Think Tank

Deep in the heart of Labour Land there is a crisis. Correction, there are crises. Leadership, policy and identity are three of them and I’m sure many more lurk beneath that oh so thin skin. Andy Burnham says, “By gum, that-there immigration IS a problem after all,” and “Let’s have a referendum.” And while Labourites on Twitter instinctively cleave to the #toryscum hashtag, party spokespeople are doing their best to appear wise after the event yet still fail to fully grasp how far from their core voters their bubble has wafted.

Giles Fraser, Owen Jones and Polly Toynbee have done their public handwringing and confirmed what we already knew – that Labour hold the British public in such contempt that they don’t believe they are intelligent enough to wield their vote wisely. Pretty much in their own words – certainly in Giles Fraser’s words – they just don’t know what’s good for them. Tony Blair’s focus group approach to policy doesn’t seem so cynical now, does it? To get their vote you have to give them what they want… even if they are too stupid to know what that is.

Not left enough? Too far left? Where does the party want to be? Well, in power, that’s where, for the raison d'être of any party, even the former party of the people, is to rule over the people, preferably with an ironclad majority. The irony is that to obtain the power to make the little people dance they must first be offered inducement to vote the right way. And this time round Labour’s politics of envy will be labelled ‘aspiration’. In prospective leaders’ inner circles think tanks are being formed to decide what level of envy – I mean aspiration – will appeal to the Benefits Street generation; who do they want to be jealous of now? And how can we dress that up as compassion?

The food bank rhetoric is just bouncing off as nobody can identify a single person who would be dead of starvation for want of a discretionary food parcel. The NHS just refuses to lie down and die and much to Labour’s chagrin has just returned its best overall satisfaction survey in twenty years. Wages are starting to rise and homes are being built. The thing is, ordinary people are just getting on with their lives and the serried ranks of academics on the left have no idea how to deal with it. Mondeo Man and Worcester Woman have moved on; they have worked out, without the ‘help’ of government, that wealth needs to be amassed before you can start sharing it out. They have also worked out that the state is not a good arbiter of that dividend.

Turning blue?

A tank is a big, lumbering war machine. A blunt instrument, with blind spots and an inability to wage subtle, stealthy warfare. A tanker is a giant ship with such momentum that it takes many miles to change direction. Labour’s think-tankers have similar problems and they are starting, perhaps, to realise them, but it will take them many years before they finally understand that the political offering which most appeals to the electorate is the one they just selected. I look forward to the day that particular penny drops and Labour finally gets that the people’s flag is not red at all, but deepest blue.

The Incurable Shiteness of Being… a Lefty

The use of hashtags, bringing metadata into common currency, is a curious phenomenon and prone to blunder. The latest trending tag  #ThankYouEd is a classic example; started by the garment-rending children of the left to be competitive in their bereavement, but swiftly hijacked by others to praise Ed’s ineptitude in handing the keys to Number Ten back to the man best able to use the office. For the eternal irony of the mewling left, praising Ed as a saviour come to deliver them from evil itself, is that the greater good is served by a Conservative approach to almost everything. And while bile and hatred comes naturally to the caring parties, adherents of the nasty party are more likely to just find their cringing highly amusing. Thus Ed is thanked for his valiant efforts in putting the right man at the helm. (Of course, it is all the fault of Margaret Thatcher, still, even though this time it’s ding-dong the witch is Ed.)

The thinly-disguised communist Giles Fraser writes in the Guardian “Right now I feel ashamed to be English. Ashamed to belong to a country that has clearly identified itself as insular, self-absorbed and apparently caring so little for the most vulnerable people among us. … Maybe that’s why the pollsters got it so badly wrong: we are not so much a nation of shy voters as of ashamed voters, people who want to present to the nice polling man as socially inclusive, but who, in the privacy of the booth, tick the box of our own self-interest.”

And the child-commentator Owen Jones wrote “There will be a big debate now over the future of the Labour party, and what the left does next. This country desperately needs a politics of hope that answers people’s everyday problems on living standards, job security, housing, public services and the future of their children… What is needed is a movement rooted in the lives of working-class people and their communities. The future of millions of people depends on it.“

I’m tempted to taunt with cries of diddums and in my weaker moments I confess I’m not above a bit of gloating, but the problem is self-evident; once again the privileged left-wingers just can’t see what is in front of everybody’s else’s eyes. Much the same thing happened in Maggie’s day as Kinnock’s goons just failed to understand the motives of the ordinary working man. Labour were shocked by how many ordinary workers voted for Tories, then and now. But why wouldn’t they? What most seek is a steady job, a home, a family life and as little government intervention by way of taxes and rules as possible; in other words, core Conservative principles.

Even in the heady days of union strength though, that apparent solidarity was driven by a desire for collective power spurred on by the thought of individual gain, but it was heavily enforced by sanctions. Ask any strike-breaker tarred with the tag of ‘scab’ and he will explain how 'caring' leftist ideologies are made to function. If the only effective means by which you can order society is through coercive legislation – race laws, hate crimes, restriction of speech, enforced multiculturalism skewed by privileges for the few, etc, etc - I’d suggest you look a lot more like fascists than do the Tories.

What we need are nice uniforms...

