I feel like a Tory sometimes. There, I’ve said it. Before anyone requisitions a shredder to destroy my Labour Party membership card, give me ooh 500 or so words to explain why. The reason is simple. The media has suggested it (but owing to the fact that the telly journalists presume everyone watching has a minutely small attention span), they presume that events of 13 years ago can’t really compare to the Up To The Minute Drama of the unendingly tedious 24 hr news cycle. Basically, to return to the subject:
We’re back in the chuffing 1990s.
Only the tables have thoroughly turned. We have traditional Labour voters disillusioned by the high sleaze and infighting of parliamentarians. We have a new, reinvigorated opposition which has successfully transformed its “nasty shit party” image into a potential future government, led by a potential future Prime Minister. Talking of PMs we have PM who makes John Major look both decisive and charismatic. We have a Cabinet of non-entities and the dregs of the last ten years of politics, including some that we had all mercifully hoped were long dead and gone (Mandelson). Furthermore, a reshuffle of the Cabinet throws up the same selection of uninteresting grey men who singularly fail to grab the public imagination and who are so riven by in-fighting that coherent government begins to look impossible. Add to that one of the worst economic crises in a decade!
Add to that the worst local election results for a party-in-government since Major’s final years and you can’t help my cynicism and vague sense of deja vu.
I confidently predict that Labour will lose the next election. They will lose it not because the British people have gone off ideas of fairness, equality and social justice. They will lose it in part because in part, after three terms in government for any party, entropy and policy become co-terminous. They will lose it because the Tories have successfully seized the public imagination. They will lose it because the Tories have successfully appropriated the same agenda of fairness, equality, social justice and most importantly, good governance.
They have, in short, appropriated the image of a party of government. Something which isn’t at all unfamiliar to any Labour supporters around in 1997.
Back in 1995/6, this was a significant concern in the dying days of Major’s Tory government. Similarly, no cohesive challenge on his leadership emerged during that torpid end-of-an-era year when an election could be called. The leadership of both parties seems to be in agreement that being let down slowly and gracefully is better than the inevitable absolute implosion (which, if the parallel proves true) will occur to both losing parties.
Just how bad Cameron’s Tories will be for the British people — and in some ways this isn’t the sort of question that anyone who is an active supporter of another political party can ever objectively answer — remains to be seen, especially as categories like “the British people” are so slippery. In my view, if this government wants a chance of returning to government within a decade, they need to do only one thing: go to the country and seek a new mandate. Whether we win or not is not really the issue — this is the fair and just thing to do.
