Analysis - What Is Wrong with Prime Minister May?

I suspect we all now understand that May is neither particularly a Remainer or a Brexiter. She is an administrator, one whose allegiance is to the State machine and whose recent political training has entirely been within the formal structures of the security apparat as Home Secretary. I write 'within' because it is an eternal truth of British politics that elected representatives are almost invariably captured by the State they are elected to oversee. Sometimes a politician can rise above the machinations of Sir Humphrey. Theresa May is not one of those politicians. 

As a former Home Secretary and now Prime Minister, being 'captured by the security state' is where she is most comfortable. This limited horizon is why she has handed over the economy to a weak Chancellor who is beholden to the City. She cowers whenever Gove, Davis and Johnson show some serious political spine (quite rare but perhaps effective, at the least, in keeping the Brexit show on the road). Even as Tory Party Chair, her instinct was to centralise at the expense of constituencies. Centralising power in a command-and-control system is where her instinct lies and yet this is precisely the approach, suitable for the twentieth century militarised welfare-warfare state, that is no longer possible in the age of the internet.

She certainly lacks the common touch, presents herself as a decent and well-meaning school mistress (that is, indeed, an administrator) and now presides over a situation where an Opposition Party that clearly opposes the will of the majority of the English on Brexit and is led by a man who was a political pariah within the PLP until only a few years ago is riding high on 45% of the national vote while her Party languishes, seen as incompetent and confused.

The problem with administrators is that they lack imagination. It is good that administrators lack imagination. They are there to execute the orders of those who have an imagination. But politicians are generally not good at solving national crises without an imagination. An excess of imagination, of course, gives us loons and tyrants but a complete absence of imagination gives us ... our current Prime Minister. 

And why is imagination so vital at this time in our history? Because the tectonic plates of international economic and political relations are shifting. She now represents an administrative class that has one of its feet so firmly stuck in the deep mud of the past that it cannot get close to planting the other on the dry land of the future. The problem arises because our security apparat, our state machine, is driven by four perceptual models that no longer entirely hold water: 

• a primitive geopolitical fear of Russia and a desire to contain Germany which has been institutionalised from the Imperial era and the last century respectively (the first is paranoid although the second still relevant)
• the realisation that it does not have the tools and can never have the tools to do more than contain violent political fanaticism yet must never admit this to the general public - basically, it is bluffing its way to offering us security as citizens; 
• the fear of the crumbling of the Union, either by Celts pushing their luck (as we see in the nonsense of a nation of just over 4m people trying to dictate terms to one fifteen times its size)) or the English wondering why they are spending so much of their hard-earned cash on stopping the Celts pushing their luck (the English being, here, like sheep led to the budgetary slaughter); and 
• a cynical, manipulative view of Washington where a lumbering giant is supposed to be lead by the nose into serving British interests through a combination of charm and prostitution (i.e. the gleanings of our expensive and barely controllable intelligence apparat).  

These perceptual models, embedded in the group think of our ruling caste, were neatly resolved by the European tyranny since that caste has never really cared about democracy at core (its rhetorical allegiance to the idea hides a deep fear of its reality). They care only about the Crown and preferment. The Crown is a weird ideological concept that means not our Dynasty or Harry and Meghan but the precise functioning of the State: the Crown is the fig-leaf that hides the workings of an unaccountable machine that purports to know what it is doing but clearly does not. The strategy of the Crown towards the European Project has seemed simple enough:  

• the EU was to be manipulated to contain Germany (yeah, right!) and to underpin the push-back of Russia;
• intelligence co-operation and Euro-ideology were supposed to help contain fanaticism even if Islamism was not understood to be truly different from the native subversive threats of communism and fascism; 
• the Celts were to be neatly contained within a Crown sphere of influence within the EU (violence in Northern Ireland wags the tail of the British dog no less than memories of Vietnam wag the American foreign policy tail); 
• access to Europe would increase the Crown's muscle power in Washington. 

