I have published this video this morning. In it, I argue that the Tories are likely to cease to be after this election, becoming so irrelevant that no one will ever vote for them again. But could Labour, dedicated as it now is to Tory policies, go the same way by 2029? And what happens to our politics then?
The audio version of this video is here:
The transcript is:
The party is over.
The party I'm talking about is, of course, the Conservative Party.
It is done. Can it recover from the position that it is now in? I really don't know.
Why? Well, look, some parties have recovered from disastrous electoral results. The Liberal Democrats are going to do pretty well it seems on July the fourth, and they had a disastrous general election after they left the coalition government in 2015 and went down to only about 10 seats.
So, they have recovered, but they did not deliver what the Torries have just succeeded in delivering.
Five duff Prime Ministers in a row is an extraordinary achievement by the Conservative party. Three of them in the last five years, without the slightest shred of merit to any of them. And in between, scandal, after corruption, after neglect and failure.
People aren't going to forget that in a hurry. It is entirely possible, in fact, that this Conservative Party is dead. RIP, I say, or let's just forget it is better still, because it has not worked for the people of this country for a long time.
It has delivered us the terrible economic logic of neoliberalism, the idea that we are all consumers and nothing else, and that all we want is to maximize the amount of product that we consume, and that can be a cost to the delivery of government services on which we all depend - literally, all of us depend - to have a high quality of life.
That economic mantra is dead, except for the fact that Labour is still trying to give it the kiss of life. But the Conservative Party which imposed it upon us through Margaret Thatcher, looks as though it's on its last legs.
Now, let me give you another hypothesis.
Labour is also going to die. The Labour Party could, by 2029 - because it is continuing to believe in this failed mantra, which proved that it could not work at the time of the global financial crisis in 2008 - Labour is going to also die a death over the next five years, simply because it is without any ideas as to what it should be doing and how the future should be organised.
It is possible that the party is not only over for the Conservatives, but it might also be over for Labour. The two parties that have dominated UK politics since the early 1920s might see their death in the 2020s.
What does that mean? It means that we face a new political future. That could be one where the far-right rise to power.
Or it could be one where the people of this country get what they really want, which is genuine, moderate, left-of-centre government that delivers just what they need for the benefit of society as a whole.
We've got five years to get that right.
The party's over for the existing parties, but who's going to claim the throne?
That's the question for the time to come.
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HI Richard,
I’m not sure I agree. Where we are now, is the result of much planning following Corbyn’s near upset in 2017. After that, the ruling class could not allow another close call, so Johnson was brought in to smash Corbyn in the next election. Once that was done, he needed to be removed, and Starmer was selected to be the next PM (after he had been given time to root out all the “undesirables” within Labour).
So this is where we are now, however, Labour still retains some links to the left, which cannot be removed or trusted. So, as you have pointed out many times now, Labour will be a disaster in power, paving the way for a new Conservative party before the next election. Conservatives have brand identity, a new party would not.
You may consider this too far fetched, cynical or conspiratorial , but I think there is evidence to show that this is not unrealistic.
Regards
I really do not think these theories stack
I do not believe that such powers exist
Of course there is the media
And there are big donations
But the claim that there is some ‘ruling class’? No way
There is MI5 though….
It’s extremely hard to find any evidence that the majority of the electorate are capable of doing any serious analytical thinking as opposed to uncritically accepting the ideological scam beliefs pushed at them by the rich. The obvious big scam believed is “The country’s run out of money!”
What I hope comes out of this whole horrible mess is that we end up with a proper left party, perhaps in the long run it will have been a good process to go through, after Corbyn it was clear the left was never going to be able to ‘capture’ the Labour Party. Labour will take votes from some former Conservatives but I think they will get much more former Conservative support after the election as Starmer moves inevitably to fill the Tory gap.
To end, a small anecdote. My dad has been a member of The Conservatives since he was a teenager, he has delivered leaflets and letters for them for as long as I can remember, and still does, he’s 82. But I know for certain he will be voting for Reform. If the Tories have managed to lose my dad… well. It might well be the case that he’s switched to Reform partly because he will never see a Tory government again in his lifetime and would prefer to support a team that’s at least in the game for now. He’s also most definitely racist and quite possibly fascist but I would rather not think about that; it’s too late for him to change.
Interesting point made by Paul Krugman in an otherwise meandering article:-
“Compare the NHS with single-payer systems – including Medicare, which serves older Americans – in which the government pays the bills but does not employ the doctors or operate the hospitals. An attempt to save money by underfunding Medicare would provoke an immediate public outcry – in fact, false rumours of such a move created an outcry in 2010. But a government can underfund the NHS for years before the consequences become obvious to voters, and by that time the crisis can be very hard to fix.”
