Back to William James – and repeating myself – but when Polly Toynbee claims that:
“The story of the night is the defection from Labour by those marching over to the Lib Dems – and some even to the Tories”
Then the only possible response is to quote James’ line that:
“As a rule we disbelieve all the facts and theories for which we have no use”
Although perhaps another bit of James…
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely re-arranging their prejudices.”
…may be equally apt.
The Lib Dems gained all of twelve seats from Labour – not so much a march and a slightly embarrassed hobble – and of those:
A couple in Scotland owed something to boundary changes which produced a tight contest,
Several went on protest votes – although interestingly mainly in areas with high student population where the promise to scrap top-up fees was probably more a factor than Iraq, and
A couple went over in what you’d think of as good Lib Dem territory anyway – Falmouth is an obvious one and Rochdale was, for donkey’s years, a safe Lib Dem seat under the larger-than-a-transit-van figure of Cyril Smith.
The real story of the night is that despite the decapitation of Blairites in the south as the natural Tories who bought into Blair in 97 and 2001 reverted to type, the Labour heartlands stood strong and delivered the victory – in Blaenau Gwent even against the Labour Party and its decision to take away from the seat which produced Nye Bevan and Michael Foot the right to have an MP of their own choice.
The real story is that the real Labour Party and not ‘New Labour’ delivered this third victory and will form the platform to push on to a fourth.
The work on that starts on Monday.
… and not before bloody time!
I don’t accept that last bit at all. With all the varying swings and local issues, how can you say that one faction of the Labour Party did better than some other faction?
This idea that “New Labour” is a kind of cabal of semi-Tories which has taken over the party, stopping us soaking the rich and nationalising industries, is a total dead-end.
I don’t like to think that, by doing my duty and helping our Labour candidate, that someone is putting me into one camp and not the other.
People within Labour can argue for change (not Us versus Them), but they can’t use a bunch of crude statistics to back it up. If people want to cling onto factions, they can do so outside the party.
You’re right about the Lib Dems though.
The generalisation I made was based on the observation that most of the seats we lost to the Tories were from the class of ’97 – I can do the numbers from They Work For You in necessary to back it up and am pretty sure that most of our losses would have deviated little from the Blair line in terms of Common’s performance.
The second relevant observation is that a 66 seat majority will largely mitigate much of Blair’s efforts to push a radical agenda around markets in public services, ID cards, etc, where rebellions are not only possible but likely to succeed.
My beef with Blair isn’t based on being ‘old left’ and hankering for the days of clause 4 although there’s still a strong case for Keynesian intervention on transport – can’t have an properly integrated transport system without public control of the railways – and on aspects of energy – we need to look at investing in R&D around clean ways to use coal as we’ve still got shitloads of it and could, with the right investment and a bit of innovation, rebuild some of our mining industry as a hedge against declining oil and gas reserves.
I’ll post in more detail on this later on but the general way I see things is that we’ve won the arguments on the economy and public services, we just need to keep managing things properly and making sure our investment spend pays off – and we have a lock on the Tories. Our next challenge is to pull back from overt authoritarianism which is very much a hallmark of Blair, and get back to being the party of social justice for all.
Not a move but an expansion back towards the left to squeeze the Lib Dems out the way we’ve squeezed the Tories by taking the centre on the economy.
My agenda would be to marry the best of what we have already achieved on the economy and public services with real commitments to protecting and preserving our civil liberities leading to a great reforming government in a fourth term which finally gives us open, transparent and accountable government based on a written constitution and bill of rights with citizen’s rights at the heart of everything…
After that we can disestablish the Church of England and Monarchy and establish a modern republic around the middle of term five. :0D
I agree with your analysis of the results. We had much Lib Dem boasting in Liverpool,Warrington and St Helens regarding their electoral prospects but they largely flatlined.
As regard Labour’s third term prospects I’m quitely confident we can get back on track after a faltering second term.Blair has had his backside kicked and his departure will be hastened by losing many of those ‘middle England’switchers from 1997/2001.