Unfortunately, the viability of this total perceptual model has crumbled since the crash of 2008 with which our administrative State has still not come to terms. Its economic 'perceptual models' have also failed consistently to provide either recovery or fairness. This has nothing to do with Brexit - indeed, Brexit is just a reflection of this crumbling, a process that most of the political and media class has still not understood. Most of us may now agree that the analysis provided daily by the second rate minds haunting the corridors of the BBC is laughable. Many of our most prominent commentators provide little more than prejudiced rants with no serious understanding of the political vulcanism of our times. Now, I listen to Spotify in preference to BBC News.

Let us take the first issue - the geo-strategic politics of Europe. Germany has been far from contained by the European Union as we saw in its treatment of Greece. British geld has simply strengthened an institution that is the tool of Berlin, backed by a France that has never ceased to loathe us, certainly since we sank its fleet and chased it out of Syria in the last major war. As for Russia, despite the sustained hysteria of the last Tory country gentlemen left in the FCO and the 'Service', it is not realistically a threat any more to anything West of the Pripyat Marshes. It is simply and defensively struggling to maintain its own ramshackle underpopulated empire, turning back a Western neo-Cold War operation that does not hide its ambition to get ultimately to the very gates of Moscow itself through subversion. 

Someone needs to tell the Cold Warriors that India can now defend itself and British interests do not extend to being dragged into a global conflagration to defend countries on the other side of the Continent. If anything, Russia might now be seen as a point of containment of a rising Franco-German European Union, preferably in association with Washington. NATO (a genuinely defensive operation in its original intention but now the militarised wing of global liberalism) is now threatened by the creation of a European Army in a culture that is not really very afraid of the tyranny of peacetime conscription. We, the people, are constantly being drawn into confrontation with Russia by neo-Cold War 'hawks' at a time when the public wants Islamism, not neo-nationalist post-communism, dealt with as the primary threat.   

As to the second issue (violent extremism), we do not have to belabour the point that its emergence derives from the sustained blundering of our political class over a century or so. We know that much just as we know that the 2008 Crash was the creation of economic blundering over a much shorter period. But that was then and this is now. The question is what to do about it? Is there the imagination to understand causes, remedies and consequences? 

Open borders were at the very centre of the terror problem as far as the public were concerned and there is a wisdom of crowds in this. Germany accentuated the difficulties with a primitive liberal ideological response to what was, in fact, always going to end up an exploitation of weakness by organised crime. It is organised crime that has created the gaps in the system which allow the violent extremist a sea in which to swim. The British State, always under pressure from unhelpful French models of preferring brutality towards dissent over engagement with dissenters, was split between those who saw that borders were part of the process of dealing with the security problem (even if the borders had to be Libya and Turkey) and those who thought security co-operation was more important than borders. 

Perhaps our Prime Minister is instinctively in the latter camp. The balance certainly tipped towards security co-operation when Merkel sold the pass in an excess of ideological insanity to deal with a humanitarian crisis in precisely the wrong way. It would have been much better to have invested in working with Assad to bring a fair peace and in the camps themselves. Migrant pressure, helped by trafficking operations, spread outwards, accentuating an already problematic 'schwerpunkt' in Calais. The truth is illegals with cash have always found a way in, straining our urban infrastructures but knowing that eventually they would be in a state of de facto amnesty, creating a constituency for political opportunists in the urban centres. 

The security apparat pretty well knows where the centres of potential terrorism are in our cities as far as they come from our old imperial connections - what they do not know necessarily is who these new people are. The problem may not be terrorism at all. Most of them contain the seeds of criminal gangs of far more psychopathic brutality than any we have seen to date, perhaps quite capable of undertaking 'terrorist acts' to force a weak state on the defensive and cut a deal. The French terror cases and the history of Al-Qaeda have shown the overlap already between petty criminality and terror acts. 

