British Labour Regaining the X-Factor? November 14, 2009
Posted by Garibaldy in British Politics.trackback
Following their recent victory in the Glasgow North East byelection, it seems from the picture at the top of the post that the British Labour Party might be showing signs of regaining some of the confidence, swagger, and slick presentation that helped them sweep to power in 1997. I’m far from convinced that holding a safe seat against a rival party that runs the devolved government in Scotland is a sign that Labour can put up a strong fight against Cameron’s Tories, but we can hope. I do like this poster though. An electoral campaign focussing on the class nature of Cameron’s Shadow Cabinet, and the hardline Thatcherite reality of the Tories, just might be enough to throw what looks like an inevitable Cameron victory into doubt, and possibly a hung parliament. Things could get interesting soon.
It will be interesting to see if there’s any element of buyers remorse over the next eight to ten months on the part of the British public. The issue during the week seriously rebounded on the Sun and Murdoch. And in a way that was entirely unpredictable.
Yeah the Sun disgraced itself. I was glad to see it rebound on them.
I hope there is a sense of buyer’s remorse, but we’ll have to see. The unpredictability you talk about is a good point. I think though it would take a serious economic turnaround that just doesn’t seem likely for the Tories not to win. Although the Tories don’t have the same enthusiasm for them that New Labour had, so who knows?
Perhaps we should start asking people to predict the outcome…
Starting a CLR internet betting site now?
That Cameron-mocking image is the first vaguely interesting thing I’ve ever seen associated with “The X-Factor”.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to listen to my Residents
and Henry Cow albums..
I told you I have a couple of Residents albums? No Henry Cow though. Any good?
“Terrible as an army with Banners” ……
Henry Cow were great actually, as were their once collaborators, later subsumed into the collective, Slapp Happy. Funny looking back that we thought in 76 that all this punk stuff was real radical, whilst, at a 30 years remove the like of Cow/ Slapp Happy, SME, AMM, Matching Mole and so on were all dealing with the complexities of matching progressive politics and advanced music in much more rigorous way – it was fashionable then to mock all that ‘rock in opposition’ stuff as preaching to the proletariat in 13/8 time, but better perhaps than agit prop sloganeering over a ham fisted, speeded up Chuck Berryism
I do not think that it will make any difference to Labour. The contested area is a solid Labour area. Labour’s economic woes and ineptitude are now becoming blatantly obvious. They have sentenced a generation to poverty. The pretend roll back on the disturbed immigration policy is just another false policy intended to ingrain themselves with ordinary people. The stark reality is that they have turned out worse than Thatcher, ideally they will be decimated at the next election and the Lib dems will replace them. What I believe will happen is that in England there vote will be split between themselves 1st, Lib Dem 2nd, BNP 3rd and Tory 4th.
The Lib Dems have moved to the right, so I don’t think that left-leaning Labour voters will go that way. I think your analysis is unduly pessimistic.
I think that my analysis is not pessimistic. We are looking at the end of the labour party as a contender for power in Wminister. Whatever one thinks of them, the BNP are are starting to hover up the working class vote – they are appealing to the the economic left labour voter and those that feel they have been ignored on social issues, the libs and the tories will gain as well from those that will only vote mainstream parties, but can no longer vote Labour. The classic socialist vote in Labour will be split amongst the greens and the usual suspects. My contention that Labour is by far the worst party for the ordinary voter to have in power is one that I stand by.
We are looking at the probable eclipse of Labour for a decade or so. Just as we saw with the Tories. Who are about to take power again. As for the BNP. European elections are very different beasts than Westminster ones, with much greater numbers of votes for candidates who do badly in national elections, so we’ll have to see how that pans out. As for the Greens. They have proven in every government they have been in that they are environmentalists first, and that it can go along just fine with right-wing politics.