According to Andrew Rawnsley in the Observer the conventional three largest political parties in the UK as a whole all face existential crises after the forthcoming general election, come what may.
The Tory crisis will result from their inability to win, and descent into likely opposition, a role that they think is never theirs to fill.
Labour wil mourn the loss of Scotland, and so a majority, even if they are in Number 10.
Both, Rawnsley says, will argue left v right.
And the LibDems will face a potential crisis of irrelevance: not in government even in a hung parliament.
I think Rawnsley is 80% right. The left and right of the Tories, right-wing Labiur and LibDems do indeed face such crises. But left wing Labour? Is it facing melt down? Not if I gauge correctly those I speak to of that inclination. The rise of the SNP to hold the feet of Labour to a lefter-wing fire suits them very nicely. The idea of angst appears not to be occurring to them right now. They're looking forward to government.
No wonder Cameron and his cohort is worried. The electorate might be making a choice and the Establishment unsurprisingly does not like it. But once in a while the people of the country have to make their voices heard. If there is a crisis it's only because democracy might work, for once.
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Can’t help thinking that the Lib Dems might prefer to defenestrate Clegg and join a Labour coalition than sit on the sidelines doing nothing (other than reinforcing their association with a failed Tory government).
Were the people of the day allowed to vote on whether they were to be forced off the Commons to be exploited? I don’t believe they were. The party popularly supposed to represent the masses, Labour, has by definition accepted the then new and malevolent paradigm of having to work for third parties to get money to live. It’s actually a party of acquiescence, then, not opposition. It’s the Tory’s best friend because instead of working to end the paradigm and restore self-sufficiency and independence Labour (the clue is in the name) simply seeks to improve conditions within it. A genuinely useful party would be an anti-exploitation party. I suppose the Greens are the nearest, which means having a party to vote for if you want that is a long, long way away. This doesn’t feel like a democracy to me 🙁
Then there are all the big problems to come.
now Labour has ruled out a confidence and supply arrangement with the SNP you have to think were heading for a stalemate and second election. perhaps Labour have some serious dirt on the Tories they think will swing it far enough their way to reach a majority with the LibDems? not that dirt seems to dissuade Tory voters… they seem happy to let the sick and poor die in the gutter if it means they get a tax cut.
“they seem happy to let the sick and poor die in the gutter if it means they get a tax cut. ”
true-but that also applies to Labour as well in so far that their fear of departing from the dominant narrative stopped them from vigorously opposing the tragic (in some cases) vilification and sanctioning of benefit claimants. In a country that was not so calloused you would expect this alone to destroy the electoral hopes of the Tories ; but no!; there was no wholehearted assault on the blatant cruelty of these policies. As Chris Hedges has pointed out in ‘The Death of the Liberal Class, we once relied on the Middle Class to oppose this sort of brutality and now that they themselves are threatened by economic insecurity the acquiesce:
” …… exposed the liberal class as a corpse. It fights for nothing. It stands for nothing. It is a useless appendage to the corporate state. It exists not to make possible incremental or piecemeal reform, as it originally did in a functional capitalist democracy; instead it has devolved into an instrument of personal vanity, burnishing the hollow morality of its adherents”
sad but true. i’m fairly sure vanity lies at the heart of much of what’s wrong with society and as studies have shown, the higher people get up the ladder, the more they compare themselves to those around them and more competitive they become.
as a wise man once said the higher a monkey climbs the more you see it’s arse and as a man who tries not engage in such fruitless behavior i sense nothing but resentment from those arseholes scrambling up the tree.
The SNP is not a left wing party. It is a Nationalist party. Any left wing Labour candidate or MP who thinks they can cooperate is damaging the party and aiding the SNP’s only ambition: breaking up the UK.
I.e. They will be used.
What Stalin called useful fools.
I think ‘useful fools’ was a term used by Lenin. Ths SNP also seem to repressent a genuinely deomcratic impulse to wrest power back from the corporate interets and the ideologies they promote.
I have to say I think the SNP are far from useful fools
“Seem” is the operative word here. And in your judgement, not mine.
I’ve been observing them over a number of decades and like many single issue groups they take their votes from wherever they can get them. Right wing farmers in the country, fisherman by the sea, green in the leafy suburbs, lamenting de-industrialisation in the conurbations, Red Clydesiders in Glasgow, Tory matrons in Perth and Kinross.
