Labour: Time for change

 

Image: By Source, Fair use

The combination of a humiliating by-election defeat in Hartlepool and the loss of over 300 councillors in last weeks elections was a serious blow to the Labour Party and it's leader Keir Starmer. The hard/far left were bound to begin attacks on the leadership and certainly Momentum was the first to oblige when they tweeted:

A transformative socialist message has won in Hartlepool before, and it would have won again.

How they figure that out when the electorate overwhelmingly swung to the Conservatives is beyond belief and shows what a blinkered world they live in. Labour lost for a whole variety of reasons but voters demanding a full blooded socialist programme? Nah I don't think so.

This has been a difficult year for the Party with political discourse buried by the pandemic. It doesn't help that despite being a highly intelligent and capable man Starmer does not have the charisma needed to compete with Boris. On top of that Labour has become so out of touch with ordinary voters that Joe Haines, Harold Wilson's former Press Secretary wrote in the Daily Mail that:

And the question that voters asked last week was this: ‘What are your economics, Sir Keir?’

They weren’t interested in the price of Johnson’s wallpaper. They wanted to know when they’ll get a house of their own. And put up wallpaper of their own....

The truth is that the Labour Party has lost its roots. Hartlepool was a chance to replant some of them and it wasn’t taken.

Labour’s greatest danger now is that it will shrug off Thursday’s elections as a Covid bounce, that it will resume its search for sleaze, continue to say that everything the Government does is too little, too late and hope that something will turn up. It hasn’t recognised that the Tory Party has changed. The Tories are no longer the party of estate owners but the party of estate agents, slick young men and women with policies they’re prepared to throw overboard if the voter doesn’t like them.

The Tory Party is interested in power. The Labour Party is only interested in its principles, however outmoded.

One looks to Marks & Spencer for its voters. The other has too many who look to Marx and Engels.

One wants to be the majority power. The other is in danger of being a permanent minority party or, worse, the party of minorities.

There is no group too small or remote or too batty for Labour to demand the Government does something for them. Strings of acronyms – LGBTQ-plus? – flow from their lips.

Haines was joined by Birmingham Labour MP Khalid Mahmood  as the  Birmingham Mail reports as stating:

Voters are rejecting Labour because it's been taken over by trendy Londoners and "woke social media warriors", according to a city Labour MP.

"Labour has lost touch with ordinary British people. A London-based bourgeoisie, with the support of brigades of woke social media warriors, has effectively captured the party.

Whilst I might point out as a Londoner that not all of us are practitioners of "wokus pocus" or even that trendy I concur that he has hit the nail on the head. The new social media leftists seem obsessed with their own correctness and are the most intolerant and self-righteous individuals around. Easily comparable with religious fundamentalists and cultists of all kinds.

This new left is authoritarian to the extreme and suppress all and any dissension  where they can. In one Labour discussion group a former Labour candidate from Dorking suggested that:

"... transphobic members of this group who need both to be banned and get in the sea."

When challenged the individual had a hissy fit left some abuse and stormed out of the group. I doubt if he'll be missed but note the sinister threat at the end. Drowning people who don't agree with him. Indeed the general unpleasantness of these types is well documented as JK Rowling can attest. 

It's no wonder that ordinary voters can't relate to so many in the Labour Party who either hold these views or acquiesce to this intolerant tendency. 

Currently Labour is really two parties in one. Whilst some may sit on the fence the time has come for Starmer to have his Kinnock moment and get tough with the hard and identitarian left and  rid the party of this plague. Labour must reform and relate to real people rather than ideologues or it will remain an ineffective opposition party.