Oedipus Lex

I think it is pretty much agreed by every­one, with the pos­sible excep­tion of Gor­don Brown, that Labour are going to be trounced at the next elec­tion. I have an image in my head of a sort of last-days-of-the-Reich scen­ario with Brown sit­ting in his bunker while min­is­ters run in with reports of Tory tanks enter­ing Lon­don, but I digress. The ques­tion that has been plaguing me for a while now is this: What now for your left wing voter?

Con­ven­tional wis­dom and an inter­view with Nick Clegg in today’s Inde­pend­ent sug­gests that many will be driven into the arms of the Lib­eral Demo­crats. Some to the Greens. This is prob­ably a fairly safe assump­tion for the com­ing European/Local elec­tions and may be true for the next gen­eral elec­tion, when it even­tu­ally comes. But then what? There will be count­less voters who have voted noth­ing but Labour for gen­er­a­tions with a real dilemma on their hands

In many ways I think Brown should call an elec­tion as soon as pos­sible. He won’t of course but I think it would be bene­fi­cial to the Labour party as a whole. Get the pain over with quickly without fool­ing yourselves there is any way you can win and re-group. Com­par­is­ons can be drawn between the Labour Party and New­castle United; use the time in the lower divi­sion to get rid of an iffy leader and get a load of over-paid tal­ent­less whelps off your books. Sadly I think many voters are scarred so badly by the New Labour exper­i­ence that the party is destined to years in the wilderness. They should, how­ever, use this time wisely. Re-engage with the core, grass root sup­port. Remem­ber its proud his­tory and re-take the moral high ground. The UK is now one of the only demo­cra­cies to have no party of the work­ing man (the US is of course debat­able) and Nouveau-Labour should rec­tify this, immediately