Ask any native of South East London about the war between the Albanian and Turkish gangs and how they 'came to a deal' and you get a picture of something going on that is clearly being defensively covered up by a mainstream media whose investigative skills now operate at the level of Mickey Mouse. Hours of coverage with the weaselly phrase  'despite Brexit' and virtually none about what is going on in the inner cities - Rotherham and Grenfell Tower are mere tips of icebergs of social dissolution.

And, third, we have the bubble of Celtic posturing. This has been burst (though you would not know it from the flaccidity and weakness of the Government towards the Celts) by a) the Scottish Referendum, b) the rise of a new conservatism in Wales and c) the evident hysteria coming out of an Ireland that has no serious leverage on the UK other than vague threats of a revival of terror when the conditions for terrorism no longer actually exist (except as tactics by criminal gangs). 

On the other hand (though its impetus is studiously held in contempt by our urban liberal administrators and the Opposition who depend on their votes) Brexit has shown the reality of a simmering English country resentment about enforced cultural change and the emergence of a growing new and allegedly 'fascist' threat from the indigenes outside London. In fact, there are fascist elements but the 'threat' is populist and only to the dominant failed ideology. The EU has now become part of a more general cultural problem in which a minority of Celts act with multicultural London, the public sector middle classes and the universities as a standing insult to the aspirations of 'sheep' (classed as 'deplorables' to use the term of Hillary Clinton about the American working class) that are growing the first signs of fangs.

Fourth, there is our American ally which has been turned over (possibly temporarily) by a form of maniacal populism that reflects the revolts amongst the English and many regionalised (Catalonia/Lombardy) and post-communist European middling States (Hungary/Poland/now Austria) where the cultural threat from Islam and the failures of elite liberalism's cultural hegemony are seen as far more important than any putative threat from the old dark native ideologies. Even in major states, populist movements are only manouevred out of formal power by the liberal establishment's control of the commanding heights of narrative and by political sleight of hand, placing a radical centrist cypher in charge of France while still trying to create a coalition of the Centre in Germany. 

Populism may be denied the oxygen of publicity within the elite but it has not been defeated. Populists are, in fact, proving surprisingly resilient against huge cultural onslaughts that seem to do no more than define camps rather than actually push back the tide. Only in the UK has a conservative establishment partially absorbed populism or at least appeared to do so until this week as the potential for a betrayal of Brexit begins to hit home amongst the English. It has only accommodated populism a) because it has had to absorb the vote of 17.4m people, again mostly English, who decided they wanted Brexit and b) it faces a populist socialist threat which does not exist anywhere else.  So, Washington is no longer bulwark of a shared liberal internationalist order but is a tiger to be ridden alongside the domestic wolf of an increasingly bitter and angry native populism. 

May's Government is now sailing very close to the wind in acceding to the rhetoric of its opposition while its deeper substance remains committed to the new order. I am not a Tory but Tory activists are telling me that they are enraged by the way their Leader is conceding ground to the past and not taking the lead in developing a national strategy for the future.
  
The national problem is that we have a weak Government still over-influenced by a security apparat with one foot in the past. This Government is trying to represent new forces but within a national narrative structure that is also embedded in the past and where its defenders (the 'conservatives of the centre') are now getting vicious in defence of a collapsing order. We have a Prime Minister who is part of that failed state apparat and is increasingly at sea and unpopular. The Opposition now scents blood in the water but it can't find a way to oust her under current political conditions ... and so it is becoming increasingly shrill, threatening to alienate the very new forces it needs to ride to power itself. 

The best solution would be a stronger 'new forces' Prime Minister from the Right to see us through the Brexit negotiations and a transformative and intellectually coherent Left to exploit the opportunities yet the dead weight of the old guard in both parties forestalls such outcomes. The country certainly can't cope with much more instability and viciousness. 

