If I was still a civil servant, I’d probably be quite unhappy today. It was announced yesterday that the members of my old trade union, the PCS, re-elected the hard left general secretary Mark Serwotka, as he fought off two other hard left candidates. The union’s website declared Serwotka’s victory was overwhelming, which seems odd given that over 80% of members didn’t even bother to vote and why should they given the lack of choice? As the PCS remained in the handcart to hell, another election took place, a far bigger one, this time involving the whole country. This brought about bad news for my old colleagues, too. There was plenty of choice in this election and the hard left didn’t do quite so well.
No one loves a smart ass, but anyway, here we go: told you so. I don’t remember the actual year I joined the Labour Party but it would have been around 1977. The party was in government at the time and my MP was Tony Benn. Prime minister Jim Callaghan was very much a centrist and tried to govern from the centre. By 1979, his government had been destroyed by a variety of issues, not least a series of major strikes that had brought the country to a standstill. Labour lost the election to the Conservatives led by Margaret Thatcher.
Thatcher marched the country to the right whilst Benn marched Labour to the left. Labour was a party at war and decided to put a hard left manifesto to the country, one described by Labour moderate Gerald Kaufman as the “longest suicide note in history”. Michael Foot was not an effective leader of the party, although he was on a different intellectual plain to today’s wretched Labour Party ‘leader’ Jeremy Corbyn. Labour was annihilated. The hard left, led by Benn, was hugely responsible for that defeat. The new leader, Neil Kinnock, sought to break the hard left and rebuild Labour. He improved Labour’s standing, but not enough, losing two more elections to Thatcher and her successor John Major.
I have rather dashed through the history of Labour in the 1980s and 1990s because actually the Tories were in office for 18 long years. In reading this essay, my loyal reader, think how old you will be in 18 years or think where you were 18 years ago. It’s a Very Long Time. Today feels more like 1983 than 1979, but a feeling is all that is.
It’s pointless looking too far ahead. It no longer matters that Boris Johnson is a liar, a fraud, a shyster and a huckster. The electorate decided that for all that, Johnson was a better bet than Corbyn. We can talk about the Labour Party succession, we can talk about how damaging the Tories will be for schools and hospitals, we can bemoan the hard Brexit that will now, inevitably, take us crashing out of Europe. We can talk about all these things and more but in the cold light of day we must look at where we are this morning.
Having expected a Tory victory of around 40 seats – I was wrong yet again: it looks like 76 at the moment – I am not surprised and I am only slightly shocked by the outcome of the election. I expect the destruction of the NHS, the continued underfunding of schools and, sadly for my former colleagues, the wholesale destruction, privatisation and break-up of the civil service but that, as they say, was the will of the people. We might not like the result of the 2019 general election but that’s democracy, or at least the version of democracy we enjoy.