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ng-interactive/2024/jun/28/how-the-unforced-error-of-tory-austerity-wrecked-britain
Does the UK market really prefer low taxes to profits from government spending?
Perhaps the intent is the nation-state be replaced by a number of city-states or more accurately SEZ states. This would explain the demonstrable lack of interest shown by the major parties in replacing national infrastructure.
I dounbt that – those are sops, but they need overall centeral control, not least of the currency
Tories will fail next week becuase they adhered to & implemented neo-liberalism. LINO (1997 and now) also swallowed this nonsense & will as Richard observes be destroyed by it, because neo-liberalism is based on a utopian/markets-lead fantasy that can never be implemented.
As my economist friend noted – SovU was pretty successful upto the start of the 1960s. If it had moved a slab of industry over to a market basis it could have possibly kept on going. It didn’t & thus didn’t (because it was addicted to another utopian fantasy).
The nationalisation of key infra (gas elec, trains, water etc) was the point when the neo-libs went off the rails in the UK & were doomed. LINO, unless it reverses all this is also doomed.
Many of the comments use the word “left”. Taking national infra into gov’ ownership is not “left-wing” – it has zero to do with left or right & all to do with the impossibility for govs to regulate very complex systems – unless they own them (or de minimis – the control systems). Neither is what is being proposed “technocratic” – it is a simple recognition of reality.
& for those that think govs can’t do things – if you are reading this on a mobile phone – then the system (air interface etc) you are using was designed by………..a government committee called GSM – (in collaboration with industry). I mention this as one example, there are plenty of others. In the neo-libtard world this could never happen.
Are voters swallowing the lies? My wife works at an ‘outstanding’ primary school in an admin position. in the staffroom this week she had a massive go at teachers – yes, people with degrees – when they were all agreeing that the NHS was rubbish and we needed to pay etc. She listed cuts to NHS, police, fire, schools etc and pointed out that those who voted Tory in the elections 2010 onwards had voted for those cuts. Cue silence caused by uppity admin person.
She said their level of ignorance was stunning, they were educated people (she has only an IT cert) who had swallowed all the lies etc.
It takes guts to stand up and say that
Good for her
I suspect that the party’s over for the UK too. In answer to a question on BBC Radio4’s Any Questions on why Brexit appears to be a topic which Tories and Labour will not discuss in the run-up to the forthcoming election, SNP MP Tommy Sheppard drew attention to the disproportionate damage to the economies of the devolved nations. He then pointed out that the UK Gov had negotiated a solution with the EU which enables N Ireland (which voted 56% Remain in 2016) to trade freely with the EU while remaining in the UK. Why then can such a deal not be negotiated for Scotland (62% of us voted Remain, as did 52% of N Ireland), or indeed Wales although they voted 52% to Leave if it’s in the interests of the Welsh people?
As ever the San Andreas fault of UK politics runs along the boundaries of N Ireland. The DUP has lost its credibility in/control of Stormont and the NI economy and electorate enjoy the benefits. Inevitably it moves gradually closer to reunification of Ireland. In the other devolved nations there is now widespread disillusionment with Westminster, its failed democracy and its stifling control of our economies. If Ireland reunites, it’s only a matter of time till Scotland leaves and the attempts to stifle independence through Supreme Court and direct UKGov interference in legitimate Scottish legislation can only move the Scottish Overton Window further towards independence. How many times can the terms of the Treaties of Union, the Claim of Rights, Lord Cooper’s famous 1953 dictum in the Court of Session, with the concurrence of his fellow judges, “that the unlimited sovereignty of Parliament is a distinctively English principle which has no counterpart in Scottish constitutional law” and more recently the devolution settlement be broken and yet Starmer, an as yet unelected UK PM, can state that he will not grant Scotland the right to vote on its own future? He’s a lawyer, so why does he even think it’s necessary for the PM of England to grant such permission?
One final thought: If/when the UK breaks up it will almost inevitably mean the end of the monarchy.
There is one key difference: the Tories have failed over the last 14 years by doing largely what the membership wanted, whereas if Labour fails over the next five years it will be by doing the opposite of what its members want.
The members want heavy green investment, increased NHS spending, nationalised water/energy/rail/mail, a reduction in inequality and poverty, to move the balance away from wealth/capital and back to the population, to rejoin the EU, and proportional representation, and they see Palestinian lives as having equal value to all other lives.
This means there is a lot more potential for recovery for Labour than the Tories, once the party reasserts itself after having been captured and forced to move in a direction against its wishes. I still see a lot of good in Labour and I still have hope that it is not a lost cause.