UK politics

Now that the neoliberal Cleggameron melty waxy thing is in power – whether it’s for 5 years or 5 minutes – a strong principled opposition is required, and we’ll hardly get that from the Labour party as currently constituted.

I posted this after Labour’s disastrous results in the 2008 local elections and I think my suggestion – that socialists take over Labour from the ground up – still holds true.

Go Cry Emo Party
May 3rd, 2008

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.

Alan Johnson is saying he will not stand as party leader and that his money’s on David Milliband. Don’t lose me a fiver, Alan – and more to the point, if you enable Pitt the very much younger to lead the party, it’s absolutely positively no longer a party of the left and deserves to stay in the political wilderness for ever.