Belated reflections on Glasgow East...

In one of life's amusing quirks, the Glasgow East debacle has occurred on the very day I have travelled down to Swindon to attend a... job trial of sorts.

Tomorrow, I shall be reporting to South Swindon CLP HQ ahead of an interview I am attending next week to compete for two Organiser's positions within the constituency.

We shall be door knocking to register voter IDs in the morning, then attending the Swindon Mela in the afternoon to give an aspect to all the Organiser candidates of the sort of work they(we?)'ll be getting up to once in situ.

I am certainly not a masochist, but in a perverse way I hope that we will be told in no uncertain terms why people will probably not be voting Labour at the next election. Such greetings will certainly inform the presentation I have to give next Wednesday as to what strategies should be used to organise supporters in South Swindon ahead of the next election. Wish me luck!!!

I shall, of course, also consider the ramifications of Glasgow East.

The bare bones of the result are this: a 22.54% swing to the Scottish Nationalists; the fourth-safest Labour seat lost; a higher than expected turnout of 42%.

Buff 'Geoff' Hoon, on Channel 4 News, was quick to point to the Glasgow East electorate giving Labour another 'kicking' after Crewe and Nantwich. I am inclined to think, however, that there was more to it than that.

Beyond all the chutney about independence, the SNP have astutely hijacked and, more importantly, via their control of Holyrood, implemented what should be traditional Labour policies - free NHS prescriptions, free tertiary education, an end to privatisation of public services, and so on.

It is these sort of policies that resonate with the people of the 'Red Clyde'; the sort of policies that Labour heartlands understand and welcome because they put people first - not by providing false 'choices' off of a limited menu of profit-making 'vendors', but by ensuring universality of access to those who need it.

The sort of policies espoused by 'New' Labour, however, are anathema to the sort of traditional Labour supporter found in the likes of Glasgow East. The policies that Tony Woodley, writing in today's Grauniad, describes as,

The Blairite "all things to all people, but more things to rich people" approach [that] could get by when the world economy was booming.

When it has come, if you will pardon the phrasing, to the crunch, New Labour is the neo-vested Emperor; a would-be laughing stock if the consequences of its total abandonment of tradition and principles on the altar of electoral success did not have such dire consequences to the Party itself and to wider society, here and abroad.

As Jeremy Seabrook so eloquently puts it in another article from the Guardian website;

Labour has connived at its own extinction, its own irrelevance. It is not that inequality or poverty have been abolished in the world. But having been absorbed into a globalisation to which all alternatives have been declared superfluous, Labour is no longer in a position to separate itself from the stifling embrace in which it has been a willing partner. It cannot now criticise a system, the supremacy of which it has acknowledged. The impotent hand-wringing is a symptom of a lost capacity to change the world. "We must listen to the people," they cry weakly. "We must understand their pain."

Gordon Brown hopes to project himself as the most plausible manager of the crisis, pitting his wisdom, experience and expertise against the callow and untested David Cameron, much as John Major eclipsed the pretender Neil Kinnock in 1992. This will not work. If Labour depended for its last gasp on the folk-memory of its defence of the working poor, the victims of capitalism, the excluded and humiliated, the Conservatives have a longer and more substantial legacy, namely their knowledge of how the world really works, and a long familiarity with manipulating the system of which they are the natural proprietors.

In the rich western societies, the only political struggle now is between liberals and conservatives. We are witnessing the final act of a claim that the vast apparatus of capital was going to be challenged by the people it had called into its service, who would apply the fruits of their labour to more humane ends than the market economy would ever achieve.

It is a time of ruin and ashes for the poor; since with most people in Britain now part of a global middle class, they can depend only upon the charity of the majority not to permit their exclusion to be exacerbated by market forces, those plausible usurpers of the forces of nature. Future political debate will focus upon how far the disadvantaged minority be left to their own devices or tended by the solicitude of the better off. In this context, Labour is now only a spectre at the momentarily diminished feast.

Of course, in a world threatened by war over declining resources – water, land, oil, of decreasing biodiversity, global warming, and in which large sections of the economy are taken over by warlords, druglords, slumlords and other unofficial aristocracies of power, political debate has not come to an end. But the persistence of Labour at this important time is an obstruction and an irrelevance; they have become the forces of conservatism to which Tony Blair used to express his hostility; and the sooner they are swallowed up by the history from which they briefly sprang, the better.

The Union big-wigs and other representatives at Warwick 2 this weekend should use Glasgow East as a ram-rod to push through proper 'Old Labour' policies - certainly, the prospect of this concerns Peter Riddell in today's Times.

The left of the party has suffered 16 years of policy imposition by the likes of Blair, Milburn and Hutton, who all should be taken to court and charged under the Trades Decription Act.

The time for the grassroots to claim a measure of control over the Party is here; all we need on the left is the will to grasp it.