By contrast with the Conservatives (see Part 2) Labour egregiously failed to learn the lessons of political
history, above all its own.
In Why
selflessness is good business I likened ill-advised attempts at
neo-cortex to neo-cortex communication, without accepting the brutal realities
of the recipients' brainstems and emotions, to trying to jump the Grand Canyon
- depressingly futile, and suicidal to boot. It's like going ‘over the
top’ in First World War trench warfare to face machine gun annihilation, or
Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg. Yet
that's exactly what Labour did. How?
_______________________________________________
On BBC Radio 4 on Friday former Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer
(Finance Minister) Ken Clarke hit the nail on the head, as he usually does. He
recalled that in 1997 the Conservatives were intellectually and morally
bankrupt, engaged in bitter internecine warfare. So the electorate
threw them out and refused to have them back until they had repented, like the wife who changes the locks to keep out her drunk, abusive husband.
A politician's relationship with the electorate
is disconcertingly personal. It’s like being married to 60 million people and,
even worse, having to deal with their mother too!!!
Ken Clarke went on to say everyone knows that Labour mismanaged the economy
when it was last in power (1997 - 2010), yet it has never accepted this and 'worn sackcloth and ashes' (my phrase, not his) in front of the electorate. The Labour Party
representative at the interview table immediately objected to his comments. She indignantly denied that
Labour had mismanaged the economy and said the problem was that they had not
sufficiently trumpeted their achievements whilst in Government. Clarke simply replied "There you are - see what I mean?!"
Labour remained in steadfast denial, and potentially may do so for many years to come if it's not ruthless in coming to terms with brutal realities. On this morning's Andrew Marr show on BBC1 TV Lord Peter Mandelson, Labour party grandee and architect of Tony Blair's New Labour, was blunt. He said: "When Ed Milliband was elected Leader of the Labour Party we were all told to shake our fists and say we were for the poor, and we hated the rich. This is not an intelligent strategy to win over voters".
Labour has often struggled throughout its history to understand the brainstems and emotions of the large body of floating voters it
needs to win over. These voters simply aren't going to roll over and
surrender to facile bravado. They don't
trust Labour on the economy, period. Ed Milliband's coterie of metropolitan champagne socialists indulged their followers in a naive grand political experiment. Meantime as the hefty majority party in Scotland they fell asleep on the bridge whilst the Caledonian liner steamed headlong into the Nationalist iceberg. They have only themselves to blame that the SNP took them to the cleaners on Thursday.
Ed Milliband is a decent man, dedicated to public service, but he and his acolytes behaved as wet-behind-the-ears demagogues. They never fathomed or accepted that whilst the UK economy has shed thousands of public sector jobs it has created 4 to 5 times that number of private sector jobs, which are NOT all zero hours or minimum wage contracts. Neither did they come to terms with the fact that the Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition had turned the UK into the fastest growing economy in the G7.
After decades of self-bamboozling the UK, in my humble opinion and David Cameron's too the most creative nation on earth, is finally...FINALLY!!! starting to see that the pinnacle of success is not only becoming a doctor, lawyer or civil servant, and that business is not squalid and sleazy. Thank God for that! Welcome, fellow Brits, to the 21st Century world of China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Scandinavia and the US, plus many other aspirational nations. You got here just in time - the train is about to leave the station!
Oh, and by the way, where do the taxes come from to pay for our cherished National Health Service, for teachers, social workers, refuse cleaners, etc. Money doesn't grow on trees, and the world of business is NOT, contrary to popular socialist worker myth infested solely with rapacious bankers and other ne'er do wells!!!
Labour can only start to address these problems effectively once it
has started with a prolonged, sincere mea culpa to the electorate, even if it feels this is
unjust, and put its economic house fully in order. All further intellectual policy
wonking and vacuous demonising of anyone not in the Labour family should be banned. And frankly I do wonder whether the two wings of the Party can, and should, be reconciled long-term.
If I was a strategic advisor to the new Labour leader I might well be advocating much more radical action, along the lines I suggested in Are political leaders an oxymoron?! To be blunt, if political parties were businesses they would be subject to mergers and acquisitions far more often. I am no raging free marketeer, but the discipline of the market acts as an important enforcer of the Laws of Evolution and stops organisational dinosaurs living on past their sell-by date, unlike politics.
Of course Labour’s other manifest, depressingly (for them) predictable,
problem was electing the wrong Milliband.
Ed was never, ever credible as Prime Minister in waiting – Labour
canvassers have confirmed they were told this (the bleeding obvious) ad nauseam
on the doorsteps. His brother David was,
but was not elected because his candidacy was too threatening (that brainstem
thing again) to the left wing of the Labour Party.
So, many salutory lessons to be learnt from the gun the Labour Party under Ed Milliband pointed at its own foot with entirely predictable consequences.
________________________________________________________________
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