A chance encounter with a very old friend has brought home to me the fact that those of us for whom 1997 was our first General Election as voters have become the lost generation of today's British politics.
David Cameron, who was born in 1966, has given way to Theresa May, who is 10 years older, while Ed Miliband, who was born in 1969, has given way to Jeremy Corbyn, who is fully 20 years older.
May's eventual successor will probably be a reversion to the Cameron generation, while Corbyn's will probably have been too young to vote until 2001, like May's eventual successor but one.
Among my friend's vintage and mine, the capable Conservatives simply found better things to do with their lives, leaving only Gavin Williamson, of all people.
On the Labour side, there was systematic exclusion, with strict purity tests of economic Hard Rightishness, zealous warmongery, an advanced social liberalism that was quite unusual in any age group 20 years ago, and no known previous connection to the Labour Movement.
As a result, strikingly few of us ever became Labour MPs, quite a lot of us left the party altogether, and the few who got through are certainly never going to lead it now. They spend their time touring the television studios threatening to set up some breakaway outfit of their own, although nothing ever comes of that, and nothing ever will.
Ho, hum. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
David Cameron, who was born in 1966, has given way to Theresa May, who is 10 years older, while Ed Miliband, who was born in 1969, has given way to Jeremy Corbyn, who is fully 20 years older.
May's eventual successor will probably be a reversion to the Cameron generation, while Corbyn's will probably have been too young to vote until 2001, like May's eventual successor but one.
Among my friend's vintage and mine, the capable Conservatives simply found better things to do with their lives, leaving only Gavin Williamson, of all people.
On the Labour side, there was systematic exclusion, with strict purity tests of economic Hard Rightishness, zealous warmongery, an advanced social liberalism that was quite unusual in any age group 20 years ago, and no known previous connection to the Labour Movement.
As a result, strikingly few of us ever became Labour MPs, quite a lot of us left the party altogether, and the few who got through are certainly never going to lead it now. They spend their time touring the television studios threatening to set up some breakaway outfit of their own, although nothing ever comes of that, and nothing ever will.
Ho, hum. Another hung Parliament is coming, and we need our people to hold the balance of power in it. It has become a local commonplace that I am on 30-30-30 with Labour and the Conservatives here at North West Durham, so that any one of us could be the First Past the Post. I will stand for this seat, if I can raise the £10,000 necessary to mount a serious campaign. Please email davidaslindsay@hotmail.com. Very many thanks.
This says what a lot of us have been thinking, thank you.
ReplyDeleteMy pleasure, if that is the right way of putting it.
Delete"The all-women shortlist system that has done more than anything else to turn the Parliamentary Labour Party from 50 per cent Broad Left 25 years ago to 85 per cent Hard Right today. Corbyn’s very highly politicised following is largely young and male because it is motivated by rage against the effects of deindustrialisation and against the harvesting of young men in endless, pointless wars.
ReplyDelete"But the economic changes of the last 40 years have turned into the ruling class the public sector middle-class women who dominate the PLP, while the wars of the last 20 years have barely affected them, having largely been waged for explicitly feminist reasons, albeit to no good effect for the women of Afghanistan, and to catastrophic effect for the women of Iraq and Libya. To Phillips and her ilk, who are Thatcher’s Daughters, the anger of the young men who are accruing to Corbyn is incomprehensible. As is those young men’s closely connected discovery for themselves of the various schools of heterodox economics, and of the traditional Great Books that, for ostensibly if questionably feminist reasons, have been excluded from school and university curricula."
https://off-guardian.org/2018/12/08/it-is-time-for-george-versus-the-dragon/
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