Much fun and games over this, and especially over what is in strategic terms its perfectly sensible conclusion:
The Left will be even smaller but the party more manageable and reasonable, for apart from obsessive feminism, women MPs are more amenable and leadable and less objectionable. But it might not make us tougher.
If Labour wins in 2015, how a family-friendly, gentler party, less prepared for all-night shenanigans of the parliamentary kind, will face up to Tory hooligans who feel they’ve been unjustly deprived of a power that’s their due, is a more worrying matter.
Yes, that is what the next Parliament is going to be like.
But consider this:
Oldies are being replaced by amenable youngsters who came of age politically in the post-socialist era of Brown and Blair, those sons of Thatcher who replaced social democracy with free market economics, euro-enthusiasm and Boy Scout wars.
Now, I am the first to express alarm at how many of my vintage who supported, in particular, the Boy Scout wars have somehow managed to wind up on both sides in Parliament, since they were so very extremely untypical.
But Mitchell is an old pro who has carefully constructed that sentence in order to make the point that free market economics, euro-enthusiasm (note that punctuation) and Boy Scout wars are all of a piece. And people who came of age politically during the collapse of all three of them are most certainly not amenable towards them.
Those who are, are now on the way out of the Labour Party. When the votes were counted in 1997, Tony Blair was found to have increased by all of 0.7 per cent the commanding Labour poll lead on the day before John Smith had died.
Good luck to those who will be seeking to provide a separate political home for the 0.7 per cent, at most, that was ever in favour of the replacement of social democracy with free market economics, euro-enthusiasm and Boy Scout wars.
Or to however many such people there will still be, by then 20 years later. If there will still be any at all outside full-time politics.
Yes, that is what the next Parliament is going to be like.
But consider this:
Oldies are being replaced by amenable youngsters who came of age politically in the post-socialist era of Brown and Blair, those sons of Thatcher who replaced social democracy with free market economics, euro-enthusiasm and Boy Scout wars.
Now, I am the first to express alarm at how many of my vintage who supported, in particular, the Boy Scout wars have somehow managed to wind up on both sides in Parliament, since they were so very extremely untypical.
But Mitchell is an old pro who has carefully constructed that sentence in order to make the point that free market economics, euro-enthusiasm (note that punctuation) and Boy Scout wars are all of a piece. And people who came of age politically during the collapse of all three of them are most certainly not amenable towards them.
Those who are, are now on the way out of the Labour Party. When the votes were counted in 1997, Tony Blair was found to have increased by all of 0.7 per cent the commanding Labour poll lead on the day before John Smith had died.
Good luck to those who will be seeking to provide a separate political home for the 0.7 per cent, at most, that was ever in favour of the replacement of social democracy with free market economics, euro-enthusiasm and Boy Scout wars.
Or to however many such people there will still be, by then 20 years later. If there will still be any at all outside full-time politics.
Were there ever any outside full-time politics? All of your posts yesterday were hugely important. The people who deprived the parliamentary process of your voice committed a kind of treason. What happened to the bloke they preferred? He is not in Parliament or a candidate for next year but he must be nearly 40.
ReplyDeleteYou are very kind.
DeleteKindness has nothing to do with it. When I heard they had nominated him instead of you for that council seat in 2003 like everyone else I thought it was a joke. It had been yours that time round for what 10 years by then? Not far off. We were all expecting you, quite excited about getting you at last. We knew he would lose the seat and that must have been the plan. Not long before then I remember someone seriously asking if he was your chauffeur or your valet. I have been politically active for nearly 50 years and I have never met anyone who more obviously should have been an MP than you, anyone who met you and didn't know would assume you already were one, like they used to assume you were a district or county councillor. No one would make that mistake with him, they probably still think he is a chauffeur or a valet.
DeleteHe is.
DeleteOn topic, please.
Austin Mitchell wrote;
ReplyDelete""women MPs are more amenable and leadable and less objectionable""
Indeed. In other words' they're whip fodder.
Which is why there's no reason we should want more of them in an adversarial Parliament whose parties are meant to both hold their own leadership to account, and fight each other.
You have obviously met different ones than I have.
DeleteParty machines do want them for that reason. But in my experience, they are frequently disabused of such notions rather quickly indeed.
The euro-enthusiasts he speaks of are in charge of the Labour Party.
ReplyDeleteEven Unite the union is euro-enthusiast (it doesn't want to leave).
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/a-ef9a-Ed-Miliband-dismisses-Unites-EU-referendum-call
You have obviously met ... well, you can see where this one is going.
DeleteUnite gives enough money to keep the Morning Star in daily publication, if it loves the EU so much.
Unite, GMB, RMT, FBU, UCATT, Community, CWU, POA, NUM, your Durham Miners' Association mates: they all cheerfully cough up to keep up the paper that endorsed No2EU - Yes to Democracy and is now running Yes2Unity -No2Separation.
DeleteYou are right, people who have spent their twenties and thirties watching capitalism, the eurozone and the Blair wars fall apart are thoroughly Old Labour, apart from a few who are mysteriously Tory and Labour MPs.
Ah, yes, Yes2Unity - No2Separation. Life in the Scottish Old Left yet. No coverage outside the Star, of course. But that is par for the course.
DeleteLabour just wants them because, as the most left-wing party in British politics, it's meant to be in favour of radical feminism, all-women shortlists, stay-away mothers and 50:50 male-female representation in everything, to reinforce the lunatic feminist notion that "the mind has no sex" (as they used to say) and we're all the same.
ReplyDeleteThe fact that women in politics are (by definition) unrepresentative of stay-at-home mothers, and thus unable to represent them, is another great reason we shouldn't want more of them in Parliament.
The fact that, as Austin Mitchell says, they are more pliable is also the reason corporations want to employ more of them, and why all our policies are designed to drive women into the office.
But we're not supposed to say any of that.
You are thinking of the other side, to be led by Theresa May (born 1956) this time next year.
DeleteFurther to that.
ReplyDeleteMitchell has hit on the principal reason that corporations want to drive them into the workplace (filling Parliament with careerist women is meant to be more propaganda to this end).
They're more pliable and far less likely to form trades unions and cause trouble.
But Ed Miliband and "Anna Yearley" are playing the game like good little sons of the 60's.
They can;t be expected to realise they're just corporate pawns.
Bless.
DeleteWomen politicians are the hardest people you will ever meet.
ReplyDeleteTell me about it...
DeleteTell any man who has ever been politically active about it.
But the point about putting in the hours against the feral toffs in the next Parliament is an important one, probably applicable to both sexes these days.
With a few exceptions women MPs on bth sides of the House are valuable assets in our democracy. There should be more of them and if that means positive discrimination in favour of women candidates that's fine by me. Passé it probably is but "Men are from Mars, women are from Venus" is for me a useful shorthand. If there had been more women around the Cabinet table when Blair announced his Iraq invasion intentions would he have been allowed to go ahead? I doubt it. If women with practical personal experience of childbirth and childcare had been in Cameron's team would the Education and Healthcare "reforms" have gone ahead as they have. I doubt that as well. Give men guns and they tend to use them. Ask them to make decisions in areas that their gender makes it difficult for them to understand and they fail. Society has a 50/50 mix. So should our Governance.
ReplyDelete