This consistent inconsistency is best expressed in defence where they manage to be simultaneously anti-nuclear but pro-Nato, pacifist but in favour of building British Navy ships on the Clyde.
As for wresting power from corporate interests: until the oil price crash they were totally dependent on corporate oil to underpin their economic forecasts and give, at least, the appearance of economic competence. If Scotland was independent it would be unduly reliant on oil, whisky and tourism (commerce having fled to England). A narrow group of corporate interests would have captured the country not the other way around.
As for “progressive”. Please. Their one economically competent senior politician, John Swinney, is on record as being a believer in the Laffer Curve as an instrument of tax policy. Challenged during the referendum debate to name one progressive policy they had implemented or advocated they were struck dumb. They are still unable to answer that simple question.
The only policy they offered was to cut corporation tax below whatever George Osborne decreed it might be. The aim being to attract businesses from the north of England. A race to the bottom on business tax. Hardly progressive.
The SNP are not useful fools. I didn’t say they were. I said any left wing Labour candidate or MP who thinks they can cooperate with the SNP is damaging the party and aiding the SNP’s only ambition: breaking up the UK. They are the useful fools in this scenario.
And if you think they care about poverty and the poor, what can be made of their drive for Full Fiscal Autonomy, a policy that would leave Scotland at least 3 times worse off than even the Tories are proposing over the next five years?
The only reason for sticking to FFA is: if they abandoned it, it would be an admission that independence itself is economically imprudent. Disastrous actually. So they cling to FFA and the deleterious effect it would have on the Scottish economy and therefore the services that the people depend on. Not because it’s good for the people but because they need to (at least pretend) to want it or their entire case falls apart.
The SNP wants independence. It is increasingly clear they want it at any cost. Progressive or left wing only comes into it to get the critical mass needed to break up the UK. Then….. Most of them don’t know and don’t care. Those of them that do know still don’t care.
Alex
I am not here to defend the SNP, of which I am no more a member than I am of Labour
But you fundamentally miss the point as to why they are popular with your arguments. They are popular because voting Labour has not delivered and so Scots a) want influence that their own Labour MPs did not deliver and b) want to make their own mess of it
If you don’t get that you don’t get that is happening in politics
Support for the SNP may not be rational, but it’s fundamentally human in a way that politics has not been
Richard
I share your hope Richard. In the age of the ‘tipping point theory’, it just may well be that what started off as Tory manipulation of people’s behaviours may just about bring their downfall. Maybe the actual tipping point now is that the austerity narrative has been done to death and people have had enough.
Having said that, neo-liberalism’s closest relation is I think ebola – an extremely resistant organism that seems to be able to re-grow into new strains despite new ways being developed to stamp it out. If there is a change of government that prefers a new narrative, them we must never forget that.
We must put down the neo-lib cognitive map of our world – and keep it down.
great analogy and every virus has it’s weak spot. what we need is a way of ‘immunising’ society against it rather than the current approach of treating it’s symptoms.
You are wrong on two counts
1. Stalin didn’t coin that phrase Lenin did.
2. The SNP will have no mandate to break up the UK – they lost an independence referendum last September in case you’ve forgotten. They will have a mandate to pursue devo max.
All you are doing is scaremongering and not doing that very well either
Actually, the phrase is “useful idiots”. And it wasn’t coined by Lenin, who never even used it. It didn’t work in relation to his political outlook at all. It’s quite popular amongst the Ayn Randite right-wing bananas on Murdoch’s “Marketwatch”. It is, however, a Cold War construct, designed by the US right to portray Marxists as cynics and slander Lenin’s actual revolutionary thought, and the Bolshevism of his lifetime in general. But, hey, carry on. Bet you can’t find it in his collected works – all 45 volumes – on Marxists.org.
I listened to Nicola Sturgeon on the radio this morning. I have never heard anything better from a political leader. I’m a LP member, but if I lived in Scotland with Jim Murphy as head, I would probably vote SNP. She is truly an inspiration. Salmond was also an effective speaker, but Nicola has made all the difference to the SNP in my opinion.
