Blog 2023 Malcolm Blair-Robinson

I have just heard the most left of centre speech of any incoming Tory Prime Minister since Harold Macmillan. The make up of the Cabinet will tell us whether there is substance behind the words. I strongly suspect there is. This will indeed be an administration with a difference.

By comparison to the Tories, Labour is a rough house, but it is much more open, a good deal more emotional, far less politically astute and very much more driven by a sense of mission. Mission trumps ambition. So when things leave the rails, the pile up is a big one and it takes a long time to sort out. That is what is happening now.

The problem is quite simple. Labour supporters who have for generations regarded the party as their champion and protector have for years felt abandoned and neglected as an economic model based on primacy of capital over labour has eroded their standards of living, job security, skills base, housing quality and life chances in a way which would have seemed inconceivable in the post war baby boomer period. They see a Westminster elite which is disconnected from their lives and oblivious to their problems, an Oxbridge educated tribe of consultants and spinners who are focused on a quite different agenda to the one they were elected to deliver.

Corbyn appeals to them as much as a popular hero as a leader because he talks their language, feels their pain, shares their hopes and wants to do something about it. The PLP are horrified because they have more in common with the Tory left than the left of their own party, which dominates the membership in the country. Had the NEC voted to keep Corbyn off the ballot the party would have exploded. The PLP now has to find a candidate who can beat Corbyn in a straight fight. If it fails in that endeavor and most believe it will, it will by this ill timed and self centered rebellion have inaugurated its own destruction. Because 500,000 plus members cannot be ignored or replaced, but 174 AWOL MPs can be and will be.

In the end Labour are just as deadly as the Tories, but on a different scale and in a different way. The Tories are about preservation. Labour is about change. New Labour was, like the Tories, too much about preservation of things that were wrong. So now old Labour is returning to change it.