A Song From 1981 (Or Earlier?)

In October 1981, 250,000 people joined an anti-nuclear demonstration in London. That summer, Tony Benn had come within 1% of being elected Deputy Leader of the Labour Party.

Me? I was unemployed in Brighton.  So unemployed, in fact, I volunteered to work as a steward at that Labour Party conference. As a consequence, I find I am the owner of the 'Phonetappers and Punters Club Official Songbook' (a Clause 4 Publication).

Clause 4, in this context, was a grouping in the Labour Party's youth and student movements who steadfastly opposed the various array of Trotskyists, especially the Militant Tendency, who would otherwise have dominated those youth movements. Because it was a reactive grouping - e.g. anti-Trotskyist - Clause 4 spanned a fairly wide political spectrum from traditional Tribunites to hardline 'Stalinists-in-all-but-party-colours' to 'Eurocommunists-in-all-but-party-colours' and even included a few libertarian leftist/feminist/proto-green types. In student politics they were in deep alliance with the CP. ( I only mention all this as I can't find any reference to  them on the web, so I'm filling in the background). For all this heterogeneity, not to mention a fair dollop of callow youthful sectarianism, they did, in my experience, at least have a sense of humour. Several of them went onto adult political careers, including Ministerial office in a couple of cases.
  
The Phonetappers and Punters Club was their 'end of the pier review' for Labour Conference. The songbook is a window into a different world. CND was being reborn as a truly mass movement.  The politics of nuclear weapons was being discussed with passion and mass involvement again, for the first time in almost 2 decades. & that meant the politics of nuclear weapons on both sides of the Iron Curtain were up for debate. I don't actually know if the song below - intended to be sung to the tune of The Red Flag - was written by the Clause 4 crew in the early eighties or was an inheritance from an earlier age(1) but it captures something of the time , at least as I recall it.


Our cause is surely won this year,
Because 'the leadership' is here,
For Khrushchev's boys and Trotsky's too
Now guide us in the work we do.

Then wave the Worker's Bomb on high,
Beneath its cloud we'll gladly die
And though our critics all shout 'balls'
We'll stand beneath it when it falls.

While Western arms we'll strive to end,
The Russian bomb we will defend
Degenerated though it might be
it is the people's property


The King St comrades chant its praise,
In Clapham they love its blaze,
Though quite deformed politically
We must support it...critically

It will correct our errors past
And clarify with its blast
Deep in our shelters, holes and nooks
We'll all have time to 'read the books'

And when we leave this world of toil
And shuffle off our mortal coil
We'll thank the Bomb that set us free
To Socialist Eternity.


(1) King St was still, then, the HQ of the CPGB. But the reference to Clapham is presumably to the old Clapham grouping of Trotskyists which, in the 1950s, apparently included Ted Grant, Gerry Healey and Tony Cliff - whom by 1981 has most certainly gone their own ways. So the song may actually be older than I'm suggesting here. But there were still folk on both sides of the Stalinist/Trotskyist divide defending the 'Workers Bomb'  when I saw the review in 1981.

The Election About Anything But Telling The Punters How Horrible We’re Going To Be If We Win, Whilst Still Boasting We’re Going To be Quite Horrible

Off we go then. Eyes down for a full house.

What the election should be about, of course, is the long term economic future of the country and how to move forward from being a set of occupied territories controlled by the City of London. About what a post industrial country should do if it never wants to be held to ransom by International Finance again. But, no, it’s going to be about boasting who can do the required – but always so, so vague – cutting of public services in a way that won’t affect the particular demographic niche the politico happens to be addressing today.

What’s the best thing that can happen? The emergence of a fractured social democratic voice in Parliament. We’ve lived for too long, too unsuccessfully with the idea that social democracy can express itself through Labour alone – or, under Blair and Brown, can be expressed through Labour at all.

We need overlapping circles of social democrats, spread through different parties with different 'dog whistle issues' so they keep each other honest. We need a few Green social democrats and more than a few Plaid and SNP social democrats. Even perhaps an Islamic social democrat in the personage of Salma Yaqoob. David Henry, the Anti-Blears candidate in Salford. & of course we need some good, old fashioned Labour social democrats. (Folk like the ever entertaining Paul Smith, down in Bristol West.).

