The Strange Death of Political Britain

Melanie Phillips is wrong to call Blair "an icon" (never to anyone beyond the North London dinner party circuit), but apart from that:

Gordon Brown continues to stagger punch drunk round the ring, blows still raining down. Today’s round brought a Guardian story that only five weeks are left before Brown and other Labour apparatchiki are personally bankrupted by the party’s unpaid loans. House prices are continuing to crash through the floor, exceeded in velocity only by Brown’s continuing plunge in the opinion polls -- the latest from You/Gov appears to show the Tories on course for a majority of several trillion seats; newspapers bring breathless dispatches every day from the Commons tea-room about which of Brown’s loyal ministers is now selflessly preparing to step up to the plate should a desperate nation beg him or her to stand, before concluding that none of these pygmies is up to it and then starting the whole exercise all over again. We can carry on like this until 2010 and may well do so (groan). Brown may stagger on because of the absence of any plausible contender; or he may be carted out/cart himself out of Number Ten. Who knows.

However this particular tragic farce ends, though, we are surely seeing the playing out of something rather bigger. It is no accident that Brown’s agony uncannily mirrors the situation of John Major, who also took over mid-term from a Prime Minister who had been shafted and then brought his party crashing down around him. True, Major actually won the election after he took over from Mrs Thatcher, but that was almost certainly only because Labour’s then leader Neil Kinnock was simply unelectable. There was, to coin a phrase, no alternative.

The real similarity is that in both instances, the Conservative and Labour parties had destroyed their sitting leader and Prime Minister – in both cases, bringing down an icon. The Tories came near to destroying themselves as a result, not only losing three general elections but losing altogether any sense of what they were about – and it is far from clear whether they have yet found it. The Labour party is coming close to forcing out not one but two sitting Prime Ministers; wise heads within it are warning that if it does so it will also be in the wilderness for several terms; some are even suggesting that Labour would finally implode altogether.

Although the ‘end of Labour’ has been foretold before, just as the ‘end of Conservatism’ has also been confidently predicted in the past, this is not an altogether fanciful thought. Why, after all, did the Tories fall apart after the defenestration of Mrs Thatcher – and why are Labour in such a terrible state now? I think it’s because Britain itself has been falling apart for the past half century, a fact briefly disguised by the fizzing stars of a couple of Prime Ministers who in their very different ways seemed to offer the prospect of turning that trajectory round. Mrs Thatcher took the country by the scruff of its neck, shook it until its teeth rattled and said: ‘You WILL be great again.’ As a result, she gave the Tories a coherent cause to fight for and a story about what Conservatism was. Tony Blair came along and said: ‘I will lay my hands on the country’s wounds and heal them’; the country felt better about itself for at least five minutes and the Labour party swallowed its distaste for this non-comrade and went along with it while Tony kept winning elections.

But the astounding political success of both these iconic leaders and their tremendous impact masked the fact that behind them their parties had become Potemkin parties, standing for nothing. New Labour was a spirited attempt to construct a fresh purpose for the Labour party after the collapse of socialism, by grafting a kind of Gladstonian liberalism (Blair) onto statist social engineering (the rest of the party). The resulting incoherence finally brought the NewLab ‘Project’ to a sputtering halt; when Blair was finally turfed out, there was nothing left except, er, class war.

In turn, the collapse of socialism meant that the Conservatives no longer knew what they were for because they thought there was no longer anything for them to be against. Obsessed by ‘the market’ and thinking only in terms of economics (aka money) they were altogether oblivious to Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’, which steadily achieved its ends over four decades and which was (and is) what conservatism should be against. (Mrs T herself, who was not quite the seer that her quivering disciples thought she was, delivered one of many death blows to British greatness and indeed to British anything at all when she was bamboozled into signing Britain up to the Single European Act.) So when they pushed out their Iron Lady, the Tories no longer had any coherent purpose in life; nothing to be against, nothing to be for.

It is now increasingly obvious that both Mrs Thatcher and Tony Blair, in their very different ways, were the only things standing between their parties and the edge of the cliff. The way back from that precipice is to analyse the state of the country correctly, thus overturning several decades of the soggy, soppy consensus of civilisational decline and decay, and have the courage and vision to start putting it right.

Simple, really.