Co-Dependency

The existing political parties (in so far as “existing” is still the right word for them) are not opposed to each other, either ideologically or organisationally. But then, to what extent were they ever? Most people would say that they certainly were in the 1980s.

But, in a move which has received eye-poppingly little investigation, Margaret Thatcher deliberately declined to kill off the Labour Party (which was no longer unilateralist and had officially converged with the Tories over Europe, to the position that they have both held ever since) when she could have done so.

After her landslide victory in 1987, she never attempted to implement her commitment to outlaw party-political contributions by trade unions. Of course, I am very glad that she did not do this. But if she had done, then Labour simply would not have existed by the time of the Election after that. So what stopped her?

Well, although Labour’s positions on nuclear weapons and on Europe were by then identical to the Tories’, and although Thatcher actually presided over massively increased welfare dependency and a thoroughly soft penal policy while making no attempt whatever to bring back grammar schools, nevertheless Labour was the bogeyman the mere existence of which kept Tory MPs, activists and core voters in line, and thus kept the Conservative Party in business. Without Labour, what would the Tories have been for?

Likewise, today, without the Tories, what would Labour be for? Despite the total absence of the slightest difference with Labour, the mere fact that there is a Conservative Party at all in enough to convince admittedly a very few people that the Labour Party must be kept going, in order to keep out what are now the inexplicably feared and reviled Tories. But feared and reviled for what, exactly, these days?