What I'm dreaming of is the opposite of a Popular Front, where differences are buried to fight the common foe: its the creation of conditions for a ramshackle 'family argument of the left' in Parliament, one where different members of the family remind each other what family loyalty is supposed to be about. & the social democratic family is - or should be - about defending the welfare state and ordinary people, not pruning it back to keep bankers happy.

Mind, when I stop dreaming I still think the Tories are likely to win.

Open Left? Let's Have An Open Hearted One...

The whole Open Left thing is a tacit acknowledgment that the New Labour government is about to go down to defeat. I’ve come across the idea of ‘getting your retaliation in first’ before but this may be the first time I've stumbled on the idea of getting your ‘post-defeat soul searching in first’. This is perhaps one reason why it’s all such an unsatisfying slurry of words and vaguely defined dangling questions.

I'd advise all these angst ridden wannabe 21st Century lefties to go read Orwell:

The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem. Dickens can describe a poverty-stricken family tucking into a roast goose, and can make them appear happy; on the other hand, the inhabitants of perfect universes seem to have no spontaneous gaiety and are usually somewhat repulsive into the bargain......The Socialist objective is not a society where everything comes right in the end, because kind old gentlemen give away turkeys. ..... We want a world where Scrooge, with his dividends, and Tiny Tim, with his tuberculous leg, would both be unthinkable. But does that mean we are aiming at some painless, effortless Utopia? At the risk of saying something which the editors of Tribune may not endorse, I suggest that the real objective of Socialism is not happiness. Happiness hitherto has been a by-product, and for all we know it may always remain so. The real objective of Socialism is human brotherhood.

I've always taken this to imply several things things:

1. Socialism doesn't depend on some idealistic concept of the perfectibility of human kind;
2. Socialism won't bring universal happiness (though there is no reason to imagine people will, on average, be any less happy than under capitalism);
3. The specific and distinctive policy objectives of 20th Century socialism - the predominantly social ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange; or significant resource distribution between individuals on the basis of need, not effort -were, in fact, only a means to an end: the end being what Orwell called 'human brotherhood', but what we might now describe as social solidarity or community inclusiveness, the lack of which is the key sickness at the heart of our society.

We need a 21st Century equivalent vision. I don't care whether it's called 'socialism' or not any more.

Why Are They So Happy?

The Labour blogosphere is jumping with joy (yes, Duncan, Paul and Hopi, I do mean you) that Stumbling and Mumbling has called the end of the recession, albeit very tentatively. Who knows if he’s right or wrong? Not me. You have to have a degree of expertise in econometrics to even enter the debate. JKA certainly disagrees, and, to be fair, Chris himself is much less definitive than his cheerleaders.

But let’s say Chris Dillow is right. What would it mean? Let me suggest two broad themes for thought.

1. First it wouldn’t mean it is necessarily the pain is all over. The recovery may just be the initial upswing of the ‘W’ shaped recession predicted by some – and in that event there’s no necessary reason why the second downswing shouldn’t be at least as bad as the first. (There is an entertaining range of alternatively shaped recessions to choose from as well- who says capitalism doesn’t give you consumer choice?). Secondly of course it most certainly wouldn’t mean that unemployment stops rising: unemployment is a ‘lagging indicator’ and so the number of jobless is likely to continue to go up for some time. & thirdly it wouldn’t say anything at all about the effects of any public spending cuts or tax rises which might be necessary to deal with the after effects of the government’s counter cyclical spending and rescue of the banks. So in human terms it wouldn’t mean ‘we’re through the worst of it. Let’s remind ourselves that, in general, it is human experience which has directly political consequences, not the econometric data per se. So there’s no guarantee that an economic improvement will result in any Labour polling improvement in a crude economic determinist manner.


