A Personal Vendetta (indulge me)

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1: Which will split the party.
2: The more feral element will combine with UKIPpers and the BNP: a small but very nasty far-right party will emerge from the dilution of the now shattered conervative body.
3: Galvanising the currently morose and self-indulgent street-left into present non- purist urgency, splitting off a sector of current New Labour "support" (probably not so noticeable, as this support has been angrily grudging to the point of torpor recently...)
4: A spate of single-issue candidates will also emerge, in the wake of the heartening Kidderminster Hospital triumph: at least some of these will combine with extant activist orgs, since what "amateur" pols always lack is practical experience of organisation. (Some will combine with the LibDems, also...) 5: New Labour's inevitable move towards necessary rock-the-vote strategies, to galvanise youth, will — in the medium-long term — provide an energy injection with results quite dfft to any intended, as let- down follows promise (just as Kennedy's New Frontier went on birth SNCC and the "Movement", then the Yippies, the Panthers, the Motherfuckers and ultimately the Weather Underground...) Nothing kicks like betrayal.

― mark s, Sunday, 10 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Patrick: "Who?"; they're all Tories apart from Chris Moyles who is an obnoxious radio DJ, politics unknown.

― Robin Carmody, Sunday, 10 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Mark: "Which will split the party"; quite possible, certainly too many Tories are too far gone to listen to Heseltine's eminently sensible comments as quoted by David.

"The more feral element will combine ..."; yes, exactly, I predicted this privately a while back. You can begin to imagine a third party (as in several mainland European countries; Austria's Freedom Party was one such to begin with) where the more extreme side of Toryism joins up with UKIP and BNP attitudes. Meanwhile the Heseltine / Clarke wing might join up with ... who? Moderate Labour or the less socialistic Lib Dems? Maybe both; certainly I think there will be more Woodwards, Nicholsons and Temple-Morrises.

"angrily grudging": that's my mother's support for Labour now, and she's voted for them every election these last 35 years. I think you're right that the left-of-Labour movement will get more organised; the Green Party's impressive string of saved deposits (relative to their previous record: hadn't they only saved one deposit and that in the 1989 by-election in Vauxhall?) proves that there *is* a growing counter-movement.

"a spate of single-issue candidates": true, the result of the breakdown in stable, consensual attachment to one particular party (a wholly good thing because it makes voters far less uncritically accepting) itself related to the decline of communitarianism mentioned by David in the other thread. Noticeably the Lib Dems stood aside in Wyre Forest, doubtless aware that Dr Richard Taylor's cause was *symbolically* greater than theirs (they had many other seats to win, he obviously just the one).

"Nothing kicks like betrayal": true, why I think left-of-Labour parties (but not the old Scargillian hardline) will be *the* boom area over the next 4/5 years (and that includes both the Lib Dems and the "fringe" movements).

― Robin Carmody, Sunday, 10 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

DavidM: "(Peter Hitchens) desperately, pathetically, angrily yearns for a pastoral 50s Englandshire that never existed anyway. And he's getting more and more pissed off that the rest of the population wants to move on"; well, obviously, and that's what makes his columns so sad to read in a way (even for someone like me who hates him). I feel very sorry for him in a way, in that he so obviously can't come to terms with anything about the modern world (and is also wracked with guilt about his youthful liberalism).

― Robin Carmody, Sunday, 10 June 2001 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

six years pass...

lol old ilx

― Dom Passantino, Sunday, 17 June 2007 20:02 (sixteen years ago) link

Yes but before that happens they will be forced to reinvent themselves as a more socially liberal, centrist party (as Heseltine said on Thursday night - elections in the UK are won on the centre ground). Admittedly it might take another defeat for them to finally realise this. But even then, don't assume that Labour can automatically expect a third term - they've been fortunate with the state of the economy so far, and have been given the benefit of the doubt on improving public services (arguably an impossibility).

-- David, Sunday, June 10, 2001 12:00 AM (6 years ago) Bookmark Link

Surely not THE David?

― Ned Trifle II, Sunday, 17 June 2007 20:16 (sixteen years ago) link

Aggressive Cameron is aggressive.

― Ned Raggett, Sunday, 17 June 2007 20:18 (sixteen years ago) link

In an attempt to counter that, I could only find the following fella, who 'occasionally plays at left back'. Ladies and gentlemen...

Defensive Cameron is defensive.
http://www.peterheadfc.org.uk/images/profile/0506/dougiecameron.jpg

― Just got offed, Sunday, 17 June 2007 20:28 (sixteen years ago) link

two months pass...

The Sainted Robin Carmody

― Heave Ho, Sunday, 16 September 2007 10:45 (sixteen years ago) link

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