Another Wall Falls

There is going to be a Labour Government as soon as there is a General Election, with only the fixed-term Parliament provision preventing that from happening this year.

It is the culmination of a process which has been going on for more than 20 years. The Conservative Party was held together by the Cold War, and by claims in that cause which turned out to have been false, anyway. By means of those claims, all manner of disparate elements were corralled together.

Subsequently, the people who thought that economic neoliberalism was somehow the essence of Toryism, or at any rate the opposite of Communism, have wholly displaced the people who were anti-Soviet because they saw the USSR as a threat to traditional Western and British culture and institutions.

Thus, we have a party dependent on the votes of churchgoing farmers and so forth while advocating Post Office privatisation, foreign-owned toll roads, Sunday as just another shopping day, same-sex "marriage", abolition of the House of Lords, and all the rest of it. The wonder is that it has taken such a party the better part of a generation to collapse. But it has now collapsed.

Leaving the way open for the party that lost, not its unifying principle, but its most divisive issue when the Berlin Wall fell. Those who were anti-Soviet but Eurofederalist had actually seceded from it in 1981. But those who were both anti-Soviet and anti-Eurofederalist remained, and have now been vindicated all round: in relation to Stalinism, in relation to Eurofederalism, and in relation to Thatcherism.

Right at the time when the Party Leadership has passed to a man more open to them on Europe than any since the early days of Neil Kinnock, and more open to the related tradition of Labour social and cultural conservatism than any since the death of John Smith.

A Leader whose party can only now be defeated in 2015 by a 29-point swing to a formation whose core supporters have finally realised that they have had no reason for at least 20 years to vote for politicians who are actively opposed to everything in which they believe and on which they depend.

As the recent local elections illustrated, they now feel no tribal aversion to voting for the other lot. They did when it, too, was a party opposed to those values, under Tony Blair. But it no longer is. So they no longer do.