The 1992-1997 Parliamentary term was the peak of rigmarole politics in Britain. The right-wing press made a sport out of causing misery for John Major and his government, making full use of the more macabre tabloid tactics like bin-searching and bribing prostitutes for stories to batter him with for being insufficiently right-wing, especially on the issue of Europe.
As the election drew closer in 1997, and it was clear that Tony Blair was going to win, those on the right of British politics decided they would take the opportunity to permanently change British politics by altering the makeup of Parliament.
James Goldsmith, a wealthy financier, spent £30 million on creating a vehicle called the ‘Referendum Party’ which specifically targeted MPs who were against holding a referendum on the European Union. This, in effect, led to a huge slew of pro-European Tory MPs losing their seats, fundamentally altering the nature of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, paving the way for Brexit.
It also led, in part, to Tony Blair receiving an enormous majority with which he could radically transform the country over the coming thirteen years, partly through mass immigration but also through constitutional mutilation. If you could go back in time, would you have preferred a less comprehensive Blairite revolution, or would you press ahead for Brexit victory? My instinct, partly because of how much personal pleasure I took in voting Out at the time, would be to pursue the course of action that was taken. But I can see the case for continuity.
I consider this dilemma when I see Corbynites revel in the destruction of Keir Starmer. It is natural and healthy to them enjoy the death of McSweeneyism, a project which trades in deceit. I do have a small amount of sympathy for the likes of Matt Zarb-Cousin and Aaron Bastani who experienced the financial crisis, witnessed how it was being rectified by attacking the living standards of young people, and attempted to organise a workable political vehicle for addressing it.
These people would put me in jail given half the chance, and most of their ‘solutions’ to the problems faced by young people are garbled nonsense, e.g millions of immigrants to fill up the new council houses and doubling down on Sisyphean tasks like geographic economic rebalancing.
Nonetheless, we recognise that the Millenial Left was destroyed by an insane and hypocritical establishment which thought nothing of weaponising anti-semitism to install the feeble-minded Keir Starmer. So it is not with any moral judgement we appraise the likely fact that elements of the Left are now using this opportunity to destabilise the Starmer regime through leaks.
I was ready to write this off as another Dan Hodges hallucination, until I read the below:
The taste of revenge must be sweet. Yet I do wonder whether or not leftists who are egging on the destruction of the Labour Party when Reform are already 30%+ are making a major strategic error. That logically, they will have to eventually unite with the centrists they despise in order to prevent a Reform government from carrying out mass deportations, tearing up human rights legislation and putting an end to the Net Zero madness.
The risk for the Left is that they seriously underestimate how much change a Reform government with a large majority and a sovereign Parliament could enact within a single term, because they believe Farage is a Duffer or that that none of their policies could ever work; that the same pattern of the 2019-24 Conservative Government will repeat itself – nasty rhetoric whilst the borders are flung open. Farage may very well go the way of Liz Truss and be out of Government in a month, we have no way of knowing that now.
But there is an alternative possible scenario, one where he successfully deports millions of illegal immigrants, destroys climate change targets, withdraws Britain from multivarious international conventions and builds massive prison camps to detain mentally ill violent people.
The consequences of this are going to be an immediate, noticeable improvement to the quality of life for most people who live in British cities. They will feel their urban environment become safer and they will see it get cleaner. Children will be able to get the bus in places like Dover and Bournemouth without being hassled by migrant men. Predatory landlords will no longer be converting houses on their streets to be turned into HMOs for criminals and drug addicts.
You can write this all of as narrow-minded middle-class bigotry if you so wish, and remind people that you live in Peckham and do not mind homeless panhandlers. But you are in a very small minority of opinion. There are enough prejudiced people in this country who will, from a leftist perspective, take pleasure from seeing the less fortunate punished by an authoritarian government. Do you really want them to get a taste for other people’s misery?
If I was a leftist, and thinking strategically, I would recognise that giving a radical right government five years to implement these changes is a death sentence. I would, summoning the spirit of Peter Hitchens and his impassioned case for the Conservative Party in 2024, make the case for tactically voting for Labour to maintain the Status Quo.
The alternative to this, supporting ‘the Greens’ or ‘Your Party’ in the hope that they are able to supplant the Labour Party in the next four years is not a serious option. Nobody on the Left believes that Polanski or Corbyn are capable of winning a plurality of seats in the next election, they are instead hoping that it will pave the way for 2034, mirroring the sacrifice made by the Tory Right in 1997 leading to 2016. But by then, there will not be a socialist dystopia left to save.