David Osler asks what happens to Labour after 2010? over at Liberal Conspiracy.
Are there any Labour supporters reading this who are not already dreading Election Night Special 2010? Watching the forthcoming Tory landslide is going to be anything other than fun, as safe seat after safe seat turns blue on the television screen, and the arm of the swingometer shifts ever further to the right.
Like others, I relished the Portillo moment, the realisation that even safe seats were no longer safe and that Labour was heading not for a scrape though, but a landslide. I recall that moment vividly, staying up until the early hours to savour a victory that had been eighteen years in the coming.
But even then, I wondered, how long can this last? No matter how good an administration is, its time will come and the swing will go the other way. Unless you believe that a one-party state is the way to go; the other lot have to get hold of the reins of power sooner or later. How, I wondered would I feel then, when it will be Labour ministers sluiced from their safe seats?
Ah… The passage of time… From Labour party member to tearing up my membership in such a short span.
My trust in Labour was betrayed. My hopes for a better Britain came to nowt. What we got was posturing, war mongering, lies, spin and an unprecedented degree of peace time authoritarianism coupled to an obsessive control freakish nanny state in which unpleasant, self-righteous politicians and their lackeys seek to micro manage the minutiae of our lives, in which petty little jobsworths are given validation way beyond their worth, in which we, the electorate are treated with contempt by those who are supposed to serve us. Whatever happened to the end of sleaze and the ethical foreign policy?
So, how will I feel when Labour is swept from power? I’ll utter a brief sigh of relief. Then it’ll be back to the barricades against a control freakish obsessive nanny state Tory administration. They may prove to be better, but it’s likely as not, there’ll be little noticeable difference.
If my memory serves me correctly, Labour and socialist activists, especially students, were much more likely to throw paving stones than Tory ones, so we might see some difference. All this generation currently seems to be bothered about at the moment seems to be their iPod. Any chance, old Jobs could invent the iThrow? As opposed to Carling, Fosters at al, that is, who presently seem to have cornered the market in the iChuck stakes.
oops….et al
Your feelings mirror mine, except that I was never an LP member, being more LibDem. This ghastly government of control freaks will live on in infamy for its wanton destruction of hard-won civil liberties under the pretext of ‘fighting terror’. I never thought I’d welcome the return of a Tory government, but surely nothing could be worse than the smug self-righteous Blair-Brown crowd.
I dallied with the Liberals when Labour went hard left in the early Thatcher years. I returned to them when they shifted back to the centre ground. I’ll never make that mistake again. They really do have to lose the next election. If not, they will continue to erode what liberties we have left and will presume that an election victory gives them a mandate to do so.
I always think “hard Left” is an odd label, because these folk are anything but hard – their brains are so addled that they can’t conceive how anyone who disagrees with them has an ounce of intelligence or goodwill. They think they know wverything about everything, and have always been a boring nuisance. It’s amusing to see their wails and grumbles on the blogs now that their brand of nannyism and multiculturalist claptrap is no longer flavour of the month with the voters.
I don’t think all that much to LibDem policies or leadership [though we have a really excellent LibDem MP in my constituency], but I support them because they are the only party who consistently advocate proportional representation, and without it we will just keep on getting governments which don’t in fact have a majority mandate.
I can’t say that I am particularly fond of labels. Doubtless you will recall militant tendency for whom the term hard left was generally used.
I’ve got mixed feelings about PR. On the one hand, it would resolve the disenfranchisement that is caused by FPTP, but on the other hand can lead to chaotic government such as has happened in Italy for the past few decades.
And, yes, the Labour supporters’ whining and complaining has been a rich seam of amusement to me.