Wee Ginger Dug: Labour ... so useless they can't even win their own election

Sadly for Labour, Andy Burnham in Thatcher drag isn’t going to attract many voters back. Not even Eddie Izzard could pull that one off. Labour these days is as distraught as a woman who’s just discovered she’s got the same taste in bras as Lord Sewel, and is held in even greater contempt than dentists from Middle America who shoot lions for fun. At least the dentist has a trophy to show for the public odium and derision being heaped on his head like a tonne of lion dung: all Labour’s got is a tombstone’s worth of asinine pledges that was crushed to make gravel.

Labour’s bunch of ill-fitting snapped elastics are where they are because they’ve assumed that the UK’s first-past-the-post election system would assure them Buggins’ turn in power every other election. But that’s no longer such a certainty. For decades, the Labour party leadership took traditional Labour voters for granted. In Scotland, voters repaid them for their contempt by returning it dead in a bucket with a yellow SNP glacé cherry on top, and that translated into an SNP victory so massive and crushing that Labour may never be able to escape from beneath the rock it’s now hiding under.

However there was another electorate even more loyal and long-suffering than voters in Scotland, and that was Labour’s rank and file. They were the poor saps who traipsed round doors, who stuffed envelopes, and who attended boring lifeless meetings so that the equally boring lifeless drones who’d sooked all vitality from the Labour movement might continue with their careerism. The lifeless drones thought that this electorate was so tame and easily led that they changed the leadership contest rules in order to reduce the influence of the unions, thinking that this would ensure that lifeless dronery would dominate the party forever. Lifeless drones are for life is the only principle that Labour’s got left.

It often happens in the history of evolution that a successful adaptation which allowed a creature to dominate its ecosystem becomes the cause of its extinction when conditions change – an old strength becomes a fatal weakness. Blair’s adoption of Tory clothing was the mutation which allowed Labour to thrive and dominate in the Thatcherite landscape of the 90s. But in the different political ecosystem of the 2010s, the ever-rightward triangulation is Labour’s downfall. Unless the party makes a radical new adaptation, it’s as doomed as Walter Palmer’s career in dentistry, and will be an even less attractive prospect than a root canal with no anaesthetic. This will be the epitaph of the Labour party, that its leadership’s machinations have all turned round and destroyed them.

Labour’s triangulation designed to lock out the Tories destroyed the party’s purpose in the end. The devolution settlement designed to shut the SNP out of power forever has left Labour lost and homeless in the land it once called home. Blair’s determination to secure a personal legacy left nothing but bloody broken bodies on the road to Baghdad and calls to prosecute him as a war criminal. Now even the loyal rank and file have had enough. They took a long time getting there, because they believed with more faith than a convert to a new religion, they were more long-suffering than the mother of a junkie whose purse has been robbed yet again. And now they’ve turned and said enough is enough.

Polls show that the auld left winger Jeremy Corbyn is ahead in the contest to become the next Labour leader. Conventional wisdom has it that he’s unelectable and will ensure that Labour remains in the wilderness for years to come. The drones are apoplectic and some are calling for the election to be halted. If the voters won’t give the right result, the right will cancel the vote. The rank and file no longer care. They just want their party back from the Blairite and Brownite automatons who purged the party of passion and soul because they couldn’t find a way to privatise it. They’re making the calculation that the drones won’t be able to wrest power back from the Tories, and even if they do then all they’ll support are Tory policies, so effectively there’s no real difference. They’ve figured they may as well have a real Labour party back even if it’s in opposition.

MEANWHILE, back in Scotland, the contest for branch office manager trundles on. No one really cares that much, except BBC Scotland, because everyone knows that whether it’s Ken or Kez it won’t make any difference. Both are opposed to Labour in Scotland becoming a real autonomous Scottish Labour party, both hum and haw when they’re asked about Trident, both are determined to keep blaming the SNP. The same old adaptations, and they don’t have a clue how to thrive in the new Scottish political ecology, an ecology that is ever more distinct from the one the party in England is trying but failing to adapt to.

In an interview earlier this week, Ken McIntosh bewailed the fact that Labour had allowed itself to get so obsessed by the SNP that the party didn’t talk about itself enough. He then went on to attack the SNP. They just can’t help themselves.

The love for Labour is lost. Scotland needs to ask itself whether it can remain a part of a Union which is going to be dominated by the Conservatives for years to come. We’re faced with the very real possibility of Prime Minister Osborne, or Prime Minister Johnson. Is that what No voters wanted? It’s not just the Labour Party that’s going to have to ask some very difficult questions of itself.