Out of the Thick of It...

comes Learning? As various politicians catch up on much-needed beauty sleep and decide what to do this weekend, there’s a distinct feeling in the air that the whole game is up for the old politics, but nobody quite knows how, or what to do about it. I’ll be off this stuff tomorrow but as a trained historian, I wonder what the three main parties could learn from their various disappointments of the past 76 hours.

• Labour:
  The whole New Labour Thing has rather run out of steam, holed below the waterline by the moral legacy of the Iraq War and an uncomfortable feeling that some labour people had grown disturbingly fat out of government. Secular New Labour 1997 messianism is a gone coon. Gordon Brown is a man of genuine passion and commitment, but to make himself electable he would need to turn back the clock to the weeks after he assumed power, and hold that snap autumn election he never did...
  
  
• Conservative:
  The party is still in serious transition, but in a direction that might make for majority government one day, with a popular leader. The overwhelming likelihood of DC becoming PM brings the opportunity to demonsrate skill and responsibility, and a collaborative leadership style that fits contemporary mores and aspirations. In Boris Johnson’s wonderful phrase the Meat in the Sausage, morally, should be Conservative. In terms of Tory tradition, they need to develop a way of doing Disraeli for Today, not Stanley Baldwin dressing-up games or Thatcherism, which is as repellent as ever — the Tory gone coon.
  
  
• Liberal Democrat:
  A terminally frustrating night for LD’s! Their popular vote very modestly increased, but they suffered badly from third party squeeze in many places in the South. The Voting pattern is becoming far more volatile, quirky and granular than ever and this is beginning to hurt rather than promote the Liberal Democrats on their way up the greasy pole. Think of last Thursday as a big stretch up, followed by a greasy slip down to where, formally, they were when they started. Ouch! The silver lining in their cloud is that a large majority voted for parties which were willing to question our rather deadbeat and now clearly ineffective voting system. Time to dust down the Royal Commission on Proportional Representation of 1918, and actually do something about its conclusions. Ninety years is a long time in politics! Lib-Lab pacts, however, have a long but toxic history...
  

Many will be relieved by the ailing performance of right wing minority parties. The experience of BNP in local government has plainly shrunken their appeal.

The biggest challenge for anyone who cares has to be those people who couldn’t or wouldn’t vote. It must be time to take serious steps to draw younger (= under 30) voters into the frame, perhaps by developing a system for internet or mobile phone voting. Almost anything would be more secure than present postal voting, but this would not be anything like as easy as it may sound. However there must be no repetition of the banana republic scenes outside, and even inside voting stations in Sheffield and London. Our present practice is too narrow and remote for the needs of this generation...