Tuesday 10 February 2015

Orange, Not Pink

No surprise here.

The DUP loathes the Conservative Party, long ago supplanted the only party in Northern Ireland that ever did have any time for it (and that was always a strained relationship), and mostly represents the old working class and heavily subsidised agriculture in a place with barely any private sector.

So there you have it. If you vote for anyone with any meaningful chance of winning a seat, other than the Conservatives themselves, then you are voting for Ed Miliband as Prime Minister and for no Conservative Party members in government.

Everyone else contesting this Election is defined specifically by hatred of that party, and would simply have to support Miliband, since they could not possibly support David Cameron.

None of them needs to be offered anything. They just need to be dared to go home if they had kept Cameron in office. But the DUP's three-point wish list is more defence spending, tighter immigration controls, and the abolition of the Bedroom Tax, all of which are in fact Labour policy, so there is no problem there.

Any Irish Republican lobby inside Labour is now negligible, with only about as many Irish as Indian passport-holders still voting in the United Kingdom, even including Northern Ireland.

And would this cause problems for Labour in Scotland? Who cares? Like Labour in Johnsonville, Labour in Salmondland needs to get over itself. Just how bad at winning, or good at losing, do you have to be before you are told to shut up?

The only way to have so much as one Conservative as the Minister of Anything, never mind Cameron at the top, is to return a Conservative overall majority. That was psephologically impossible in 2010, and it is still psephologically impossible in 2015.

It would require a Conservative lead of 11 points, which would be 11 times larger than the lead that that party very occasionally records, although even that lead is highly infrequent.

All of this would be true even without Harriet Harman and her pink battle bus.

Now, in her day, Harman was a smooth operator. She has been in Parliament since before Tony Blair and Gordon Brown ever arrived, she has repeatedly come back from sackings and what have you, she was the guiding influence behind significant pieces of legislation in the Blair years, and she successfully gamed the Labour Electoral College in 2007 so that she became Deputy Leader the day after reputable polling had predicted that she was going to come last.

But even that was a while ago now, and Brown never showed the slightest sign of making her Deputy Prime Minister, dispensing with the position rather than giving it to Harman.

Interviewed recently on Woman's Hour, it was abundantly apparent that she had become a creature out of time, saying "childcare" over and over again while repeatedly unable to answer the point that childcare was now of great interest to many millions of men but of no interest to many millions of women.

She seems not even to realise that pink is now highly controversial within feminism. And of course the belated adoption of her 1970s version of it, the hatred of which for the Labour Party of the same decade was matched only by the reciprocation by the few Labour members who were of aware of its existence, was an integral part of the transformation of Labour into an anti-worker and pro-war party.

After all, in those terms, who were the workers? Overwhelmingly, who fought, and who fights, the wars? The one in Afghanistan, in particular, was sold in heavily feminist terms, terms in which it has been an unmitigated disaster, just as it has been in so very many others.

But that is the past. Labour is nowhere near either as anti-worker or as pro-war as it was 10 or 15 years ago, however low that may be setting the bar. Moreover, as at least a relatively pro-worker and anti-war party, it is far more likely than not to win an overall majority this year, while its Leader is guaranteed to become Prime Minister.

In the midst of all of this, Harriet Harman and everything that she represents are simply an irrelevance. Even the London Jewish atheist Ed Miliband regards a deal with the political wing of Ulster Free Presbyterianism as more important than anything aboard the pink battle bus.

For the second time, Harman will not be made Deputy Prime Minister. Therefore, this time next year, someone else entirely will be Deputy Leader of the Labour Party. This Parliament has demonstrated that there is no shortage of more than credible candidates.

4 comments:

  1. Tighter immigration controls are not Labour policy-it relaxed them when half of Eastern Europe joined up, and freedom of movement is set in stone for any EU member state. No negotiation. If you don't know that, you're a fantasist.

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    1. No, you just don't read the papers. Well, not the proper ones.

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  2. Freedom of movement is set in stone for any EU member state? Bollocks. That's just balls. Tell it to every other EU member state, every single one. Tell it to this one, because that is not what we have.

    Labour is committed to tighter controls and nobody who can read suggests that is impossible or even hard to do. If you don't know that you don't follow politics and you are obviously supporting a party whose leader is going to be beaten by a comedian in character, although neither of them is going to win the seat.

    Great post, Mr. L. Keep them coming.

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    1. Oh, depend upon it. Although I don't normally allow swearing.

      But Kippers are asking for it. They believe this dross, as anyone would if they never read anything else. They believe in "the EUSSR" and all the rest of it.

      But notice how they are barely mentioned anymore. UKIP is now frightfully 2014. Will Al Murray take more votes than Nigel Farage? I wouldn't bet against it.

      Speaking of satire, I cannot help feeling that if Private Eye had made up Harriet Harman's pink van, then they would have been vilified as public school misogynists.

      She ought to know better, but she has been set up. The Labour Deputy Leadership Election is now on.

      While the Pink Ladies are on tour (singing Grease as they go?), who will be representing their constituents in the House of Commons?

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