Oh, dear. Does anyone ever look at the Labour Party and not emit a weary, Hancockian sigh? And when I say Hancock, I’m not referring to Matt, but to Anthony Aloysius. Every time a story connected to the Labour Party hits the headlines, my immediate reaction evokes the atmosphere of the classic radio episode of ‘Hancock’s Half-Hour’ in which the existential dreariness of a traditional British Sunday is encapsulated in the despairing groans of the title character when confronted by yet another drab day of rest, just seven after the last one. In many respects, I think the wretched impotence and irrelevance of Her Majesty’s Opposition is perhaps intensified in that they’re not even up against an especially strong and popular Conservative Government – though let’s face it, this has been the case ever since the days of the Con-Dem Coalition ten bloody years ago; and nothing has changed.
The Party has gone from Gordon Brown to Ed Miliband to Jeremy Corbyn to Keir Starmer, losing four consecutive General Elections en route, and still appears to have learnt nothing along the way. It has been wiped out in Scotland and decimated in the North of England, and it has managed to keep the Tories in power for a decade due to its remarkable inability to address its unelectable status. As used to be the case with the England football team before their impressive performance at the 2018 World Cup, I don’t even expect to be surprised by the Labour Party’s incompetence anymore; it’s just a given now. Whenever a member of the frontbench pops up online, I no longer anticipate they’ll have anything to say other than something that will make me cringe, laugh or shake my head; yet I look at what they’re up against and wonder how they can miss so many open goals over and over again. It even gets to the stage whereby you find yourself focusing on the various tics and mannerisms of the Shadow Cabinet – Starmer’s upset Dalek voice, Angela Rayner’s lisp, Anneliese Dodds’ air of someone who would be more at home heading Islington Social Services – and apportion blame to them.
The past week has seen a development which seems to sum up why so many have abandoned the Labour Party and just how clueless Labour are in gauging the public mood. I suppose it was merely a case of serendipity that news should seep out about Sir Keir’s latest misguided attempt to reconnect with the lost voters of the Red Wall heartlands just as the nation bade farewell to ‘Captain Tom’, the 100-year-old WWII veteran whose zimmer-frame sprint around his back garden raised a fortune for the NHS last year. How it must have grated with the Corbynistas that a representative of the very social demographic they hold responsible for all society’s ills should have captured the affection and respect of that society by doing a good deed in which all the petty issues that prevent the far-left from sleeping at night had no place. Captain Tom’s efforts transcended age, race and gender, trashing the tunnel vision of the Woke narrative with one simple and admirable gesture that provoked unity rather than the division deemed necessary for The Revolution.
Yes, a week in which some SJW bright spark declared butter to be the newest addition to the ‘Things that are Racist’ shopping list simply because a supermarket own-brand featured the Union Jack on its packaging to indicate the location of its production was the same week in which an edict from Sir Keir hinted at the inclusion of the national flag on new Labour promotional material. Coming to the conclusion that the thick, illiterate bigots the Party loathes but is dependent upon for votes seem to have an inexplicable attraction to this symbol of white nationalism, the leader surmised projecting the image that Labour isn’t just a political party for university-educated, Guardian-reading, middle-class metropolitans (like him) might just be a vote-winner. It’s a wonder Starmer hasn’t announced all remaining Labour MPs north of Watford should henceforth wear flat caps and declare bread & dripping to be their favourite dish, all washed down with a bottle of Ena Sharples’ preferred tipple of milk stout, of course.
His problem is considerable because the intense dislike of the people the Party is eager to bring back into the fold permeates all of Labour’s ideological barriers. Starmer’s team includes both Ed Miliband as Shadow Secretary of State for Business and Emily ‘Lady Nugee’ Thornberry as Shadow Secretary of State for International Trade; the last time the pair were united under the same banner, Miliband sacked Lady Nugee for her infamously snooty Tweet of a white van parked outside a house displaying the flag of St George, a picture speaking a thousand words on what the Labour Party thinks of traditional Labour voters. And, at the other end of the scale, there’s Momentum. Yes, the cult which propelled Sir Keir’s predecessor to power remains a deeply-engrained malignant tumour in the dark heart of the Party, a toxic force within it that hates the nation and its people; and in the frustrating case of the latter, they continue to exacerbate that hatred because they won’t do as they’re told by adhering to the rules and regulations of the master-plan.
Just as the use of gender pronouns on a Twitter bio is the badge of a twat, any proclamation from the race-baiting branch of the Labour Party can provoke both laughter and despair. Renowned veteran Identitarian Clive Lewis MP reacted to the Party’s ‘patriotism strategy’ by echoing a colleague comparing it to the motivation behind the recent storming of Washington’s Capitol – ‘Fatherland-ism’ was the novel term Lewis coined. Any promotion of the Union Jack is invariably seen through the imperial prism of colonialism by this section of the Labour Party; whereas most people in Britain tend not to obsess on the distant past – lest we forget, the Empire actually ceased to exist before most of us were even born – it’s funny how those quick to accuse working-class scum of an obsession with the unacceptable face of the nation’s history are the ones who won’t shut up about it.
