The blogger at Lenin’s Tomb posts his thoughts on the latest assembly elections in London:
Anyone who thinks that Labour is about to turn left is kidding themselves. Far more likely is that the government will take a more aggressive stance toward the unions (as it did in 1969, with ‘In Place of Strife’) and make a demonstrative crackdown on immigration (as it did with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1968). Labour doesn’t contain the resources for a regeneration of its battered left, any more than it did when John McDonnell failed to get enough PLP support to even run a campaign against Gordon Brown. The last vaguely leftish credible alternative to Brown was the late Robin Cook, whose standing after his dignified antiwar resignation speech would have made him the obvious candidate. And even he would have struggled. Just because the left-of-Labour vote was poor, just because the Tories have made a decisive recovery, don’t think that we can place our hopes in a New Labour conversion, or that we can avoid continuing to try to build a left-of-Labour alternative. We will be lying to ourselves in quite a dangerous way if we imagine that we can claw back some space by just abandoning the electoral terrain to New Labour. The fact that it is now a more difficult task in the short-term does not mean it can be wished away.
It’s a good post. I’m still reeling from learning about the election results; also, I’m finding it difficult to express my thoughts on the matter without copious and inarticulate swearing, which only heightens my appreciation of the post’s well-written astuteness.
Meh. Frankly, Labour had it coming. As much as I dislike the idea of a new Tory government, I dislike the idea of Labour continuing to find new and interesting ways to screw up the country.
Brown is rapidly becoming the John Major of the Labour party.
Look like the Brown Matrix is heading down the pan then!
You said it! All though it is occasionally to have a ranting inarticulate post once in a while to liven things up.
Ok, well at least I can make words about this now rather than typing %**! again and again.
Brown’s many inadequacies as PM seem to me like a poor justification for having London run for the next two years by a man who is pretty much the exemplification of everything that has ever been wrong with politics. Or for having a BNP member on the London Assembly. And the massive Tory resurgence is very unlikely to result in Labour getting the message that they need to offer more genuine left-wing policies. Especially when the only attempt to provide a genuine voice of the left on the political field has entirely collapsed.
I leave England for five months and look what happens.
The original link uses the term “BNP Nazi” a few times. I don’t know anything about British political parties, so can someone expand on this?
BNP stands for British National Party. I recommend you read the Wikipedia Article on them, which contains some lovely nuggets from their constitution, such as that they are “committed to stemming and reversing the tide of non-white immigration and to restoring, by legal changes, negotiation and consent the overwhelmingly white makeup of the British population that existed in Britain prior to 1948.” and that they propose “firm but voluntary incentives for immigrants and their descendants to return home.”
They are, literally, Nationalist Socialists, and one of the ways they’ve gained support is to speak to whites in those traditional working-class communities which have been more or less ignored by the major parties for a long time now. I’m not a big fan of that political-affiliations quadrant system, but it does make sense to see them as economically on the left but socially extremely authoritarian. The thought of them gaining political leverage at the moment is seriously frightening.