Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

Sadiq Khan, fresh from his inspirational victory in London in which this blog rejoices, writes in a Sunday newspaper that Labour needs to reach out to win. Oh dear no! This is how New Labour lost Scotland. The SNP became the true socialist party while New Labour was reaching out into oblivion.

What Labour needs to do is turn left and attract back the huge number of working class people who no longer vote. In the mayoral election 55% of Londoners did not vote, but were registered to do so and in the general election in 2015 nearly 40% across the country failed to come out to the polls. Most of these are natural Labour supporters. Labour can win a landslide in 2020 without taking one single vote from the Tories.

To do this is it should stop all this nonsense of reaching out and instead reconnect to the people they were founded to defend and whose lot they were organised to improve. The Tories are polling victories on the lowest votes they have received since well before WWII, when the franchise was narrower and the population smaller. The fact that Labour increased its share of the vote in both the local elections across England and in London, while the Tories dropped, is entirely due to the leftward tilt under Corbyn. What is now needed is a full scale assault on the party of capital, the Tories, for whom people vote if they have something to lose, and a bold programme to restore the power of the Labour Movement for whom people vote if the have something to gain. It is they who are in the majority by a country mile.

First of all it is necessary in order to come to any useful conclusion to accept that there is a change of political weather in progress which makes all the rules that politicians and commentators have been using for the last thirty five years useless and misleading. When the weather changes the rules change. There are very few politicians who pre-date the Thatcher era and no commentators. So the wisdom that Labour must win hundreds of seats if it is to stand a chance of winning in 2020 is a fallacy. Milliband won loads, 800 in fact, in 2012 and lost in 2015. He also led in the polls up until the final year but he still lost.

Corbyn has to fight on two fronts. He has to fight the Tories and UKIP in the country and his parliamentary party in his backyard. All were gunning for him. All told each other gleeful stories of the losses which would pile up as the votes were counted and then the coup could be mounted. In fact there were hardly any losses, two parliamentary bye elections were won, all the at risk councils in the south were held, the Tories were not just defeated in London but beaten and while the Conservative vote fell by three per cent on the 2015 tally, Labour went up four per cent. That is a significant tactical victory with great strategic potential. Because all this was achieved in England. And 2020 for Labour has to be won in England.

Scotland for Labour in now a write off for a generation. The SNP is now the socialist party for Scotland  and it contains the former Labour supporters who walked away from New Labour because it sought power over principle, abandoned the working class, became London centric and Thatcherite and worst of all was led mostly by Scots. This led to a sense of betrayal and anger far greater than would have been the case if it were just an English party. Which is what Labour is now becoming, with a branch in Wales which still commands support because it is left of centre and never really embraced the glitzy nostrums of New Labour. That is why the left leaning Labour of Corbyn did so much better in England and especially in the south, and why although it cannot yet see it because it lacks the wits, the Tory party faces its greatest strategic threat since 1945, as the following four years advance to the day of its reckoning. Because the wind of change now blows left. The centre is a sterile mud patch poisoned by greed and exploitation of which most of the young and increasing numbers everywhere have had more than enough.

As I write this the outcome of a many of the various elections in England is not known, save for the fact that Labour is doing rather better than everyone predicted. The most acute disappointment at this development is within the disconnected Parliamentary Labour Party, which is the last and only bastion of the angry remnants of New Labour in England, the Scottish element having been wiped out in 2015. So this post is about Scotland.

For all practical purposes Scotland is now an independent country within the United Kingdom. Not only are its legal and educational systems different; so are its politics. Scotland is by majority consistently a socialist country.  But the rightward drift of New Labour brought about the gradual emergence of the SNP as the preferred Scottish Party of the left. There is not room for two of them. Aside from the independence issue, SNP economic and social policies are bang on the money for any traditional Labour supporter. This explains why Labour has been thrashed again and pushed into third place in the Scottish Parliament, so it is now not even the Opposition in the country where at the start of devolution it led the government.

This time the SNP does not have an absolute majority, unsurprising because the electoral system is designed to make that much more difficult than the Westminster model. So while the SNP has won, it has lost its majority. Many will take the view that too much chatter from the SNP of another independence referendum if the UK votes for Brexit, is the root cause of the setback. It is also the reason for the unexpected advance of the Tories to second place in a parliament where for years they have been barely a player. Unionists have felt it wise to get behind the party which whatever the outcome of the Brexit vote, would keep them in the UK. This could be good news, making the break up of the UK less likely than many had feared. That in turn makes a Brexit win more likely as there are an awful lot of voters who would not be willing to risk both an exit from the EU and a break up of the UK. Politics in never straightforward.

We will look at England tomorrow when all the results are in, but this blog has already spotted some very interesting things. Very interesting indeed.

Never make predictions in politics and none will be made now. But this Blog thinks that not only is there a real possibility of President Trump, it is more likely than President (Mrs) Clinton. If you think that is far fetched consider this. Clinton is ahead in all the polls and as a previous post points out, she has vast experience of the presidency, government and international affairs. But she is dogged by scandal, she is at the core of  the political establishment against which there is much anger and people instinctively do not trust her. She also loses. She has just lost to Bernie Sanders again, in spite of the fact that his hopes of getting the nomination are over.

By contrast Trump wins and the longer he fights the bigger the wins become. He did not just beat his rivals in the latest contests, he creamed them and drove them from the field. So all this talk of brokered conventions is gone. He is the Republican candidate for president and a boisterous convention will confirm that. What baffles the pros about Trump is that he is the most reviled candidate since polling began, minorities and women hate him, yet still he wins. That tells you two things. The first is that a lot of the haters are telling the pollsters one thing and voting another. The second is he is pulling out people who usually stay at home. That makes him a very dangerous adversary.

So in the UK note must be taken and political contacts opened. In fact Trump would not be bad news for us. If you sweep aside idiotic rhetoric about building walls and banning Muslims, you would have a President who wants to do a deal with Russia and China to reduce diplomatic tensions, would attack America’s ruinous twin deficits in both world trade and the federal budget, would talk big about the military but refuse pleas from the Generals for more expensive systems for which the cost would have to be borrowed, cut deals with Congress to ensure that his government actually functioned and finally if we are silly enough on this side of the Atlantic to vote for Brexit he would give us a sympathetic nod and unlike Obama, he would not send us to the back of the trade deal queue.

I am away on a long weekend in the Med and wrote the previous post in the departure lounge at Gatwick. I have not been following the news as much as usual but I have kept in touch. I had not planned a further post until my return to the UK but I think more needs to be said now. I want to begin by reminding readers that I have a  great grandmother who was 100% Jewish, making my paternal grandmother technically Jewish according to tradition and therefore my father likewise, but not me. I am in fact an eighth Jewish which is not a lot but enough to enable me to comment with some candour.

The Labour Movement is not and never has been anti-Semitic; indeed the reverse and has always welcomed and been well served by great men and women who were Jewish. As is often the case in politics people sometimes say things which offend because their meaning has much wider implications than the muddled thinking behind the comment. Many a political career has foundered on such a gaffe and there may be careers now in jeapody because of comments, which even if not intended as anti- semitic, are deeply offensive, even frightening, to Jewish people everywhere.

But there seems to be some evidence that individual failures are being magnified into institutional culpability designed to damage Labour’s electoral chances and undermine the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. If there is even a chance that this the case, those who are cynically using the anti-Semitic card for domestic political ends are politically disgusting and should be driven from public life for good. New Labour is now widely regarded among the public, especially the young, as the rotten apple of British politics and its  remnants should be finally emptied from the barrel of the Labour  Movement, which it has for years betrayed by prioritising power over principle.