But it’s essential to their narrative that we all have our designated roles of oppressor and oppressed; gradual integration of the races with each successive generation descended from the original immigrants of former colonies has really f***ed-up this storyline, so the fanatical desire to revive division on racial grounds not only validates their viewpoint but also obscures the perennial source of authentic division within Britain – class. The fact that most ‘ethnic’ sections of society feel more British and feel more pride in that fact than the privileged elite reciting the ‘Britain is a Racist Country’ mantra must really stick in their throat. Ironically, however, it’s not as if discerning the futility of one side’s perspective means one therefore has an appreciation of the other side’s latest brainwave to dispel it.
The Labour leadership’s hapless attempts to pander to what they perceive as the patriotism of their ex-voting base is such a cynical, patronising and opportunistic move with no genuine understanding behind it; it’s like some old-school, cigar-chomping showbiz impresario giving teenage trends a cursory glance and declaring Skiffle is where it’s at when Skiffle has already taken the last train out of town. The Starmer side of the Labour Party is no more in touch with the population beyond its most enthusiastic fan-base than the Corbynites, as its tiresome infatuation with minority concerns, perhaps best embodied by Lisa ‘Trans Rights for Wigan’ Nandy, continues to underline. Put these two strands together – both of which would separately summarise why a political party cannot get into government – and it’s a heady blend of unelectable uselessness. If it were the Lib Dems, it’d be easy to dismiss as a sad joke; the fact it’s the party of Keir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald, Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevin, Harold Wilson, Barbara Castle, Tony Benn, Roy Jenkins et al just makes it all the more tragic.
© The Editor
winegumtelegram 
The problem with the political types in the Labour Party is that they feel a need to signal a huge raft of principles accommodating every possible minority which could consider itself oppressed, ideally with every public utterance, whether relevant or not. It is inevitable that, whatever principles are adopted at the time, there will be conflicts with some of the other adopted principles in different part of any ‘broad church’ party.
It is a basic principle of politics that divided parties don’t win elections, because the electorate generally wants to get on board with a consistent and confident message which seems to address their concerns. Hence the Labour Party started to haemorrhage votes, first to UKIP and the Brexit Party, also to the SNP, and finally to the Conservatives, content each time that they were supporting those who projected a feasible strategy for both the country’s and their own personal futures.
This is something which the Conservative Party has always understood – it really only has one principle, that being to get elected and stay elected, being prepared to adopt whatever positions seem necessary to deliver that key objective. The classic example is the NHS: despite representing the ultimate in incompetent socialism, the Tories very soon recognised that opposing it would always lead to electoral disaster, so they hold their noses and accept it, even embrace it, as the essential price of their ticket to office.
And Tony Blair understood that too: the only way to excise power is first to gain power and, for that, you have to win elections, ideally more than one. Sir Kier is currently trying to repeat what Blair achieved 30 years ago, dressing himself in ‘flags’ which reassure the voters, in order to win the keys to Downing Street – his problem is that the Labour Party is now even more fragmented than in Blair’s day, so the message on the streets will always be very different from the headline one he wants to project and he risks creating some major schisms which will ensure no victory until they can again work out a way for all to assemble around some common goal . . . . . if ever.
The humming noise you may hear in the background is Clem Attlee spinning in his grave.
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Those of us old enough to remember a time when Labour was in government are at least aware things haven’t always been this way. Those whose political memories don’t stretch back even to 2005, however, must just imagine the Tories are always in charge and Labour are the permanent bridesmaids forever being fitted for wedding dresses they’ll never wear. Even if you’re a diehard Tory voter, this has to be recognised as a terrible situation for the democratic system to be in. The cult of Corbyn may have galvanised a section of the youth vote, but his failure to gain power could well have disillusioned an entire generation and turned them off trying before they’d even really begun. When there is no opposition, the system ceases to function and it’s nigh-on impossible not to succumb to absolute apathy. The whole scenario is just so dispiriting and demoralising.
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Seems to me that the solution to Labour’s problems is both incredibly simple and at the same time fiendishly complicated. They need someone who is as media-savvy, as good as winning elections and as appealing to centrist swing voters as Blair was, but is also sufficiently different from Blair that they can’t be written off as an identikit Blairite (because Blair, since leaving office, has become more and more toxic each passing year. Strangely, his toxicity seems to bear an inverse relationship to the time elapsed since the Iraq non-existent WMD debacle).
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I think Blair has been demonised to the same degree Thatcher was before him, passed down like some ancient legend of the Devil to generations who don’t even remember him being PM. Like Mrs T, it has to be said he did a lot of the hard work himself, mind; but it’s interesting that whereas she was loathed by the opposition, Blair is most reviled by those who support the party he actually led.
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Your point emphasises the difference between the parties – Thatcher delivered the key objective three times and is lauded by the Tory Party for it, Blair matched her achievement but is vilified by those he led to those three victories. Apparently, to the Labour Party, it’s not about winning, it’s about how you play the game – how very Etonian.
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As long as you ‘win the argument’, of course!
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The Blair/Thatcher comparison holds some water, but at the risk of stating the obvious, Thatcher didn’t invade a far away country, killing hundreds of thousands directly and indirectly, on trumped-up pretexts. Such military actions as she did engage in while in office were justifiable. The vast majority of the Falklands islanders wanted to remain under British dominion. Granted, the vast majority of the Tories went along with the Iraq misdaventure, but the Tories weren’t then in government. The point I am making is there are good reasons why Blair is toxic particularly on the left.
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For me, Starmer is Max Headroom with better CGI.
Not the most up to date CGI , maybe circa 2000.
The charisma has not been updated though.
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