiasco; those who’ve taken the time to publicly comment are almost unanimous in planning to give Labour a bloody nose in the local elections and they don’t care who they have to vote for to do it either, whether it’s Boris or the BNP. For far too long Labour have treated the poorly-paid like sheep, forgetting that sheep also have teeth and will bite when cornered.
As for Frank Fields’ empty histrionics and his immediate acceptance of what any idiot could see was an empty promise from an empty suit, written in disappearing ink on soluble paper, well, that particular bad actor will be also up for re-election at some point. I hope he’s got a job to go to.
James Naughtie on Gordon Brown just a moment ago, Radio 4 :
“It’s a circle from which he can’t seem to, er, to jerk himself”
Wahaha.