So there we are - a second rate Prime Minister trying to cope with new social forces, an opportunistic and hysterical Opposition that does not know what it wants other than power and a changed global condition in which the entity with which we are contesting, the European Union, is beginning to fall apart at the seams for reasons that actually have little to do with Brexit but which Brexit is hastening. She really has to go ... but only if the Tory Right can deliver someone with imagination to deliver national sovereignty, some serious economic growth and greater fairness.

Some Friendly Advice to Hysterical 'Liberals'

What is really fascinating about the last day or so has been the lesson that 'liberals', both London-based and American, appear not to like democracy very much, especially when it comes up with a decision of which they do not approve.

The current Remain response is to try to overturn a democratic decision by fair means or foul - by a replay ('best of three' or keep going until they win?) based on claims of lies from people who lied, by Parliamentary coup d'etat or by Lords blocking. What next? Calls for the Army to step in or for the Bundeswehr to be 'invited in' to liberate us.

60% of Scotland does not want to be part of the United Kingdom anyway and the Northern Irish nationalists, well, we know what they want, so the democratic vote in England and Wales was not 52% but much more than that.

It was a decision made not by racist Morlocks looking to munch on the effete Eloi in the universities but autonomous working class and middle class individuals, debating the issues, ignoring fear and slander, and coming to a view on what was in their and their country's best interest.

I really do wonder at the mind-set of these people. The European Project is truly proven here to be more important than national democracy. Or is this propaganda just coming from people nicely immersed in the gravy train and terrified of the plundering coming to an end. They really do seem to want a manipulative dictatorship of the intelligentsia. They really are anti-democrats.

Our side's reaction has (up to this point) been emolliative and magnanimous in victory. We have remained relatively silent. We have urged not only calm but unity in the national interest. We are seeking a negotiated withdrawal that is amicable and retains as much of 'European values' as possible. We have only asked that the final say on policy be ours because we have a democratic mandate.

And what do we get in return? Hysteria. Aggression. Slander. Attempts to mount a coup (not just in the nation but in the Labour Party). I have seen what amounts to a racist (or rather classist) cartoon apparently labelling 17m or so people as skinheads in, of all places, an Israeli newspaper - you would think they would know better, wouldn't you?

What should our reaction be? How long should we put up with this before ending our current demobilisation and pulling our troops off the reserve list to undertake a second campaign in which lessons will have been learned and no quarter can be given.

You see, our attitude to a war of aggression on us is to say - bring it on but only if you must! We don't want it but if you insist on it, we will respond. A majority of the English and Welsh people are neither racists nor fools.

They will be angered at the patronising attitudes of urban intellectuals who have been lining their pockets at their expense for far too long. I mean, how many cultural studies experts exactly do we need to export goods and services? They will be even more angered by a metropolitan political class that has failed and now purports to tell them how to think.

We who fight alongside them act as a restraint. We want peace, harmony, the opportunity to build a better and fairer and more prosperous Britain in collaboration with all the reasonable elements in the political class. But if you declare war on the people, you declare war on us, their intellectual allies.

A war of workers and intellectuals against a supine and weak, and failed, liberal political establishment can end in only one result - if not now, then in five years, ten years, twenty years - because we believe there is no value greater than national democratic sovereignty as a precondition of individual freedom and long term prosperity.

Please do not underestimate the sheer force, the cold determination, the rationality of our position - or that we will not harden over time.

So, a piece of advice. Lay off the patronising attitudes. Lay off the aggression. Work with us to build a pluralistic, tolerant, independent Britain that is fundamentally democratic and is ready to work with and not against the European nations to build a better world. But if you want to push us all into a cultural civil war, that will be your decision and not ours and you must take the consequences.

Why the British Labour Party is in a Tail Spin ...

