How can Labour win in England? By promising, and then delivering, the same level of public service provision - on personal care in old age, on undergraduate tuition, on prescriptions, on hospital parking, and so on - as in enjoyed in each of those still recognisably British places, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I honestly do not understand where the idea ever came from that the English in general, or even the upper middle classes or the inhabitants of the South East very much, favour the slash-and-burn approach always aggressively promoted, since long before this or any of several previous recessions, by a succession of callow youths.
Speaking of the South East, there are also millions of votes to be garnered by opposing, promising to reverse, and then actually reversing the clearances both of that corner of the country and of city centres generally by the withdrawal of Housing Benefit from people whom this perfectly ignorant Coalition sincerely did not realise were overwhelmingly in full-time work. The immediately disentitled would not be the only ones to rally to this cause. Everyone who wanted there to be taxi drivers, bus drivers, waiters, bartenders, shop assistants, cleaners, plumbers, electricians and so on would very rapidly have noticed when all those people had suddenly gone away.
Keeping the City too rich to need to pay tax, by direct public payment when necessary, is the thing that we cannot afford, along with endless wars in places where we have no interest or may even, on balance, have more interest in the other side than in the one that we are backing. Imagine the votes to be picked up in London by a Government which, having told the red braces boys where to go (largely back to America, which two terms of Obama will have turned into a country wholly foreign to them - it would take a heart of stone not to laugh), had made that conurbation's life comfortably affordable for the working and middle classes.
Middle classes whose correct maintenance by central and local government action because of the economic, social, cultural and political good that they do includes the reversal of that thoroughly anti-family measure, the abandonment of the principle of universality in respect of Child Benefit.
And so on, and on, and on.
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There is not now going to be an AV-based realignment, so when are you going to re-join the Labour Party?
ReplyDeleteI was elected with the word Independent next to my name, and our term, which should have expired at the recent local elections, has been extended by two years in order to be in sync with the unitary county council.
ReplyDeleteIt is easier to do what I do from a certain detachment, but I suppose that I might go back if the Labour Party accepted an application for affiliation by the British People's Alliance.
In the words of Robert E. Dowse:
ReplyDelete"From the beginning the ILP attempted to influence the trade unions to back a working class political party: they sought, as Henry Pelling states: 'collaboration with trade unionists with the ultimate object of tapping trade union funds for the attainment of Parliamentary power.' The socialism of the ILP was ideal for achieving this end; lacking as it did any real theoretical basis it could accommodate practically anything a trade unionist was likely to demand. Fervent and emotional, the socialism of the ILP could accommodate, with only a little strain, temperance reform, Scottish nationalism, Methodism, Marxism, Fabian gradualism, and even a variety of Burkean conservatism. Although the mixture was a curious one, it did have the one overwhelming virtue of excluding nobody on dogmatic grounds, a circumstance, on the left and at the time, cannot be lightly dismissed."
Apart from the Scottish Nationalism and the Marxism, you seem to want to do the same thing. I wish you every success.
The "Fabian gradualism" would also depend strictly on the answer to the question, "Gradualism towards what, and why?"
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