After Glasgow East

The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill has now lost Labour two Commons seats. But it won’t be withdrawn, because New Labour was always about destroying the Labour Party on the basis of visceral hatred towards exactly the sort of people who mind most about such things.

After Glasgow East, the way is now clear for a party which can win back those who have suffered most as a result of New Labour’s carefully contrived social injustice, and wealth redistribution in the wrong direction.

Those who feel compelled to vote for a separatist party despite believing passionately in the Union as Catholics in Scotland (and Wales, and England) do, for all the tricolour-waving around Saint Patrick’s Day (insofar as that still goes on – I have never even seen it in Consett except in relation to the sale of Guinness just like everywhere else, and in my experience even people with names straight out of Angela’s Ashes are these days black affronted if anyone suggests that they are Irish), which has nothing to do with life as it is lived in Scotland (or Wales, or England), or indeed with life as it is now lived in either part of Ireland.

Those who need a party unambiguous in its defence of Catholic schools, historically a Labour interest alongside the Tory championing of public school Church of England-ness, and, way back when, the Liberal connections to the Connexions. The SNP is a late and fundamentally insincere convert to this cause. Its core is still as hostile to Catholic schools as to the monarchy, if not even more so.

And those who, in an eerie echo of the emergence of the American Religious Right (a spectacular electoral success but a spectacular political failure), are prepared to give their blue-collar or even no-collar Catholic votes to a Baptist in the interests of life and the family, as once they gave those votes to Methodists and Scottish Presbyterians when such were rather different from what they are now.

New Labour cannot be that party. It was created specifically not to be. Not to be the party of social justice or the right kind of wealth redistribution. That was Old Labour. Not to be the party the United Kingdom, sovereign and at the heart of the Commonwealth, with no question of its constituent parts as provinces of a federal European state under overall American control. That was Old Labour. Not the party of Catholic schools that “took the sons (and daughters) of dockers and turning them into doctors”. That was Old Labour. And not the party “owing more to Methodism than to Marx”, indeed owing nothing whatever to Marx. That was Old Labour.

Which is what people want. In Crewe and Nantwich (the northernmost and westernmost limit of Tory support, but of that another time). In Glasgow East. Everywhere.

Some of us are determined to give it to them. And the Electoral Commission has finally agreed to let us.