Waiting for the Tory spaceship to crash feels like waiting for the asteroid to hit.
Things in politics are rarely what they seem. The NHS came into being because the middle class could no longer afford to pay for private medical care. Comprehensive education replaced grammar schools because middle class parents could no longer afford the fees to send their children, who failed the 11 plus, to private schools to save them from having to attend the frightening secondary moderns. New Labour won a landslide victory in 1997 commensurate with the public’s abject dissatisfaction and abhorrence of the sleaze and corruption of Thatcher’s Tories and the ghost of Thatcher Tories under Major.
If the Tories lose the next general election (fingers crossed) it will be because of the legacy of Thatcher’s corruption, the incompetence of successive Tory leaders, and the public’s realisation that, despite the bilge in the press and from Labour’s own right wing ghosts, the current Labour leadership offer a truer lower case conservative politics than May’s (or whomever is leading at the time) Tories. The basic principles of the current Labour party are to put the working people of Britain and their families first, taking the country back from those who have thrown away the economic legacy of the generations since the 1940s. But the public aren’t meant to know that so, most likely, pragmatism will win the day.
Unless you accept that a majority of the British public are comfortable with the idea of a coalition government comprising the Tories and UKIP then, the next time Britain takes to the polls for a general election, voting Labour (in England at least) is going to be your only option, unless you’re in a seat like Richmond Park, which is never going to swing Labour’s way. The truth is that, to stop the disaster that a Tory/UKIP alliance would bring, Britain will most likely need a four-way alliance of Labour/LibDems/SNP/Plaid Cymru* (presuming that the next general election comes before the second Scottish Independence Referendum). Is it likely that voters will want to trust governing Britain to such an alliance?
Who knows.
Seriously, who knows? The ghosts of Labour past have done their damnedest to torpedo Labour’s electoral chances since 2007 (they’re still at). Even if you accepted that the current Labour leadership were not up to the job of forming a government, would anyone in their right mind have any more confidence in the troupe of clowns who have been working to destroy their, supposed, own party for close to a decade? At least with the current Labour leadership you have a Labour that is trying to restore Britain’s lower case conservative values.
British politics has been unraveling since the decline of Empire and needs to be fundamentally reformed. It is likely that we need a form of Proportional Representation (a change to the PR politics we have now, Propagandist Reality). I do not believe we have reached a low enough point yet for our politico-media circus to admit that they are entirely out of their depth and I do not think we have reached a low enough point yet for the rest of us put them out of our misery but I don’t know how low things can get before that happens. My suspicion is that a political asteroid will strike and make everything before it obsolete, mercifully taking the decision out of our hands.
*I should add a proviso that any progressive alliance should also include the Green Party as they have easily had some of the most progressive policies in recent times, even if they haven’t won the seats their policies deserved
