Done With That

Ben Wildsmith

In respect of events in the USA, we’ve reached a point that is beyond the reach of satire or even stoicism.

Jokes about the current president and his team abound, but they sound hollow. Some still affect to cast these people, somehow, as stupid.

Even as they rip apart the fabric of western democracy, slow learners manage to mistake their vulgarity for unsophistication. The truth is that decades of complacency by neoliberal thinkers and politicians has finally been exposed for the elitest claptrap it always was.

At the heart of this delusion is the middle-class shibboleth that education is an unquestionable virtue.

The high-water mark of liberal governance in our lifetimes was the Blair and Clinton administrations.

Both resembled a university essay in their prevarication. Blair’s ‘third way’, presented as something novel and modern, was an old-fashioned surrender of power by society to capital.

Public/private partnerships that indebted the public sector for a lifetime looked plausible on the page, appearing to balance contending interests. The traffic, however, was all one way.

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Partner

International capital can ‘partner’ with services designed to improve equity in society but only in the sense that a lion partners with an antelope. The lion will be happy to fund university research that explores the positive outcomes for antelopes who accept their place in the ‘real world’ and stop clinging to old-fashioned concepts of antelope-centric solidarity.

The problem with academia, and God knows I’ve snorted my fair share of it, is that the tidy, rational conclusions it rewards are rendered laughable by the irrational, untidy riot that is the human experience.

There are only two genuine responses to this. Either we fashion society to be broad, empathetic, and inclusive, or we give up, Thatcher-style, and scrap it out for resources.

Attempting to triangulate between these fundamental positions delegitimises the notion of shared progression and leads, as we have seen, to barbarism. It’s a bad time to be an antelope.

Say what you like about the tenets of Blairism, Donnie, but at least it was an ethos.

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Kryptonite

The lessons Labour should have learned from that period were that appearing professional and organised are kryptonite in a fight with privileged Tory amateurs, and that temporary compromises of the common good are never recoverable. Instead, the party seems eventually to have concluded that if flexibility was popular with the electorate, then it needn’t bother with any coherent philosophy at all.

The algorithm gifts me seemingly endless bite-sized press releases from the Labour Party. Every, single one of these refers to the benefits of government policy for ‘working people’.

Justice Secretary, Shabana Mahmood, recently defended the party’s pivot on disability benefits by advising that ‘the clue is in the name.’ What the ‘working people’ who set up the party would think of it fetishising labour as an end in itself would have thought of this I don’t know, but I can confirm that it is proving to be the final straw for many within the party.

The leader of the Labour group on Dudley Council in the West Midlands resigned this week after 41 years’ membership of the party. Several Labour councillors joined him in becoming independent. If you look up his resignation statement on Facebook, you will see endless supportive comments from previously loyal Labourites.

In the Guardian last week, Will Hayward wrote of the open goal that Labour and the Conservatives are leaving for Reform UK here in Wales. The emptying out of Labour’s philosophical offering seems to have been undertaken in pursuit of voters who no longer exist.

Misinterpreted 

Last year’s General Election was indicative of nothing other than voters’ refusal to be governed by the likes of Liz Truss and Boris Johnson. The ‘lesser of two evils’ nature of its victory seems to have been misinterpreted by Labour as a positive endorsement of its ideas.

This would be more understandable had the party troubled itself to put its current policies to the electorate before the election. Had it explicitly campaigned on punishing the disabled and creating an economy based on arms manufacture we may, I suggest, have seen a very different result.

The long deaths of Thatcherism and its soggy son, Blairism, have disadvantaged ‘working people’ to the point of nihilistic despair with democracy. Brexit, Trump, Reform UK and the rest of the clown show that acts as a distraction as people are robbed blind are the only boots people have been offered with which to kick the bloated corpse of torpid neoliberalism.

As it turns ever more rancid with warmongering rhetoric and divisive cruelty people need, as never before, a principled alternative.

Plaid Cymru here, and the Greens in England need to smell the prevailing wind and go fully on the attack. It is plausible that the next general election will do to Labour as was done to the Tories last summer.

Our Senedd elections will be international news as the world watches to see the soul of whatever replaces the old politics. Whether from the right or the left, you can be sure that it will not be a compromise with the past.

Encroachingly, from both directions, and to the point of self-harm if necessary, we’re done with that.