UK Labour party in death spiral?

[a_majoor]

President Obama will not be meeting with too many kindred spirits outside the US at this rate; the Left is being consumed by the failure of their programs and voters are starting to see the big picture throughout the world.  “The trouble with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money” –Margaret Thatcher.

http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2008/07/now_for_the_lab.html#184204

Now for the Labour implosion
Brian Micklethwait (London)  UK affairs

For the leader of the Labour Party and our Prime Minister things are terminally frightful, but they are now looking just as bad for the Labour Party as a whole. I have been pondering the consequences of the latest Labour electoral reverse by reading the Coffee House blog, which is now my favourite political (as in who's-in-who's-out) blog, as opposed to the metacontext stuff that we do here. Several points stand out:

For the benefit of those who have not been following this, Labour have just lost their twenty fifth safest seat in a by-election, to the Scottish Nationalists this time. If they can't hold seats like this, what can they hold? Gordon Brown is clearly electoral death, even in Scotland, maybe particularly in Scotland. For as long as this appalling man leads their party, no Labour MP can feel safe. So, you would think, all they need to do now is get on the phone to each other and decide on an alternative.

But, the trouble is that, closely related to the above, the semi-plausible Labour Party leader, among the half-dozen or so semi-plausible choices, with a majority that is most likely to survive the next general election is ... Gordon Brown! Pick any of the others, and what remains of Labour could go into the next Parliament with a leader who has just lost his seat.

Even if they do pick another Prime Minister, he or she will be a new Prime Minister. This is not like the chaotic Conservatives of the nineties and noughts picking yet another new Opposition Leader. This will be a rabble of discredited politicians choosing another national political leader, having just themselves picked the previous dud. That uncontested succession is looking like more and more of a blunder, and what is more a blunder by the Labour Party as a whole, not by the mere Prime Minister. And as the travails of the present incumbent incompetent illustrate so well, you never really know how well or how badly some new guy will do. Even cabinet ministers don't get anything like the kind of sustained media glare shone on them that Prime Ministers do. A new guy will be a leap into the unknown. If he's no better than Gordon Brown ... (interpolation: you could say something similar about Michael Ignatieff)

The governing parliamentary party is now a complete shambles, and worse, a complete shambles which seems to have no obvious way of rescuing itself, which is what the word complete always means in such circumstances. David Cameron is now saying: let's have an election now. The country can't wait until 2010. I think Cameron's timing is spot on. Earlier I here speculated about the already then widely touted idea of scorched earth, between now and the next election, the scorchers being Gordon Brown and his Labour Party, and Britain being the scorchee. Now it looks like the Labour Party is about to get a terminal roasting right now. Maybe others can see some kind of way out for these people now, but I can't.

What now looks like happening is that the government will implode, as the saying goes. Just what that will involve, who can say? It might even get interesting in the House of Commons. There might even be a vote of no confidence in the government that the government will lose, or perhaps win too badly to carry on. Certainly, a Geoffrey Howe moment looks like coming soon, when a Labour heavyweight gets up, very publicly, and says, Prime Minister, it's over, as Howe did in the House of Commons to Thatcher. But such a speech is just as likely to be an impulsive moment of personal rage as part of any thought-through plan about what the hell to do next. Because the thing is, no matter how bad things get for Labour, the circumstances are such that they could then get even worse. Even diehard socialists of the sort who built the Labour Party in the first place only voted for it because it looked like it could become a plausible parliamentary instrument to do the things they wanted. If Labour stops being even that, will anyone want to go on voting for it?

Fellow Samizdatista Michael Jennings says that after about a decade of Conservative rule, over a very difficult clutch of circumstances, Labour will be back. I agree that something will be back, but will it be Labour? Forget voting Labour. Will anyone even want to stand for it? I expect Guido Fawkes to be listening out for stories concerning seemingly heavyweight Labourites grabbing that Job in The City while the going is still good, and abandoning all hope of any political future. Worse, that New Generation that political pundits will be confidently expecting, in the manner of Cameron and his young pals, may simply fail to materialise, of anything like adequate quality. Don't forget, by the way, just as an aside, that the Labour Party is now pretty much bankrupt.

