Monday 18 July 2016

So what would a useful left wing agenda look like for Labour?

Right now, if your primary focus is not Brexit and the complications and opportunities therein are not you immediate concern then you are simply not relevant.

But I can see why Labour cannot focus on the issues because it does not as yet know who it represents. The leadership represents the members and his politics are far closer to those who voted to leave the EU so we would naturally assume that would be the angle to start from. But then there is the PLP who seemingly represent themselves and the middle class "liberals" working their way up the greasy pole. So there are in fact two Labour parties. One which wants to go back to uselessly firehosing the public sector with money that we don't have, and another which wants to go back to uselessly firehosing the public sector with money that we don't have. The distinction is which particular powerbase they hose it at. The quangos and the special interests or actual poor people. Neither is particularly useful.

If the left had any moral compass at all they would be looking at ways in which people can have good jobs for a decent wage. And like it or not, working class people want proper jobs, not service sector jobs in air conditioned offices like our snowflake youth. They want to be building and making things. So the question is how we do this when we are mainly a service based economy? I would venture that the answer probably lies in building houses.

So the question would be how they raise the money to do it without doing something deeply unpopular. Borrowing. So if you are insistent on taxing the City, you are going to want to safeguard the city at all costs. They are saying that passporting services is key to them remaining in the UK. So the Labour party really ought to be making serious noises about remaining part of the single market in the face of a government Brexit team who doesn't actually want it. As much as this would show that Labour was informed and relevant it would be serving the function of being an official opposition.

Working class people are pretty pissed off at having shit jobs for no money with ridiculous rents and completely unaffordable houses, crap pensions and a pretty bleak spiritual life. They associate that with the loss of industries that we central to the character of their towns and cities and have been dumped on ever since by a patronising paternalist social democratic consensus where it doesn't matter who gets elected because nothing changes. So clearly people do want some kind of motivated opposition with a jobs and growth agenda and a means of delivering it. The problems is, it must also be electable which means having a credible leader who isn't fixated with railways when the rest of the planet's political order is collapsing.

So in reality, given that the leadership does not even recognise the need for policy ideas or credibility there is zero likelihood of Labour achieving power any time this side of 2025. And if the leadership contenders are anything to go by, being lamentable as they are, it would seem that Labour simply does not have the intellectual stock to ever recover. Not least when there are bloodthirsty Blairites lurking in the background.

If by then the party then becomes the property of the somewhat dismal millennials, we are back to that same middle of the road rootless internationalist zealotry that the working class so despises. As ever the only chance Labour has of winning is through Tory incompetence and being utterly fed up with them. And then we are back into the same cycle of ideas free presentation politics and ritual virtue signalling. I'm afraid I see no value or purpose to this utterly repellent party. We are looking at ten years of Corbynites making a laughing stock of left wing ideas and demonstrating how irrelevant and bankrupt socialist ideas are. That would be fine by me were we not so desperately in need of effective opposition. Too bad they are too preoccupied with ripping holes in each other.

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