I keep reading that the Labour leadership campaign is in chaos, seems a bit harsh seeing as they have hrdly started yet, and also that the Liberasl Democrats are falling apart at the seams. This claim has a tad more substance as the front runner for the leadership, Tim Farron has hinted that he wants to drop the Dems and divert to being the liberals with a political philosophy based on classical liberalism.
What were really seeing is a fragmentation of the Left.
As Labour under and since Blair, sought to occupy the ground that belongs to the centre right, it triggered a lunge towards authoritarianism and statism by the remaining dyed-in-the-wool Marxists, hence the growth of Greens, extreme socialist groupings and the SNP.
But what most surprised Labour, and the pollsters too, was the volume of traditional working-class votes which went to UKIP in far greater numbers than the kippers had ever gathered from any wavering Tories, presenting a greater threat long term.
As I have been saying in this blog for a long time, politically correct thinking, gay rights and an obsesion with imigration are not vote winners in the streets of Manchester, Leeds, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Nottingham and Sheffield. Anyone familiar with those cities does not need me to explain why, anyone who does need me to explain why is never going to understand anyway.
The challenge now for Labour is to define a whole new position, one which can recover those lost working class souls whilst also making the right noises about business, immigration, Europe etc. It looks like an impossible challenge, certainly for any of the current batch of leadership candidate nonentities.
Labour now only exists in the most deprived and under – employed parts of a few major conurbations, it is a party of the depressed inner-cities, no longer a whole nation party, nor even a working-class party. The exit-door beckons unless Osborne throws them a life-line with his daft city-devolution plan that could guarantee devolved Labour enclaves for a few more decades yet.
As for the Liberals, whether Democrat or not, I suspect their day has gone: people have more feasible choices now for their protest votes and trying to co-exist in the middle-left-ground while being trampled on by both the Tories and Labour is not a healthy place to be.
From the start of the twentieth century to the 1970s the left served us well, then the Labour Party was hijacked by the elitists of the Fabian Society and became the party of lawyers, luvvies and academics while the Lib Dems for a while was an uneasy alliance of libertarians, social democrats and the raffia mafia.
RIP then the british left, what will replace it we cannot tell.