All hung together

The voters don't like hung Parliaments (why would they?), but their real dislike is now for the political parties themselves. Quite consciously, they are preparing to vote (including, where appropriate, not vote) for a hung Parliament specifically in order to kill off the parties that they now so virulently despise.

They are perfectly capable of doing this: after all, they wanted a reduced Labour majority last time, so they successfully brought about exactly that at the ballot box. Britain has the most sophisticated electorate in the world, even capable (as at Bromley & Chislehurst) of using a by-election to protest against the Opposition rather than to protest against the Government. Where else in the world does that happen?

Given that, do not mistake abstention for apathy: it might be the very reverse, as it was in many cases last time, and as it certainly will be in very many cases indeed next time.

The situation in which we now find ourselves simply is not like anything that has gone before: voter turnout in free-fall, next to no party members, the parties bordering on bankruptcy, their central organisations functioning as a single body (and that funded by an illegal slush fund), the outgoing Prime Minister awaiting arrest while desperate for the other party to win and beat his own successor, and so on. Nothing like this has ever happened before, certainly not simultaneously across the board as at present.

Many people assume that, in particular, the Conservative and Labour Parties will somehow always exist, just because they always will, they always will, they always will.

But they won't. We are living in their final generation, as even their most seasoned and active remaining members on the ground freely state face-to-face or in private correspondence. And even they don't seem to be weeping much, it must be said.

However, someone (other than the BNP, the Trots and the Islamists, that is) will still have to contest elections in 10 years' time. Among other things, this is an opportunity to re-create a party conscious and worthy of its roots in the unions and the co-operatives, in Fabianism and Christian Socialism; a party which combines, and which understands the connections among, the hugely popular legacy of Keynes and Beveridge, sane social conservatism, and patriotism in all directions.

People would want this who still vote Labour only because they feel that they owe it to the fallen of two World Wars to turn out and vote for "someone". People would want this who long even only to be part of the first category, but who simply cannot bring themselves to vote for what Labour has become. And people would even want this, once confronted with it, to whom, for whatever tribal reasons, it would simply never occur to vote for the Labour Party as such.