2. It would raise quite big questions about how our economy now works. If the international financial system really did come within days of simply jamming up – and no one seems to question that is what almost happened last autumn – yet we can return to growth within months, might that not mean that the basic thesis of ‘the Great Moderation’ is correct in outline at least, and just needs to be ‘tweaked’ to account for the possibility of the odd Black Swan moment? Which might suggest a policy of steering a political path back to the economic status quo ante with some risk management/regulatory bells and whistles added. Or is it a sign that the key boffins in HM Treasury really had read their Minsky, and have had their Minsky moment of triumph ? Which would imply an aggressive future policy of bank regulation, even bank direction and long term and active ownership of key financial institutions. Or perhaps it might even mean we should all suddenly convert to Boffy’s unorthodox Trotskyite view that this a sign of the amazing strength of the underlying Long Wave upswing, based on new technologies and new sets of productive relations, and that the time is now ripe for a massive expansion of workers co-operatives. Whatever: I’m no economist and I don’t know. But I do know that all three of these perspectives might gain some traction in different parts of the Labour movement – and all three lead to very different, and clashing, economic programmes. I think even a recovery might mean Labour is sunk by internal policy differences which, in the grand scheme of things, would be considerably more important that the sort of personality driven, Mafioso-lite failed coup we saw last week.

I like reading Duncan, Paul and Hopi. They’re bright and self aware, even if I don’t always agree with any of them. But I think they’re clutching at straws here.

Addendum: In any event, Anne Pettifor makes the case for believing the recession isn't over.

Why I Can't See Myself Voting Labour Ever Again: It's Tribal

I suppose I could, like a good little politico, go on about how much I dislike the policies. & Lord, isn’t that fertile ground? I mean there’s the War that 2 million marched against, obviously; there PFI; there’s Academies; there’s the brutal acceptance of inequality; there’s the weird Soviet/Californian managerial hybrid of target driven marketisation which has so disfigured our public services; there’s stray ‘smallish’ polices like ASBOs and Respect which really get my goat. I could write a lot about all that and then sit back and feel what a clever, principled and unsullied Lefty I was.

But, let’s be honest, it’s not really about the policies as such for me. It’s tribal – it’s about the culture and the sociology. Labour no longer feels like my tribe. In fact it feels like the tribe that despises mine.

Let me explain. The old Labour Party was always a sociological alliance between, in the main, manual workers and middle class state-orientated Fabian social reformers. Both elements contained their 'Left' and 'Right', so Old Labour produced Bessie Braddock and Dennis Skinner, as well as Anthony Crosland and Tony Benn. So I could come from an apolitical but Labour voting unskilled manual household, get an education and a job in the welfare professions and still feel I was part of a particular tribe.

Thatcherism’s attitude to this tribe was more sophisticated than many allow. Sure, it smashed its characteristic modes of industrial and political representation in a fairly cold-blooded, direct way. But, sociologically, at least as important was the way it more or less self consciously split the tribe. ‘White Van Man’ it bribed with council house sales and utility privatisations; ‘public service person’ it demonised as someone determined to pursue provider capture, that is to run public services in the interests of the staff not the users. & New Labour inherited these broad sociological attitudes, unexamined. It didn't challenge them, it didn't try to put the tribe together again - it just continued the Thatcherite programme of stamping on its face, over and over again.

Which is why I'm always bemused by accusations leveled at the Blair/Brown government about excessive public spending. It very largely went on PFI scams as far as I can see. Or dodgy wars. Or kowtowing to the so called aspirational classes. Whatever else it did, it didn't rebuild my tribe.

But it's nice when someone else remembers the tribe. Which is why I'm more than prepared to give a big thumbs up to Hilary Wainwright's latest offering, “Public Service Reform…But Not As We Know It!”, an account of a genuine partnership with the Trades Unions in Newcastle Council intended to head off privatisation and improve services. Read the shortened article here, and buy the book here.

It's not the revolution, but its a good thing for the tribe.

Dirigisme: Once More With Feeling?

I see Lord Mandelson wants to use the Post Office as a basis for setting up a 'People's Bank'. Good idea - and why don't we call it something snappy like 'Girobank'?

I can recall one keen young political whippersnapper, full of the joys of the Wilsonian 'white hot heat of technological revolution', who promoted that idea before. In fact I think he was Postmaster General when it was set up.