The underlying story here is the economy, not the Labour Party economy, the national economy. Which is also unravelling horribly, and which can surely only get worse in the next year or two. It has become clear to me that I am angry about this "New" Labour Party because, although I never supported it and never voted for it, I did actually believe them when they said that they wouldn't completely screw up on the tax-and-spend front. I actually feel personally betrayed! Blair, I thought, got it, about spending only what you can get from tax and that you can only get so much tax. Well, maybe he did, but he handed the country over to a stupid grump who quite clearly did not and does not get it. The stupid grump only pretended to, and now he's stopped even pretending. It's almost as if Blair wanted the Labour Party to implode, "apres moi". He made the one promise that he must have known that a Brown-lead Labour Party would not then keep, and left them to destroy themselves, with a great big grin on his face. I hope that this Labour melt-down causes some retro-analysis of Tony Blair and of his alleged competence, as both a Party leader and a national leader. It's not just Iraq, not just civil liberties, not just the relentless crumbling and dumbing down of the public sector. It's the economy, stupid. Blair let it happen. The only thing he knew how to do well was to keep on being Prime Minister, until such time as he was unable even to do that.

Will things now calm down for Labour? Am I becoming overwrought, again? Maybe. Will Brown, or someone, steady the ship, hold the horses, steady the buffs (whoever they may be)? Perhaps. But they've been saying that for the last six months and more, and yet things keep getting worse. And they are now getting much worse much faster.

Interesting times.

 

[a_majoor]

I'm afraid I was wrong; it's not the Labour party that is going into a death spiral, but the United Kingdom:

http://althouse.blogspot.com/2009/03/when-family-is-burning-to-death-in.html
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5998930.ece

"When a family is burning to death in front of your eyes, rules should go out of the window – especially with kids. Everybody wanted to try and help."
"I thought the police were there to protect lives. At one time they would have have gone inside themselves to try and rescue them."

http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NzMyNzIwZGEzYmRmZDdhYWQ3NTBmNWZkZTdmMzhiYzU=

The death of England (cont)  [Mark Steyn]

Jay, that fire story from Doncaster is almost unbearably sad: The characteristically moronic behavior of the braindead British coppers transformed it from a family tragedy to a national metaphor. I have written recently in Canada of the disturbing passivity of the "citizenry", but Britain's nudged it on a stage: Even if you understand the obligation to act in such a situation, the state will forcibly prevent you and (if recent form is anything to go by) ensure that if you disobey them you'll be prosecuted - pour encourager les autres to remain obedient sheep to the government shepherd.

It's interesting to read the words of the South Yorkshire Police spokeszombie:

The senior officer in charge is confident we handled this incident as professionally as possible. In a situation like that you could end up with more deceased bodies than you had in the first place

Well, there weren't any "deceased bodies" at the time Her Majesty's constabulary showed up. And there might not have been any had they not shown up at all. The incident has strange echoes of that fire at a school in Saudi Arabia not long after 9/11, where the fleeing schoolgirls escaped the blazing building but, because they were unveiled, were beaten back by the stick-wielding religious police to die in the flames. In both cases, the emergency responders who are supposed to save you (or at least make an attempt) instead wind up killing you - because a rote prostration before rule enforcement trumps their basic humanity. In recent years, the British police have evolved from being merely useless (at least when it comes to traditional activities such as solving crime) into what John O'Sullivan calls "the paramilitary wing of The Guardian" - the blundering enforcers of the nanny state.

Still, you begin to see why so many lazy government officials are wedded to that "there's no right to shout fire in a theatre" rubbish. Even when the building's burning down, you've no rights. New Hampshire's great motto, "Live free or die", is not just a bit of bloodcurdling stemwinding but a real choice that Britons, Canadians and, alas, Americans ought to ponder: You can live as free men, with all the rights and responsibilities and vicissitudes of fate that that entails. Or you can watch your society decay and die before your eyes - as England, once the crucible of freedom, dies a little with every day.

 

[stewacide]

I'm not a close follower of UK politics, but the impression I get is quite the opposite: before the financial crisis Labour was drifting aimlessly, Brown was pulling an almost perfect Paul Martin, and David Cameron was having drapes cut for #10. Since the crisis, however, Brown has been much praised for grabbing the financial bull by the horns, and in so doing gaining a global stature and image completely distinct from and largely overshadowing the Blair legacy (Iraq, Afghanistan, illusory growth based on financials and real estate, etc).

More generally, the financial crisis makes things harder for conservative parties globally, even those in opposition, and helps left wing parties, even crypto-neoliberal faux-socialist like New Labour

If Brown and Labour can make the issue the response to the crisis, rather than the causes of it - a version of Harper's 'steady hand on the tiller' - I think they have a good shot.

 

[a_majoor]

Brown and Laobour (like Obama and the Democrats) will indeed make the issue the "response" rather than the cause, since they, after all, are the cause of the crisis......

