Almost Always Right

Rod Liddle writes:

A happy new year to all of you; I hope it is more pleasant than 2011. My resolution is to kick anyone who uses the word 'chill' to me in any context other than that referring directly to inclement weather or a touch of ague. Anyone who uses 'chill' in combination with the suffix 'pill' or 'out' will be kicked repeatedly.

Gloom, there may be around. But those dwindling few of us who support the Labour Party will have been heartened by Lord Glasman's comments that the party is too elitist and must reconnect with its working class support. For sure, many of us have been arguing this for years, but none of us is an academic who has the ear of the Labour Party leader (who is himself, of course, high born and affluent).

My guess is that Glasman – who is almost always right, by my reckoning – has less influence with Miliband than is suggested. But whatever, the capture of Labour by the Stalinist metropolitan middle class is its biggest obstacle to being a) a potential party of government and b) likeable.

I don't suppose Ed will take any notice of Glasman's comments. There will still be marble-mouthed London monkeys parachuted into northern constituencies and the manifesto won't change either.

Rod’s and Maurice’s politics are like mine, with their roots deep in those of the reviled Labour Movement that gave this country the Welfare State, municipal services, workers’ rights and full employment. Those roots are trade union, co-operative, Radical Liberal, Tory populist, Christian Socialist, and Social Catholic and Distributist, reaching back through Early Modernity and the Middle Ages to Classical Antiquity and the Bible. They are not so much anti-Marxist as simply non-Marxist, though contributing to a searing critique of that monstrous fallacy, as also of Jacobinism and Whiggery before that. (I probably ought not to mention my fresher who is Maurice’s stepson, but he spent his gap year working on the Living Wage campaign for Citizens UK, and his profile picture on Twitter is the Labour symbol in blue, so it looks as if I shall hardly need to work on him at all.)

In June 2014, at least 14 British seats at Strasbourg will be up for grabs, since the 12 Liberal Democrats might as well spare themselves the humiliation, while the BNP is increasingly unlikely to exist at all. The press gang that gives a free pass to UKIP, peddling risible fantasies about Margaret Thatcher’s Euroscepticism or about the EU as a source of “Socialist” legislation, might finally have started reporting, not only UKIP’s farcical goings on, but also the fact that at least half of its vote must be Old Labour or, especially in the West Country, Old Liberal. Add together the Conservative and UKIP percentages there, or in either Midland region, or in any Northern region, or in London, or in Wales, and you would arrive at a ludicrously overlarge figure for the number of “natural Tories”.

Two candidates per mainland region and one in Northern Ireland? If we can be bothered to make the effort. Also true of funding. But we need to start now. Labour is usually ahead in the polls, and it has won five parliamentary by-elections in a row, all with healthy swings from the Conservatives. But it would benefit from a body of MEPs, and then also of list members at Holyrood, Cardiff and City Hall, plus products of the Stormont electoral system. Perhaps initially to act as Labour’s conscience. But at least potentially to provide a real alternative.