A simple view of the problem of the Labour Party, expressed from both within its own Left and from middle class observers looking at it from outside, is that Labour has (in the words of one correspondent) "transformed from a party of the trade unions into a party of the metropolitan, largely London-based opinion-shaping set and new clerisy." In this model, the party that was born to represent working people’s interests "is now little more than a kind of political safe haven for a new elite that [is] cut off both from traditional politics and the masses." Labour politicians, largely raised in tight networks of middle class public service, activism, professional public affairs, NGO and charity work, see themselves "as providers of public benevolence, operating from a metropolitan milieu, well away from any of the problem areas to which they minister."

I believe that, while there is some truth in this, it is not the whole truth by any means - the symptom is being mistaken for the disease. It is all little more complicated ... after all, some areas increased or solidified their Labour vote: Wales, The North East and so on. The Labour vote actually went up more than the Conservatives (by 1.5%) yet they were down 26 seats. Core Labour areas seemed to become more Labour (excepting Scotland), especially if one takes into account the fact that UKIP was stripping out some working class Labour votes (which means they were being replaced by regional middle class votes). Losing one major sectional interest (Scotland) 'did for' Labour in Parliament but the hidden story is that the reason that this is a disaster is that Labour is little more now than a coalition of interest groups and, if the Labour representatives of the interest groups that make up that coalition can no longer command the constituencies they claim to speak for, Labour faces the problem that each time political reality breaks the back of one bit of the chain that holds it together, the Party drifts further and further away from office.

What you are seeing here is not merely a metropolitan matter but a strategic issue that embraces the whole nation ... because the core model for New Labour was never so centralised as it appeared. It always was a federation but New Labour turned it from a federation operating as a 'national socialist' force into one that was far more coalitional. Yes, national politics in terms of the State were increasingly centralised and the Party itself as organisation (hitherto the expression of Labour's 'national socialist' culture) effectively gutted as an independent force but power was now delegated to sub-elites within a range of linked 'satrapies'. In other words, New Labour did not adopt a command' model so much as an 'imperial model' in which local Rajas kept the faith and administered things on behalf of the centre in return for favours and being left alone within their area of concern. 

The model depended on de-socialising its interest groups, unravelling the belief in a single unified nation (multiculturalism being only the most obvious part of a much more widespread phenomenon) and then turning these groups into a coalition of interests which developed mutual dependency. We had a) small nations and regions, b) trades unions and c) identity groups. The idea was that these three combined under the leadership of a liberal intellectual class (which had always historically been treated not as superior but as agents of the Party) would always give a permanent majority against conservatism, defined as the dominant inchoate sentimental mass that the old elites ruled through rhetoric and lassitude. But this model is now falling apart. How? Why?
   
We have already mentioned that the core regional group - Scotland - has broken out of the programme for entirely local and historical reasons but one has to understand why this is so devastating to Labour. The Scots were central to the original Labour Project and they drove much of its radicalism right up until the formation of New Labour - represented by Brown and Cook. There is a line, believe it or not, from Jimmie Maxton and the 'Red Clydesiders' all the way through to Gordon himself. Brown and Cook represented different unionist and devolutionary models in the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s but, when it came, devolution (Brown's preferred strategy against independence) redirected the attention of Scots back on to Scotland itself, Scottish problems no longer demanded a unionist and London-centred perspective. The Imperial model no longer applied. The Scottish Labour elite found itself detached from Scotland even while it held high office in London, looking increasingly like a bunch who would go off to the Imperial Capital to rule the world and simply throw Scotland into the pot without considering its needs.

To counter this, Wales, the North East, South Yorkshire and the North West retained an interest in the Union as a means of getting advantages for their various Labour-dominated largely urban and densely populated local authorities so it was logical to continue to vote Labour. Remnants of British industrialisation, these areas are only viable economically so long as they are sucking the South as dry as they can of the additional revenues that come out of London as global trading city. These areas are now stuffed in terms of direct access to the centres of power for half a decade, although Tory One Nation thinking will try to sustain some balance here, seeking to reward those areas that realise that localities cannot just gamble every five years on a Labour victory for their sustenance and so pull at least their business classes into some sort of accomodation with Conservatism. 