In the mean time, here is some more of how the civilization in the UK is undergoing its death throes:

http://reason.com/news/show/133423.html

Disturbing the Peace

On the inalienable right to "excessively noisy sex"
Brendan O'Neill | May 11, 2009

"Unlike Winston, [Julia] had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship."
So wrote George Orwell in 1984, his dystopian vision of a future world where mankind's every thought, desire, and bodily tingle would be policed by the powers-that-be. Orwell imagined a Junior Anti-Sex League that spied on kissing and cavorting adults, and a ruling Party that sought to squash the "sex impulse." The heroes of his nightmarish tale—Winston and Julia—had to sneak off to a wood in order to explore each other bodies in a bit of peace and quiet.

It turns out that Orwell was suffering from premature speculation. It was not in 1984 that a major Western government made the "sex impulse"—the grunting, groaning sex instinct—into a police matter; it was in 2009. Here in the U.K., to add to our already-existing panoply of Orwellian measures—5 million CCTV cameras that watch our every move; "speaking cameras" that warn us to pick up litter or stop loitering; the government's attempt to recruit child spies to re-educate anti-social adults—we now have the bizarre and terrifying situation where a woman has been arrested for having sex too loudly.

Yes, in modern-day Britain even the decibels of our sexual moaning can become the subject of a police investigation.

At the end of April, Caroline Cartwright, a 48-year-old housewife from Wearside in the north east of England, was remanded in custody for having "excessively noisy sex." The cops took her in after neighbors complained of hearing her "shouting and groaning" and her "bed banging against the wall of her home." Cartwright has, quite reasonably, defended her inalienable right to be a howler: "I can't stop making noise during sex. It's unnatural to not make any noises and I don't think that I am particularly loud."

Pleasurable groaning and bed-banging are common noises in crowded towns and cities across the civilized world. Most of us deal with them by sticking a CD in the stereo. Those who complain are normally told to stop being prudish or to have a discreet chat with the creators of the offending sex sounds. So how did Cartwright's expressions of noisy joy become a police case, which later this month will be ruled on at Newcastle Crown Court, one of the biggest courts in the north of England?

Because, unbelievably, Cartwright had previously been served with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO)—a civil order that is used to control the minutiae of British people's behaviour—that forbade her from making "excessive noise during sex" anywhere in England.

That's right, going even further than Orwell's imagined authoritarian hellhole, where at least there was a wood or two where people could indulge their sexual impulses, the local authorities in Wearside made all of England a no-go zone for Cartwright's noisy shenanigans. If she wanted to howl with abandon, she would have to nip over the border to Scotland or maybe catch a ferry to France. It was because she breached the conditions of her Anti-Social Behaviour Order, the civil ruling about how much noise she can make while making love in England, that Cartwright was arrested.

This case sheds harsh light not only on the Victorian-style petty prudishness of our rulers, who seriously believe they can make sexually expressive women timid again by dragging them to court, but on the tyranny of Anti-Social Behaviour Orders themselves. Introduced by our authoritarian Labour government in 1998, anyone can apply for an ASBO to stop anyone else from doing something that they find irritating, "alarming," or "threatening."

Local magistrates' courts issue the orders, sometimes on the basis of hearsay evidence (which is permissible in "ASBO cases"). short, the applicant for an ASBO does not have to go through the normal rigors of the criminal justice system in order to get a civil ruling preventing someone he doesn't like from doing something that he finds "alarming" or "dangerous." Once you have been branded with an ASBO, if you break its conditions—by having noisy sex in your own home, for example—you are potentially guilty of a crime and can be imprisoned.

The ASBO system has turned much of Britain into a curtain-twitching, neighbor-watching, noise-policing gang of spies. The relative ease with which one can apply to the authorities for an ASBO positively invites people to use the system to punish their foes or the irritants who live in their neighborhoods. ASBOs have been used to prevent young people in certain areas from wearing hoods or hats (they look "threatening"), to ban a middle-aged couple from playing gangsta rap (the expletives offended workers and children at a nearby kindergarten), and to prevent a 10-year-old boy from having contact with matches until he turns 16, after he was found to have started a fire.

And now, prudish people who previously would have been told to "put up or shut up" over their neighbors' noisy sex have been empowered to turn one woman's private affairs into a very public trial. This, too, is Orwellian: the creation of new layers of spies and inter-communal suspicion.

In Orwell's dystopia, "the sexual act, successfully performed, was rebellion." So it is in Wearside in 2009, where the excessively noisy exploits of Cartwright and her possibly very talented partner are a form of rebellion against the arbitrary and interventionist nature of the ASBO-wielding powers-that-be. They are screwing for liberty.

Brendan O'Neill is editor of spiked in London.