Interest rates

15 June, 2015 (21:19) | All articles | By: Stuart Fraser

WE haven’t yet discussed the Labour leadership election, which is a shame because I know your interest in the contest is so very keen. I imagine Brothers and Sisters of this place talk of little else at the dinner table.

For those of you who have not yet attained your level 3 NVQ in Irony: yes, I know it’s very boring and I too have no interest whatsoever in the business because the election itself is far from interesting. What is interesting is the reason for it not being interesting. Interested now? No? Thought not.

But. I insist that it is interesting in its lack of interest: the fact that nobody cares who becomes the leader of the opposition shows that a), none of the candidates has said anything to startle people out of their torpor; and b), it can’t be much of an opposition if nobody cares about it.

That’s the crucial thing. What’s the point of an election for the leadership of a party that says nothing new, promises nothing different and sticks to no principles?

Why bother with a party that slavishly copies the Tories? If you’re an idiot, are well-off or selfish, especially if you’re all three, you can vote for the Tories. You don’t need Labour’s Tory-lite.

Why be interested in a party that weakly accepts the Tory party line that the election was a victory for the right when it was anything but? A party that absolutely refuses to accept the reality of the bankruptcy of the first-past-the-post system and ignores calls for democracy because it fatuously still believes it can win with FPTP?

Miliband at least proposed arguments that although they were about as daring as stepping on the cracks in the paving slabs, had a tiny frisson of opposition to the status quo about them. Controlling profiteering energy utilities and profiteering private landlords screwing money out of the state in the shape of housing subsidies for the vast rents they charge were policies with a conscience and, moreover, policies that were good for the public purse.

He at least contested the acceptance of the argument that Labour caused the great recession, which is of course ludicrous. He also contested the idea that the Tories have control of the national debt – they have, as we all know, increased it many times beyond its 2010 level.

That opposition, Miliband’s opposition, did not win a first-past-the-post election in the southern half of a country whose obedient media consumers were more concerned with eating bacon sandwiches. But its policies led to a share of the vote that was more or less equal with the right once you factored in the votes of the parties to the left of Labour too. Labour’s share of the vote in fact led, or was equal to, the right in every age group bar the over-64s.

The left’s performance was far from a failure, yet Labour have accepted the Tories’ insistence that it was so and put up for the leadership  as craven a bunch of electoral cowards as I’ve ever seen, bleating on about aspiration.

What’s the point? What’s the bloody point of electing a leader who’s a carbon copy of the besuited camerons and the shiny osbornes and the nice-tied blairs, all obediently dancing to the tune of the city and big business and endorsing the delivery of abjectly shitty public services to an overcharged and underpaid electorate who don’t even have a decent democratic say in what’s going on?

If Labour had backbone and principles – Nationalisation! Pride in links with the unions! Commitment to helping the needy! Stopping the encroachment of the private sector in the NHS! – and opposed what was going on they might not win a general election but they’d at least be standing up for decency.

The arguments would one day win the day, because turkeys can’t go on voting for Christmas for ever.

Did you vote Tory? Yes? Well, first, you’re an idiot. And second…

How long do you want your taxes to subsidise the shareholder friends of George Osborne as the Government hands health service contracts to the private firms who paid for its campaign? How long do you want to wait two weeks for a privatised monopoly to repair your phone line? How long do you want to pay £5 to park in a hospital car park? How long do you want a crappy rail service? How long do you want storm and flood to destroy your services? How long do you want to wait for a power cut to be fixed? How much road toll do you want to pay? How many ambulance services do you want to be run by Richard Branson? With how much debt do you want to saddle your helpless student children? How much longer can you stomach the sight of executives banking six-figure salaries while queues grow at the food banks? What if you or your family slip into the bottom half like that? How much longer can you stand idly by and watch while the lying liar Iain Duncan Smith’s work assessments drive the disabled to homelessness and suicide? How much longer can you stomach mentally ill people being stuck in police cells because there’s no room at the hospital for them? How much enthusiasm can you muster for the return of the right of the rich to brutally tear apart wild animals?

There will be a critical mass of revulsion at all of the above and so much more. It just takes the southern English an awfully long time to see sense and muster the courage to act with decency.

But the SNP has shown what can happen in a country where a political party taps into a sense of anger at injustice, greed and selfishness and proposes alternatives with a social conscience.

Will the Labour Party learn that lesson? I rather hope it doesn’t, because it doesn’t deserve to – ever since Blair’s war-mongering, the Labour Party has shown that it will abandon any principle for the pursuit of power, will shoot its own granny if there’s an expenses claim in it.

They no longer deserve to be our opposition. If the Labour Party had made common cause with the left at the last election, we might not now be abandoned to the miserable fate of five more years of Tory fingers in the nation’s tills.

But they didn’t, and even if only for that they deserve to become a footnote in history, and we deserve the rise of proper alternatives – the Greens, a reconstituted Liberal party, maybe an SNP for the UK – an opposition proposing opposition, a party that stands for what it believes to be right even when the gerrymandered votes of the English south keep those policies from power, a party that stands up for principle even if it knows it can’t win.

Anything else? Anything else is just not interesting.

Comments

Comment from StentsRus
Time June 16, 2015 at 7:27 pm

I note you have vacated the far side of the moon and are now lost, lost in space. Is it the space between your ears? Obviously a copious void judging by your current ramblings. If I might make a well meant observation on your proposals. Greece.

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