What next for New Labour?

Many left-of-centre voters will face the ballot paper with despair and a sense of a wasted opportunity. 40% of the electorate are still undecided or unconvinced. It is quite possible that despite puffery to the contrary, the Labour vote in many parts of the country will implode. A narrow defeat is the best Labour can hope for. A collapse into a third place way behind the others will set in train a chain of consequences some good, some bad. A significant swing away from Labour would see the Tories elected with an overall majority. A positive outcome could be a re-alignment of British politics. This will follow a period of bloodletting within Labour that will be a battle between the old left and the Thatcherism-light of New Labour. However, without meaningful electoral reform, it could mean the Tories sustaining and tweaking the discredited first-past-the-post system to their advantage. A government headed by a Blair wannabe, supported by less than a third of the electorate would not have the moral authority to take the difficult decisions without provoking civil unrest.

Muriel Gray writing in the Herald last Sunday summed up what a lot of Labour supporters feel.

“Like so many other voters I’m desperate to forgive Labour. I’m terrified of a Conservative government, of a return to the unreconstructed certainties of the right wing that will polarise society, or a limp coalition government with the child-like LibDems, whose plans for the coming financial apocalypse are as well conceived as those of a man sawing off the tree branch he’s sitting on. Where is the party that, for all its faults, actually believed in the common good, and that politicians were the servants of the people’s will?

The stumbling block is that the sins of Labour in power have been so enormous, so grotesque, that it’s impossible to overlook them and let their leader carry on, however skilful we may know him to be in fiscal management. How can we forgive and forget the war? Not just the sheer, repugnant scale of how wrong it was, but all the attendant lying, spinning and self-preservation that followed in its bloody wake.

How can we forgive the staggering losses in our personal liberties, engineered by a party that used to shout about protecting them? Did we ever think that Labour would become the party of the police state? Do we forget about how Labour snuggled up to the bloated fat cat bankers, or how they courted money and sold off peerages? Can we stomach their slithering Mandelsons and their revolting Jim Devines? Do we forget all those expenses sharks and forgive the party’s total abandonment of the working man and woman? Can we shrug our shoulders at an immigration policy that was deviously designed to increase a loyal bloc vote, and instead ended up creating ghettos full of misery and disenfranchisement?

It’s impossible to forgive. The list is too long, the crimes too serious. So what Blair started has effectively finished Brown, and now we stare ahead at years of an ideological desert where the only jobs the administration will care about will be their own, and the idea of the common good will be an anachronism to equal the hostess trolley or the lava lamp.”

Her despair is palpable. It is the end result of years of a silenced membership, mainly mute MPs and government by sofa cabal.