Steve_Bamlett_blog

The British electoral system has delivered another bizarre result, where a political party has secured only about a third of the national vote and holds the biggest majority in the UK Parliament of any party in recent ‘democratic’ history. In no sense has it a democratic mandate understood by people at large, yet it will stress that it must ‘rule’ as ‘changed Labour’, still fighting internal battles against left-appealing solutions, and instead appealing to the forces of the economic status quo for as long as possible as if they could be tamed. The effects of this most likely to matter are that:

• The case for electoral reform that underlies any fair and democratical view of such gross failure of representation will be buried under other ‘urgencies’ and accidents of the business of government.
• The urgencies will be translated into the simplest of terms based on the delivery of increased economic growth, under massive deregulation of local democracy and freeing of private enterprise.
• The voice for action on environmental issues will be pushed to the margin, as something that must await resources to carry it out. Those resources will not be facilitated in the supposed ‘need’ to give way to the interests of gross growth targets.
• The marginalised will be further marginalised under a discourse of encouraging incentives to economically  productive work. Child poverty and family breakdown will remain unaddressed, and the social and health care system will further crumble in the belief that further economies and efficiencies in the use of current resources, is the way forward.
• Foreign policy will continue to be regulated by the demands of global alliances of the capitalist international and national and trading power-holders. The continued sale of arms to forces friendly to that means of global capitalism’s survival will be favoured, including continued Israeli bombardment of Gaza until the likelihood of other non-colonial resolutions are made impossible.
• There will be a push for the further privatisation of resources to address the crisis in health and social care. The demise of a centrally run national health and social care service will occur in favour of a regulating quango with no true efficacy in the representation of those in genuine need.
• The accommodation of the argument that the present ills are fuelled by immigration will ensure a policy that tackles population movements is prioritised and will feed the Reform vote, on which Labour landslide  victory has to some extent largely depended. The blueprint for that already exists in France, on the same journey through a mythical but authoritarian centrism to soft or hard fascism.

I hope none of this true. I believe it will be. I needed to get it out there to face what comes next. It is unlikely that Labour will fund renewal in ways that alienate its new power base. Listen to the rhetoric of ‘glad confident morning’ again with a wariness greater than ever needed before. The apparatchiks will speak in a language that disguises the absence of real change under its linguistic signs.

Let’s  see, but hope will not be founded on anything but our gladness to be rid of the monstrous corruption of Tory government. In truth the struggle for a decent system is only beginning and has been set back again by the exigencies of first past the post representational democracy, ruled by volatility that is fuelled by the agents of easy blame finding.

As for landslides. Expect more of them as the climate further destabilises.

With love

Steven xxxx