Why Isn't Labour Trying Harder to Win the Election?

As the world economy shudders and jolts on its tracks, and the markets plunge, it occurs to me that there’s an explanation for the generally feeble nature of Labour’s campaign for the May 2015 election.

 

The Tories, as we know, cannot hope for a majority next May, whatever happens. If UKIP were abducted by aliens, it would still be the same. All the sordid and unprincipled Tory weapons - pretending to be hostile to the EU while favouring it, dishonest immigration policies they don’t mean and know they can’t implement, referendums they don’t want and won’t have the power to call,  post-dated cheques written on empty accounts, unfunded tax cuts, panics about terrorism,  claims that they have rescued the economy when they have in fact loaded it down with even heavier chains of debt, personal smears of Labour leaders, drenching marginals with money – can only serve to keep the Tory party on life support. The thing will still appear to be alive, and might just possibly be the largest single party if the complex constituency arithmetic falls that way. But too many of its habitual voters have deserted forever, or passed away (and so deserted for even longer than forever) for it to obtain a majority at Westminster.

 

Labour, by contrast, can actually win. It’s unlikely, especially now that the SNP is chewing up Labour support in Scotland,  but a fierce and vigorous campaign might achieve an absolute majority. The Parliamentary boundaries allow it. Labour’s unchanging lead over the Tories in all serious opinion polls (confirmed recently by ICM after a spate of incredible claims of a Tory lead following Mr Cameron’s laughable tax cut speech in Birmingham) allows it. Despite attempts to pretend that UKIP is as great a threat to Labour as it is to the Tories simply aren’t true. UKIP did  *not* beat Labour at last week’s by-election. It did beat the Tories, and by a huge margin. The Tory vote collapsed in both Clacton and in Heywood and Middleton.  Labour’s vote collapsed only in Clacton. They held their share in Heywood and Middleton and will do so in the higher poll of the general election. I doubt if UKIP will win the seat in May.

 

So why aren’t Labour trying? Why isn’t the Labour establishment rallying round to grasp the victory which is within reach? Blairite sulking over the (deserved) failure of the undistinguished and weirdly overpraised David Miliband to beat his brother really has run its course.  What is supposed to be so great about David, who somehow became Foreign Secretary without even knowing that Britain had knighted Robert Mugabe? If they’d wanted to get rid of Ed, they should have done so years ago. They haven’t. It’s too late now, unless some wholly unpredictable cataclysm forces him to resign.

 

All professional politicians normally prefer office to opposition. There’s more fun, more money, more chance of cashing in afterwards.

 

I think Labour knows something which the Tories (who perhaps believe their own propaganda about the economy) don’t know or can’t believe.  They can see that George Osborne’s housing-based bubble cannot last and must burst with a loud bang pretty soon. They can see that higher employment has only been achieved though the creation of huge numbers of ‘self-employed’ jobs which pay so little that the supposed employees earn too little to pay tax.  They know that the City is full of foreboding and that the deep faults of  uncontrollable, unaccountable debt which caused the last crash have not been put right. Far from it.

 

 

 I think Labour fears to be the party in power when the coming economic storm, long in gestation, finally breaks. I think whoever is in power when that crisis comes will be out of office for a very long time, if not wholly broken. And that we may well end up with a grand coalition as we try to pick up the pieces afterwards. So why try now?