The Meaning Of Life Is Life Itself

A very large medicine bottle, a firm talking to about not getting any younger, an instruction to dial 999 "if you are on the floor in agony", and here I am. Those few hundred votes every few years were one of the pleasures of my life, and simply contesting elections made me usefully well-connected among the kind of people who won them. But as the doctor asked me, "What if you had won this time?" That possibility can never be ruled out entirely.

Labour is now polling well below its result in 2017. It only ever wins uncontested General Elections. Tony Blair managed that three times. Middle England ended up disliking his wars, and one in particular, but the Conservative Party had not opposed those wars, and in any case Blair never gave those voters any economic reason to turn against him. On cultural issues, he and Gordon Brown made a habit of following them several years later, eventually giving them, not even what they had wanted, but only heavily diluted forms of that, such as civil partnerships, or the mere reclassification of cannabis.

Cry all you like about hereditary peers, or even about foxhunting. But what of them? On everything that mattered to almost anyone, Blair did exactly what the Conservatives would have done if they had won in 1997. Having spent much of his adult life abroad, a bewildered Peter Hitchens tried to marshal a minority of his parents' generation then, as he is addressing that minority's ghosts now. Again, though, so what? 

Write up even ordinarily Conservative-voting Britain's prejudices in highfalutin terms, and Pabloism insofar as Keir Starmer understood it would be what you would get now, just as Eurocommunism insofar as Blair understood it have been what you would have got then, and was. "Look what they would do!", howled Hitchens then, and howls Hitchens now. "That's just common sense," came the reply from the small-town and suburban bourgeoisie then, and comes that reply now. "Look where their ideas came from!", he attempted and attempts. "Good for that Gramsci, then," they retorted then, it at all. "Good for that Raptis, then," they retort now, if at all.

Gramsci and Raptis are much more interesting than Old New Labour and New New Labour. They are fundamentally and ultimately wrong, but you should still read them. Raptis went on to co-found Pasok, and in 1996 a member of NATO and the EU gave him a state funeral. How frightened is Worcester Woman supposed to be of such a person's thinking even in the raw, never mind in a form so pasteurised as to be palatable to Wes Streeting? With which aspect of it might she disagree? She would be far more alarmed at the thinking of Hitchens.

And so to the Labour manifesto. Never mind, "After 14 years, is that it?" They would not even do half of that. Yet their victory would still be Britain's contribution to Europe's lurch to the Far Right. Centrism and right-wing populism are con tricks to sell exactly the same economic and foreign policies to different audiences by pretending to wage a culture war. While pre-existing conservative phenomena have been known to ally with Fascism, usually to their own ruin, it is the liberal bourgeoisie that keeps Fascism in reserve for when it might ever face any serious demand to share its economic or social power with anyone who did not have it before the rise of the bourgeois liberal order, or to share its cultural or political power with anyone at all.

They are already as touchy as we remember them last time. I have been banned from The Guardian for having posted the following: "Labour is a party of extremely right-wing people who lack the social connections to make it in the Conservative Party, and whose two defining experiences were being brought up to spit on everyone below them, which was everyone else where they grew up, and discovering in their first 36 hours at university that they were nowhere near the top of the class system, a discovery that embittered them for life."