If I ever see Mandy drinking from a pint mug of tea or lighting up a pipe I'm going start feeling a bit uncomfortable...

A Rub of the Green: What is Cameron Upto ?

For reasons I don't pretend to understand Cameron is pushing through a formal Tory rapprochement with the all but electorally dead Official Unionist Party. Slugger O'Toole is full of it. Along the way Cameron has given several hostages to fortune, including really problematic statements such as," I'm not neutral on the question of the union." Such statements seem problematic to me because they feed the 'auld ghosts' of the ur-Republican view, rather than move politics onto any kind of a new terrain. I genuinely struggle to see what is in all this for the Tories. So it feels a bit irresponsible to put it mildly.

From a distance, Northern Irish politics seem stuck in a kind of shadow boxing mode. Yes, the guns have been put away - or almost all of them anyway. Yes, we have formal power sharing - when the elected representatives can be bothered to decide they'll talk to each other, which, to be frank, isn't that often. But they really don't seem to talk about the 'elephant on the sofa': the demographic shift.

One of the ironic effects of Direct Rule was that the long term existence of a higher birth rate in the Catholic community actually began to have demographic effect, because the Brits gave more jobs to people from the nationalist communities thus stemming the traditional flow of emigration. The balance now stands at something like 43:57, down from the 1/3rd - 2/3rds split of the 1960s. Some time around 2040 there will be an adult nationalist majority. Followed shortly, one presumes, by a referendum in favour of Irish unity. But when the last British soldier and civil servant leaves there will still be a million people living there who, unless something changes, will be extremely resistant to incorporation into a united Ireland.

In this context Cameron's intervention seems...well a bit bonkers.

I also learned on Slugger that the (British) Labour Party has now authorised the setting up of a NI wide CLP, although this is several steps away from formally standing candidates in any elections in Northern Ireland, which would still require the explicit approval of Labour HQ. This too gives rise to a certain foreboding, although, at a push, I could just about grasp the logic of NI Labour candidates standing in European elections if jointly sponsored by both British and Irish Labour parties, as both sides of the argument over the border seem to approve of EU membership and, indeed, EU links are often touted as one way of decreasing the relative importance of the border in the politics of the North. But even this has to be seen in the context of the existence of the SDLP with its firm (if much diminished) base in one community but not the other. So it could still go very wrong.

In any event, Europe may be a bit of an exception: I can't quite see how a Labour candidate affiliated to the British Labour Party could possibly appeal to both communities in elections to Westminster, Stormont or any local council. & surely it is paving the way for some kind of cross community unity, to minimise the possible consequences of that '2040 moment', that is the big longer term contribution British politicians can make to the future of the North of Ireland.

Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom?

This is new - at least for me. Compass are asking all and sundry to propose new policies. People can organise their own meetings to discuss the ideas proposed. It's not a sudden outbreak of unmediated direct democracy however - they still have an 'expert panel' to judge the ideas before Compass members get to vote on them.

No doubt all this is a predictable outgrowth of the Howard Dean and Obama campaigns - and an attempt to link the 'flash mob' phenomenon into the political process. But what interests me is that it seems to be a step on a path to re-imagining what a political party might be in the internet age.

'Modern' political parties are all, in essence, run by their full timers. The only real difference between the Tories and, say, the SWP in this respect is that the Tories' full timers are mainly elected representatives. Much as I dislike the paraphernalia of democratic centralism - the list system, the absurd insistence on defending the line - in strictly sociological or organisational terms all political parties are deeply alike in this respect, however different their ideology, party rules or policy offerings. The membership - even if you call the membership the 'cadre base' - is there to act as a transmission belt of ideas and activities generated from the top. The members are 'amateurs', theoretically in democratic control of the 'professionals' but in reality almost always subservient to them. So being a member ain't much fun unless you're an election/ paper sales junkie - which many of them are - or very keen on endless policy wonkery.

This sort of initiative might well prove to be e-window dressing that still leaves the professionals firmly in control. Indeed, it is likely that many of the proposals submitted will come from other professionals in various campaigns and pressure groups. But I still think it is worth two cautious cheers. Who knows, one or two ideas genuinely originating from amateurs might actually make their way through the process. & in the ossified world of politics that really would be something new.