Can’t see where you would get the idea that the SNP are to the left of Labour. They have coat-tailed Labour time after time, adjusting their policies (effectively stealing Labour’s policies) in a desperate attempt to appeal to the sections of the core Labour vote (rightly) alienated from Labour after its supine caving in to the Tories during the referendum campaign. As Alex Gallagher writes – they are not left wing. They remain above all an opportunist, populist, nationalist party. Their overriding aim is to separate Scotland from the UK, their greatest wish will be for a Tory victory. As a working class socialist who rejoined the Labour Party to try to elect Neil Findlay and Katy Clark to the Scottish leadership I am sick and tired of the soft attitude adopted by some Labour leftists to the SNP – they are not our allies.
I have to say many I meet in Scotland persuade me otherwise
Although I am a big fan of Katy Clark and like her back in the Commons
Richard
I have asked you before via twitter what you think of the SNP’s policy of Full Fiscal Autonomy. If adopted it would mean the abolition of the Barnett Formula in Scotland. It would lead to a reduction in the annual budget of the Scottish Parliament over and above the loss of Barnett money. IFS calculates £7.6bn year one rising to £10bn year 5. That’s from a calculated spend (Barnett allocations plus UK Govt. spending in Scotland) of around £65-67bn.
Osborne’s “austerity” would lead to a £3bn cut annually in Scotland. It is huge. FFA leads to £10bn growing to £12-£13bn. It is colossal.
No really “left wing” party or person would wish this amount of cuts to the public sector (because that’s where the cuts would fall).
Or do you have a different analysis>?
Ask the SNP, not me
I have offered explanation as to how this might equate
Because of this blog, I went out and got the Observer to look at Rawnsley’s article for myself. I’d say he was pretty right. But I’ll never forgive him for putting the boot in on Brown before the last election.
However, my attention was drawn to the Observer leader comment and my heart sank. Emphasising the cuts proposed by the Tories and the borrowing that Labour ‘must do’ and entreating politicians to be honest about our country’s finances, it did little to explain to the reader any alternative view of how to deal with the economy such as the actual mechanics of printing sovereign money (as opposed to creating debt). There is no excuse for such intellectual laziness and theGuardian Group ought to be ashamed of themselves.
The best part about this election?
Deadringers on Radio 4 – it is really good and back on form. However, with so many numpties in politics these days, how could it be anything other?
I heard that too
And it was good
Simon, agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of the liberal middle-class.
James-I’m still in shock that the country ‘let’ this happen and it’s a wake up call to us (or should be) with regard to economic scapegoating.
The biggest issue in this election, and Rawnsley touches on it, is that the FPTP electoral system is utterly unfit for purpose. If the opinion polls are right, the SNP will get around 4% of the national vote and end up with 50 seats. The Greens will get about the same or a fraction more of the national vote and 1-2 seats. LibDems will get c.8-10% and end up with around 20-30 seats. And UKIP will get between 12-16% of the votes and 1-3 seats.
If you looked at it in the abstract, you would say we have a system where the more votes you get the less representation you get.
In other words, it is likely that the SNP, with 4%, will get around twice the parliamentary representation of the combined Greens, LidDems and UKIP, who will probably get around 30% of the vote. And yet voting reform appears to have been kicked into touch for a generation. I wonder how bad the voting system needs to be before it is challenged in the European Courts?
I agree (though I have no objection to the people of Scotland getting what they want, lord knows they’ve been denied it for decades).
I am curious how you think the European courts could have a say in our electoral system?
I think the Existential crisis is one of the Voting System. It’s very possible that the result will be the Conservatives win the popular vote but don’t gain enough MPs to form a majority. Not a great advert for Democracy (and I know it has happened before in the UK).
I think the SNP is a glorious romantic red herring fuelled by a bored Media. There are other areas of the UK more populous / economically more important than Scotland where independence would be more traumatic. Just imagine London doing what Singapore did to Malaysia.
I did suggest London itself would do a ‘Passport to Pimlico’ many years ago but I didn’t understand then that The City had already done that many centuries ago and kept quiet about it, a situation which we still have.
I’m not sure if we can trust the judgement of the IFS as it too seems stuck in the ‘deficit rut’ but here’s this that is thought provoking:
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2015/04/snps-anti-austerity-rhetoric-does-not-reflect-its-plans-says-ifs