Last night at my local Labour Party didn’t go so well. As I have said previously, it’s becoming hard to be a centrist and the Labour Right in the form of Labour First and their supporters are very well organised. The Left slate lost by about fifteen votes out of 101. What frightens me is the political vacuousness of the right.

Their voter engagement strategy is just based on Labour brand loyalty and hard work. In my second speech of the night, I quoted Einstein,

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.

During the last election campaign, we set ourselves the target of 4m conversations and did 5m; obviously a lot of them ended with being told to “Fuck Off”.  We lost!  Their answer seems to me to aim for 8m conversations. There has to be more to them; but I can’t see it.  These people, who have nothing to say about jobs and hope are going to destroy the Labour Party; the only thing that unites them is careerism and some admit it. They declare that, what’s needed is a better more attractive leader. They have no policy and no vision of a winning electoral coalition and are completely unable to do anything other than do the same thing over and over again. Knock on doors, every day!

This is a strategy, it’s not an accident; it started in the middle of the 90’s based on the assumption that the working class have nowhere else to go. It’s executed by the last of the new Labour foot soldiers, located in the revolving doors between parliament, the unions, (well paid) charities and corporate public policy jobs. The Brexit vote and now the US Presidential election show that they do (have somewhere else to go).

Robert Reich talks here about the how the current US Democrat party followed New Labour and walked from its working class base who have returned the favour, he is also quite clear that the Democrat machine supported Clinton vs. Sanders for reasons of careerism and probably lost the Presidency because of this.

It’s happening here too. What is worse is that they’re teaching their young supporters the same thing.

PASOK (and maybe Scottish Labour) shows us how a Socialist Party that walks away from its base dies.

 

Insanity

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