( Hat-tip Tom P)

How Long Can the Labour Bounce Last?

Stumbling tells us the government is all over the place: the right hand doesn't quite know what, er, the other right hand is doing. It's probably true: a large ship of state is being turned round after many years of steaming in one direction and the crew have quite forgotten how to perform the manoeuvre. Underneath the headlines about Brown leading the world into a series of counter-cyclical Keynesian reflation measures are a whole host of more practical problems which New Labour is only weakly equipped to address in this new world. Today reported this morning that Lord Mandelson - now doesn't that name have a ring to it, like a title that was somehow always pre-ordained – was considering shelving the family friendly/flexible working extension proposals for small businesses. Meanwhile Brown and others still plough on in their quest to help 'hard-working families'. Something is going to have to give.

Perhaps some of this is inherent in the nature of politics itself: you deal with one problem and another one pops up somewhere else and you suddenly remember you used a different technique to deal with that one some time ago. 'Events dear boy, events'. But it is also due to the fact that New Labour abandoned politics per se, or at least politics as it was previously understood on the Left of the spectrum. They were and remain essentially technocratic managerialists. They ask not 'What is the Good Society and how can we edge towards it?' as old-style social democrats did, but simply," What Works?" A global recession makes it very, very difficult not to extend this into the obvious next question of "Who do you want it to work for?" and that's a political, not a managerial, question.

There is more than one historic model for Keynesianism. FDR tried it with infrastructure projects – but so did Hitler with his rearmament programme. Dave Osler reminds us that Keynesianism alone is not enough: we need policies for full employment. Will Hutton makes the striking observation that the quickest way to get the economy moving is not pulling forward large scale building projects but raising unemployment benefits. & the Green New Deal people want the infrastructure measures to be ones that leave us better off than before in terms of being able to face the challenge of climate change. But every one of these things involves some renegotiation of the relationship between state and economy, not just technocratic reflation.

New Labour will go down in the history books as the masters of spin - and the original spinmeister is back in the cabinet. But that's not going to be enough now. They need some politics now and I'm not sure they can magic it up without hurting their long time friends.

To Do List: 1. Save World 2.Stop Digging Hole 3. Pass the Blame...

A few short weeks ago I was predicting a near total melt down in the Labour Party's fortunes. They were all played out and the various segments of their core vote were drifting away. The Tories held an incredible 24pt lead in the opinion polls.

But Mr. Bean has been replaced by Dr. Finlay - the economic physician of choice to the Western world. Suddenly, Brownanomics is the new black throughout the chancelleries of the west. This, I submit, is a fairly bemusing development. Historians will struggle to explain it. In objective terms it might be the greatest comeback since General McArthur returned to the Philippines.

It seems to have given the government heart to begin to stop digging whilst in a hole. So we see the rapid abandonment of basically stupid policy positions- 42 days detention, key stage 3 SATS test – which only pride and unease about lurking ultra-Blairite reaction on the back benches had kept them wedded too. Sure, there are good policy specific reasons for both of these moves, but I really think what connects them is a political tactic rather than anything to do with the inherent nature of this government's attitude to either civil liberties or education. This is an attempt to regroup politically, and store up those sections of the core vote – the Guardian reading middle classes – most interested in these matters.

But the recession still looms. Inflation up to 5.2%, unemployment predicted to rise to 2 million by Christmas. Being praised by Nobel Prize winners and striding the international stage like a latter day Keynes is all well and good – but who will the electorate blame for the recession? Who, after all, was minding the shop in terms of City regulation?

The politics of the next few months will be a struggle to allocate blame. Brown and co and in a strong position in some ways - everyone understands that it is their prescription which the world is now taking and this will earn them kudos. But how convincing a story can the Tories – who have been all but invisible for a fortnight – make of the assertion that this is a home grown crisis?

Yesterday was Dunkirk – it’s a long way to D-Day

Yesterday saw the largest scale government intervention in the UK Stock markets ever undertaken, plus a cut in interest rates on an unprecedentedly global scale. Brown and Darling were greeting with a wartime spirit in the Commons, and cheered to the rafters. There are calls for the US to follow the British plan. So has it worked?