Crossrail, even with its risks to votes in the Conservative corridors through which it passes, is very much part of that strategy of engagement. Patronage is now fully in the hands of the centre-right ... and it will be used to chip away at Labour hegemonies. The effect on segments of the white working class will not mean that they will hold tighter to their Labour mother for fear of something worse but that they may, as in Scotland, look for new patrons - and this is where UKIP, if it can mature, comes in. UKIP ousted the Tories as second party in much of the urban North East and was clearly picking up Labour votes just as Labour was picking up Liberal votes.You can expect the Labour side to try to revive 'regionalism' as a solution ... Prescott's original vision ... but the people just do not care enough, it all looks too self interested now (like any sudden interest in electoral reform) and the Tories could trump it easily enough with a bit County, City and Parish decentralisation.

There is a certain historical dead weight that will ensure certain areas will remain Labour strongholds all things being equal for a very long time, bases from which perhaps an opportunistic neo-Blairite strategy might expand again, but, with the loss of Scotland, the Party cannot afford to lose another fortress. As much energy will be spent on holding these territories in the two years leading up to a European Referendum, when the metropolitan love of Euro-socialism may not chime with the Party's roots as the arguments develop, as in building the policies for a recovery of credibility in Middle England.

The second element of the Coalition, the trades unions, also expected highly focused goodies (full employment and worker's rights, often vectored through the EU) from its support for Labour as a political movement. In return, in 1996 and then again in the middle of the Blair regime as the Warwick Agreement of 2004/5, the trades unions gave up on their historic association with 'socialism' (already attenuated compared to the Marxist versions elsewhere) to concentrate on a restricted range of policy imperatives, only a few of which were about interests outside their own. The deal with the devil was that the Labour Movement would get all it wanted as a special interest but not worry its pretty little head about the context - the broader cultural, economic, freedom, national security and even social justice (insofar as this meant transforming society rather than amelioration of targeted abuses) aspects of the case. 

The special interest that once meant all workers now increasingly meant only workers employed by the State. This drew it inevitably towards the Brownian model of a moderated capitalist economy from which a surplus was to be extracted - to serve not the people but the State and the special interests that served the State under cover of 'improved public services'. In the recent period, this has meant that the two heirs (Milliband and Balls) to a decent social justice-driven Scottish ideologue found themselves offering little more than to sweat the private sector a little to benefit only (in the eyes of the very many working people who are in the private sector) the public sector and regional and state sub-elites. Irritation at Scots and other regional claims to more money for their support of a Labour Government during the campaigning of the weeks before the vote on May 7th may be read as code for irritation about all such diversion of funds from 'hard working families' in the South, still struggling to return to prosperity levels of pre-2008, to a range of special interests who were only more needy in their own eyes.

On top of this two-layered sponge of interest-group regionalism and trades unionism, both neutered by their lack of interest in anything other than their own sectional interests, was overlaid a mish-mash of London-based rainbow identity politics managed by a professional political class seeking, in a consciously Gramscian model, to control the culture in order to control the politics of society. There  was a history to this - a transformation of the student revisionist Marxism of the 1970s into a sort of radical centrism that merged with the rise of middle class activists representing neglected identities, part neurosis, part performance art and part genuine grievance packaged as a shrill set of demands for victims who clearly did not include their own representatives. It was an ideology that presumed to speak for others and denied agency - it also intruded into private life and private custom.

The horror of the Rotherham child abuse case exposed the falsity of the pose although this would scarcely have had an effect on the national election. It did not occur to many enthusiastic Left-liberals that a twentieth century Italian Marxist model might be intellectually creative but could not represent political reality in a highly developed country of largely prosperous and free but anxious households. Nor that the triangulations of American liberals trained within the tradition of Saul Alinsky spoke to very different social conditions and histories. The sponge cake has every sort of pretty bon bon on it now but each was merely that - a bon bon with no serious base in the country even if it made a very good fist at asserting cultural hegemony while it held the reins of State.

