Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Set in the mid nineteen nineties, this fast moving thriller lifts the curtain on sex, sleaze and corruption in high places as the long reign of the government totters to an end, following the ousting of the iconic Margaret Thatcher. The novel catches the mood of those times with a host of fictional characters who engage in political intrigue, sex, money laundering and murder, pursued by an Irish investigative journalist and his girlfriend, the daughter of a cabinet minister found dead in a hotel room after bondage sex.

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It is the modern trend for defeated parties to topple into recriminations and leadership battles, reinforcing the belief among voters that modern politicians are more interested in themselves and power than in social advancement and the wellbeing of the people they represent. I have previously posted how the Churchills, Atlees, Wilsons and Heaths stayed on to fight another day and win, but these were political giants compared to the pygmy nonentities who for the most part inhabit the Westminster Village today.

Labour has descended into a rudderless muddle torn between loyalties to right or left. All sorts of people of whom most of the population have never heard are putting themselves forward as leadership candidates, who when interviewed fall dismally below the credibility bar necessary to have a chance or are taken seriously as prime minister material. Things will look up a bit when parliament re-assembles as Harriet Harman will prove a much more effective acting Opposition Leader than anyone expects. However the mistaken cries to move right by pensioned off Blairites towards a centre dominated in England by the Tories, will reduce her effect and create something of a vacuum. This will be filled by the SNP.

Margaret Thatcher’s greatest political achievement was Tony Blair and New Labour. New Labour was a thatcherite party which severed its connections with its roots in the Labour Movement and became a conservative party to the left of centre, which had moved significantly to the right. Essentially this left a choice between Conservative Labour or Conservative Tory. For thirteen years the people preferred Conservative Labour. Until the crash. This was not caused by Labour spending; it was caused by taking Thatcher/Reagan economics to unworkable boundaries which gave markets control of everything in the mistaken supposition that markets would always work for the public good. They do not. They work for their own good. To work for the public good as well, they have to be guided, regulated and reined in. Failure to do this guarantees that they eventually implode, as a glutton who cannot stop eating eventually pukes.  An essential feature of markets is that there have to be winners and losers. Much of politics is centred about who are which, and where the burden of the intrinsically essential losses actually falls.

Post war British politics were polarised between the left which took up the cause of the losers and the right which championed the winners. The voters backed first one then the other and enjoyed great political stability as a consequence. It is important to understand that the words winner and loser are not here used as expressions of envy or contempt. They are scientific observations of the nature of human interaction. For anyone to win, someone must lose. Above all the race must be fair. The post war political race was. Voters knew this and the turnout was high. It peaked in 1950 at 84% and thereafter was always in the seventies. Blair achieved his fist landslide in 1997 on 71.4%. Now watch this. He achieved his second landslide in 2001 on 59.4%. And when you analyse that you see that the working class stopped voting out of disappointment and the Tory disaffected supported Blair, because he was after all a thatcherite in their eyes, somewhat to the right of Harold Macmillan.

Since then turnout has never got past 65%. One third of all voters do not vote. Ever. Most of those are working class voters who feel there is nobody out there who cares. To win again Labour has to reconnect with the masses and forget about Islington. Because most of those non-voters are natural Labour supporters who feel abandoned by their champion and cast out of the democratic process. When Labour harnesses their energy and renews their faith it will be back on track to victory. Follow the numbers and they turn left. Going back to the politics of the discredited Blair is the road to political defeat and despair.