Perhaps it is too early to tell. But the FT grimly records:

"News of the scheme failed to calm the stock markets. Amid massive share trading volumes, the FTSE 100 index of leading shares closed at 4,367, down more than 5 per cent, marking its worst three-day run since October 1987. Yet the cost of insuring the debt of Britain's largest banks against default dropped, suggesting that the credit markets had been reassured by the scheme."

Some technically well informed people on the left tell us that it's a wasted opportunity – we could have acquired more of the banks for this amount of money, and began the inevitable turning around of a failed 'business model', if that is quite the right way of describing how an economy should be run. Larry Elliot certainly agrees that it a plan to stabilise, not reform, the system which brought us the mess in the first place. But this hardly a surprise: no one imagined that Brown and Darling did this as a first step towards setting up a socialist economy. Nor, to be frank, is anyone suggesting that these moves alone will mean we avoid a severe recession if not an actual depression. Indeed some people – like VoxEU.org, with their frightening graphs - tell us we're still heading for a 1930s type crash.

Never mind, though: in his 'day job' Stumbling and Mumbling tells us at least some things are still working: outside the financial sector, corporate profitability is still healthy, at least in the US.

So – what's my gut feeling about all this? Simply that this is genuinely a '1940' moment for Britain. Either these moves stave off the 'threat of invasion'- for which read the collapse of the banking system - or they don't. Given the reception by mainstream economists I suspect there is a fair chance this will be realised. But 'staving off an invasion' is a long way from 'wining a war', as it were. The economy survives - we're not in the strange Icelandic world of national bankruptcy –but turning this around will require huge further shifts, which almost no-one in power seems presently to even be prepared to contemplate. What the economists call a structural adjustment is required - a different way of running the economy because it's broken for most of us. There is no way of getting there painlessly and we can certainly expect higher prices, more unemployment and lower standards of living.

The 1983 Manifesto was right: Britain as a country needs to use its financial sector to support the gainful enterprise of its citizens by directing investment to areas where meaningful jobs, ideally with a greenish tinge, are created . We need to move away from an economy based on casino capitalism because the net result is disaster. Yet the problem, 25 years on from 1983, is that all the metal bashing jobs have either migrated to the BRIC countries or been made redundant by the march of automation and technology. We need a new plan which not just socialises more of the economy, but projects a new vision of how we're going to make a living. In other words: a national-popular programme, however weird and old fashioned that sounds in what we've been told is a globalised world.

But we're not going to get it anytime soon.

Things Were Different When I Were a Lad

Hattip to Blood and Treasure and Virtual Stoa for reminding me that the Left once had a very strong sense of how to avoid the sort of thing we're living through:

"It is essential that industry has the finance it needs to support our plans for increased investment. Our proposals are set out in full in our Conference statement, The Financial Institutions. We will:

• Establish a National Investment Bank to put new resources from private institutions and from the government - including North Sea oil revenues - on a large scale into our industrial priorities. The bank will attract and channel savings, by agreement, in a way that guarantees these savings and improves the quality of investment in the UK.
• Exercise, through the Bank of England, much closer direct control over bank lending. Agreed development plans will be concluded with the banks and other financial institutions.
• Create a public bank operating through post offices, by merging the National Girobank, National Savings Bank and the Paymaster General's Office.
• Set up a Securities Commission to regulate the institutions and markets of the City, including Lloyds, within a clear statutory framework.
• Introduce a new Pension Schemes Act to strengthen members' rights in occupational pension schemes, clarify the role of trustees, and give members a right to equal representation, through their trade unions, on controlling bodies of the schemes.
• Set up a tripartite investment monitoring agency to advise trustees and encourage improvements in investment practices and strategies.

We expect the major clearing banks to co operate with us fully on these reforms, in the national interest. However, should they fail to do so, we shall stand ready to take one or more of them into public ownership. This will not in any way affect the integrity of customers' deposits."