Meanwhile, as the Blue Team roll up their sleeves and take up, unfettered, where they left off, Labour and the rest of the raggle-taggle left will fire up their well-oiled electoral thinking engine and without any meaningful consultation with those they seek to represent they will convene insider focus groups, gather in Marxist study meetings and come up with some really pithy slogans. You just see if they don’t

Missing in Inaction

There is something oddly wrong with British politics. There has been something horribly wrong for many years now, and for most of that time it was Europe, or Socialism, or Socialism in Europe, but it’s all gone eerily quiet all of a sudden. Since 2010 the Labour Party’s policies, all of them, have been missing in action but now, it seems, the shadow cabinet has also quietly slipped away.

Apart from a feeble and insincere ‘one nation’ statement on Twitter over the Woolwich murder nobody has heard a peep from Ed Milibland, the man who apparently still pretends to be their leader. Ed-the-Balls has been in hiding since his dearly longed-for triple-dip recession never materialised and even the strident feminist tones of Harriet Harperson have been missing from the airwaves.

A few days ago Andy Burnham made one feeble attempt on Radio Four to blame seventy years of compounded mismanagement of the NHS entirely on the coalition’s last three years, but he may as well have been reading from the same script he dreamt up in 2011 when he was moved to health having fucked up education and drawn flak from Mary Beard.

I miss them. It’s all well and good declaring open season on David Cameron and jeering from the sidelines as more proper Tories defect to UKIP from his New Red Conservative Party. It’s all well and good occasionally asking, “Who IS Nick Clegg and what is he for?” but without the principal comedy ensemble that is Her Majesty’s Opposition politics is just no fun any more – they couldn’t even be bothered to field a participant anybody had heard of for Question Time last night.

Neither have we heard any frankly hilarious calls for a general summer strike from the likes of Labour’s puppeteers, the gang of three: Len McCluskey, Mark Serwotka and Bob Crow. At the moment they and the Labour Party are missing a golden opportunity to have a right old go while the Conservatives are clawing their eyes out over same sex marriage. It's an open goal fer Chrissakes! What on earth is going on?

We need a public inquiry but there’s nobody to call for one.

Somewhere, there is a secluded happy valley, a sunny Shangri-La, where Shergar, Glen Miller, Lord Lucan, Amelia Earhart and the ship’s company of the Marie Celeste have been joined by the washed up survivors of a sunken political movement. Should we inform anybody? If you see them, don't call anybody.

Old Labour Hubbard

Next door to the woman who lives in a shoe, where she earns more than a doctor just for having so many children she doesn’t know what to do... Round the corner from Little Jack Horner, the union official with the plum job… Just along the glade from the hill where Jack and Jill famously earned Jack’s disability living allowance, lives old Mother Hubbard. Seeking to feed her poor little doggie, Mother Hubbard proceeded to the cupboard where the Labour Party kept all their policy ideas and what did she find? Sweet FA according to Dan Hodges.

In the past Labour has wooed voters by telling them nice things such as mountains are mounds of muffins, clouds are composed of candy floss and rain is made from Mountain Dew. And if we all think nice thoughts and wish very hard we can go on a journey and become stars on X-Fuctor. And nobody ever needs to be called scum. Even when they are the vilest scum imaginable. Because the Labour Party want to be seen as a very nice party; jelly and ice cream and balloons and everything. Everybody say, “Aaaah”. 

But now the chickens are firmly on the roost and all is not well in Miliband’s Marxist wonderland.

Multiculturalism has mangled our traditional sense of fair play and tolerance and created ghettoes and strife and fear and hate. The Diversity Coordinators have spent so long redefining their role, their aims, their purpose in life, their mission statements and their remuneration packages that they now need Diversity Coordinator Coordinators to redefine their role, their aims, etc. 

Education, education, education has been misheard as statistics, statistics, statistics for so long that the current crop of wunderkind are more like “wonder-they-can-spell-their-own-name-kind”. It’s not the teachers’ fault; after all most of them are products of the same failing system. But they are complicit in churning out a dumbed-down electorate which, despite my hearty derision of the Left, I can’t believe was the intention of any sane government.

But look, the party’s over and this time there are no goodie-bags to take home. All the money went on the trifle. And before you trudge home in the dark, it’s time to tell you the truth at last. Because being too nice to you all for too many years was slowly killing you with kindness. 

Life can be roses, but not without effort. Educational attainment can be the route to riches, but not for everybody. School can even be fun, but not all the time. Some make it all the way to the top; most by talent and hard work, some by good fortune, but the top is a very small place and to get there you have to scramble over the heap made up of the rest of us. There it is, the honest truth and reality of life as the planet’s top predator. 

So Michael Gove is surely to be lauded for telling the truth and getting to grips with a crippling national problem. Yes, the teaching profession is going to whinge like buggery but it’s time for them to admit that their fifty years of ‘progressive’ education is largely responsible for our appalling performance measured against the rest of the world. (It’s notable that the best in the world largely use ‘old fashioned’ educational methods.) 

And while we’re telling the truth, George Osborn should also be praised for daring to tell us the money cupboard is bare. So back to the Labour Party. Opposition is usually easy – all you do is gainsay every government proposal and promise milk and honey if you get back into power, but even the serial fantasists of Socialism seem to have admitted the game is up. The lack of any form of coherent opposition policy is a sign, maybe, that reality has finally dawned on Keir Hardie's clan.

Ed explains his economic policy to the nation

But, cheer up folks, there is good news ahead. There must be, otherwise all the newspapers wouldn't already be back to banging on about Kate’s particularly perky party poppers, so all’s well with the world again. Yay!