So, for example, the metropolitan feminist element could lay claim to the pages of the Guardian but alienated many women in the country as much as it mobilised others. It also irritated many men otherwise tending to tolerance and liberalism. Cameron, instead of trying to placate this activist class with positive discrimination in favour of second rate ideologues as Labour did, began to promote fewer but infinitely more able women into office - Theresa May and Justine Greening are simply more impressive than Yvette Cooper and who? (we can't even remember their names!). Who Labour should have remembered were Barbara Castle and even latterly Margaret Beckett and nurtured similar strong fighters for economic equality within the trades union movement and broght them into public life. Instead, it emphasised cultural and social activism. 

Similarly, the LGBT element in society often felt patronised by their own activists. Many, actually quite socially conservative (it was always presumptuous to think that someone who liked other men or was black or was a woman or was a Muslim could be corraled into a coherent liberal-left 'line'), were pleased at Cameron's struggle against his own Right to push forward civil marriage. On the Left, strong and courageous individuals like Peter Tatchell noticeably preferred the Greens to Labour which may have been flaky but did tend to attract some of the more creative individuals in radical politics.

Perhaps the only vote captured for New Labour that 'worked' in the mass for it was the ethnic minority vote and then only selectively. Only now has Labour ousted Respect in Bradford but the suspicion (apparently admitted to friends of mine by Labour officials in a state of inebriation) amongst the white working class who worried about these things grew that migration was partly engineered to create this bloc. Whether conspiracy theory or not, the very rise of such minority groups and the compromises required in terms of a faith-based agenda to ensure their votes (often at the expense of their own more vulnerable members) eventually alienated many liberal-minded middle class people as much as they did the demonised white working class. 

What was striking about the Middle England vox pops after the election on Newsmight was that there were evidently traditional Labour voters uncomfortably moving to the Tories. The message was 'my Gran would be spinning in her grave' but it needed to be done. The Tories spoke to economic anxieties outside Labour's core areas and public sector but that would be matched by anxieties inside their core vote - it would be a numbers game. What may have tipped the balance was a mounting sense of cultural resentment which was far from illiberal - indeed, a deep resentment that the resentment was merely dismissed as illiberal is an explanation for some part of that swing. If certain votes moved to UKIP, that cultural discomfort moved other votes to the Conservatives as LIBERAL protectors of the homeland culture.

With the fortress areas under siege from within by cultural discomfort and from without by selective patronage, with the organised trades union movement lacking any strategy that does not require a liberal Labour Government to enact it and with the cultural model promoted by the 1970s Generation looking threadbare, Labour has some serious issues to address, issues that may not be sufficiently addressed by simply offering Blair-lite when Cameron is doing that so much better. 

More to the point, Labour may now be structurally 'stuffed' because it allowed itself - in its hunger for power in the late 1980s and early 1990s - to adopt a coalitional American style politics that works in a Presidential system and one where Congressman wear their party discipline lightly but which hollows out the organisation that forgets that the United Kingdom is still small in area, with a distinct and shared national culture that places 'shared values' and household interest ahead of, or alongside at worst, special group interest. The point about socialism (in its national form which is the old British form) is that it could genuinely trump individualism and create a dialectic between the nation and the personal expressed in two great parties of state offering different visions of the national interest. 

By removing socialism and replacing it with an eighteenth century concept of 'interest', Labour has undercut its only means of undermining conservatism and the ruling elite in the long term, even if it could carry it off well in the short term. New Labour was an unsustainable political model. We may be about to see the Strange Death of Labour as a coalition that may never get traction again for majority government, one that now stands in the way of radical national alternatives as dead weight, whose base is now either aging and tired or young and inexperienced and which has sentenced its own support base to second class status for a generation.There may be no solution other than the failure of its opponent.