Labour Party Manifesto, 1983 aka 'The Longest Suicide Note in History'

But however suicidal or otherwise it proved at the time it was, of course, the platform on which both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown were first elected to Parliament.

Brown Out for Labour?

New Labour is decomposing. Each day Brown's position is undermined a little more, either by another back bencher calling for a leadership contest or simply because the big beasts of the World's financial sector are going belly up. (That doesn't really work for our Great Helmsman as he's spend a decade boasting about his 'special friend',Prudence).

Can he get through Labour Party Conference at the end of this month? Conferences are great places for plotting after all. I think he will because it really isn't going to be easy to dump him, elect another leader and still pretend a general election isn't necessary. You can't change Prime Minster twice on one mandate without getting pilloried in the Press. & the one viable tactic for Labour whoever is leading them surely has to be avoiding an election for as long as possible. People have stopped talking about 1983 - which was a better outcome for Labour than the sort of result currently suggested on websites like Electoral Calculus - and started muttering about 1931 (52 seats for Labour).

This has happened in other countries - whole historic parties have been almost wiped out in single elections in my life time in both Canada and Italy. I know it sounds ridiculous to imagine it might happen here - but a perfect storm is brewing for New Labour. There is a gathering sense of the economic crisis of 1929 being re-run in miniature(well, I hope it's in miniature..). The SNP look and sound like a social democratic party of government on a European model. Labour's old 'core' manual working class vote is slipping away, mainly to apathy but sometimes to the BNP, and the 'aspirational' classes are turning Tory again.

But most of all New Labour no longer has a coherent and trustworthy political story, just a bunch of increasingly panicky policies that change, it seems, from day to day. It could really all go tits up for them.If (and it's a big 'if') they lose the Glenrothes by-election I predict Brown will fall. & then Miliband or Cruddas or whoever it is will be forced to go to the polls in months and get massacred....

Or Glenrothes will be held. & then we will face a sort of re-run of the last 18 months of the Major administration: government by 'waiting for something to turn up'...But in either event, I can see no circumstances under which New Labour can possibly win the next election. It's just a case of them choosing when and by how much they might lose.

What the Labour Party has been upto Whilst I've Been Away

The old Labour Party was always a sociological alliance between, in the main, manual workers and middle class state-orientated Fabian social reformers. Both elements contained their 'Left' and 'Right', so old Labour produced Bessie Braddock and Dennis Skinner, as well as Anthony Crosland and Tony Benn. But time, and Thatcher, destroyed this sociological base, or at least decreased its overall weight in the population so it became incapable of projecting itself as a 'national' party. As a consequence it turned in on itself in a fratricidal civil war which took up much of the 1980s. Even those few shoots of modernity that appeared on the Left during this time - Livingstone and the GLC foremost amongst them - got smothered, or at least muffled, by inescapably getting caught up in this internal conflict. Kinnock stabilised the situation but little more.

Blair and New Labour took a different approach. More or less his first act was to symbolically rip up the Holy Grail - Clause 4. But this wasn't him taking sides in the old civil war, or at least that wasn't its primary meaning - it was him rejecting the whole prior sociological base of the party, and indeed its whole prior modus operandi of relating to the electorate. Henceforth New Labour was going to be about 'aspiration' and 'Middle England'. But it was going to reach out to them as a centralised marketing campaign, not grow out of them organically. Harold Wilson famously said 'the Labour Party is a crusade or it is nothing'; Tony Blair proved 'nothing' could still sell toothpaste quite successfully. (I'm using 'toothpaste as a metaphor for managerialist, technocratic policies.)

But now New Labour has run out of time, of options and, yes, out of toothpaste. It has very weak resources to fall back on: a (much smaller and sullenly depoliticised) manual working class that correctly thinks it's been ignored; the grandchildren of Fabians staffing the welfare state who feel alienated and attacked by the marketised version of 'public sector reform'; Middle England who feels its 'aspirations' aren't being met.

The historical conditions which gave birth to and sustained the Labour Party no longer pertain. It only has a ghostly after-life as a sort of zombie version of the American Democratic Party to look forward too.... A general election defeat of the scale of 1931 is not impossible.