The Death Of A Movement - How Stupidity And Spin Destroyed The Labour Party

No, not a new book review. This is my take on how the party I used to work for became a pariah organisation which I, and many thousands more, will never touch (bargepole-handed or not) again. First let me invoke some muses to help with the rhetoric. Inspire me now, Clement Attlee. Harold Wilson where are you when we need you? Nye Bevan, Michael Foot, Tony Benn and John Smith, pray for us now and forever after.

When did the illness begin which killed the Labour Party? In my opinion with the death of John Smith. Smith was not a media whore like his two successors. Nor a spotlight-hugger and camera angle connoisseur of the type that Brian Walden was talking about in his 1985 monologue on JFK-fixated western leaders. He would have made a great Prime Minister and one of integrity. He would have schmoozed the Americans, much as Wilson did over Vietnam, without committing one hapless, under-equipped British squaddy to the debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan. But alas fate and history led us down another road which was to be lined with corpses. Real ones, in Iraq especially.

It is a yardstick in Labour history when Ed Milliband has to tie himself in knots to obfuscate the fact that Labour is wedded to the trade unions. His spin-tarts and focus group apparatchiks are telling him to distance himself from any idea that Labour is shackled to the trade union movement. They have all forgotten that Labour is supposed to be to be shackled to the trade union movement who pay for them. It's partly the union leaders to blame due to their own insipidness now and their venality in the Blair era. Image before substance became their disease as much as the Labour Party's. The big unions (I remain a member of Unite although I have cancelled the political levy) have ploughed their own narrow furrows. They have become weak in the same way that they were strong right up to the 1970's. Their influence could revive, as a pillar of our beleaguered democracy, if their stategy is sound in the light of the recession. An unlikely scenario I'm afraid.

The reason I say this is that they suffer from the same leadership problems as the Labour Party itself, The Metropolitan Police, the Coalition, Academia and The Media. They are headed up by narcissists who are primarily interested in their own ephemeral careers. What did the last two Met Police Commissioners care if they left behind, in the wake of their scandal-induced sackings, a demoralised and discredited organisation? The same applies, more importantly, to what was left behind by Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Milliband inherited a Party without a soul (it was privatised and sold to the White House long ago), without a purpose (what do they stand for now other than election?) and without a heartland (does Alex Salmond look worried to you?). They are about to tear themselves apart amid faction fighting in Scotland which will inevitably lead to the secession from London of whatever remains, if anything, of their organisation. The useless Iain Gray is the distillation, the osmotic sap, of what is left from the meltdown of a once vibrant party.

There is no hope of a comeback for £abour. Scottish independence, now an inevitability not least because of the efforts of the neo-Thatcherites of New Labour, will make Labour an irrelevance in the new Scotland. The left in Scotland will re-align. In England and Wales? Good luck to them.