Denial of the Labour Kind. Chapter 1. History (Laying the seeds of failure)

Okay, so here's my reflection on Labour's crashing election defeat, their response and where I think they will go from here. A bit of a different layout, I need to sectionalise this blog.

So, in this chapter let's lay out the background for Labour's defeat.

Chapter 1. History.

Labour was borne out of a necessity for a political force to represent the people. Those in the mills and factories that were exploited by rich owners. Labour's ideals were better living conditions, working standards and a requirement for equality.

Initially, with the support of the Unions Labour became strong enough so that it could win the General Election of 1946. Almost immediately it went to work improving living standards. The main thrust of this being the inauguration of the NHS in 1948.

Since the 1950s however, there has been a sad decline in the standards of the Labour party. The party gained a elitist core, just like previous Socialist institutions. The "Intelligentsia" who think themselves better than the common working man they are supposed to represent. For decades the Labour party moved from their primary focus.The low point being the 1970's where Labour were held to ransom by the all-powerful unions. Finally bringing the country to it's knees in 1978/79 and hurting the very people it had striven to help way back when it was formed.

The Socialist experiment of the late '70s brought forth the mighty Margaret Thatcher. A thorn in the socialist side and a very bitter adversary of the unions. She effectively smashed and Neutered the unions to an extent that they could only play in their own paddling pool. The Labour party consigned itself to irrelevance for a decade of more. All the time moving further away from their original goal of bettering the lot of the working man. After all if you're not in power, you're not making the rules.

During the Thatcher years, Labour circled the drain, failing to find a credible solution to the initial prosperity that the Tory government created by using oil revenues and selling assets like nationalised industries. All the while wages in real terms fell like a stone. After the massive unemployment of the early eighties, the working poor would take anything. Wages were massively depressed and did not recover in step with the economy.

John Smith started the reform of the Labour party, by curtailing the extremist left-wing elements who essentially wanted a Marxist party. Unfortunately John died before he could reap the reward of a truly moderate Labour party being in power. Instead the Red Tories emerged out of the Labour party, led by Tony Blair. He looked and talked like a Tory. He was in link step with the big corporations.
He promised to BE the Tories, promising not to change things too much for the big corporations and thereby winning himself the support of the Murdoch media empire.

This "New" Labour party did little to increase living standards for the working poor. The only notable exception being family tax credits. By now wages had fallen so badly in real terms that it required the Labour government to step in an syphon taxpayer's money to prop up the wages of people with families. In the most convoluted and inefficient way possible: by paying the tax out in PAYE and then applying to a separate agency to pay some of that tax back.

As well as the decline in wages, the Blair years saw the housing price bubble start to inflate. As opposed to the previous Tory governments, the Labour government saw house prices as a way of (wrongly) making ordinary people feel more well-off by inflating house prices.

The Blair decade in power also fostered an elitist, entitled attitude, just like it had done with the Tories and their years of power. The deceit over the Invasion of Iraq brings into sharp focus the level of duplicity in the Blair government.

The sense of entitlement was best shown by Gordon Brown. The wannabe PM. The eventually manoeuvred Tony Blair out of the picture, only to be tripped up by his elitist attitude. His comments about Gillian Duffy during a tour of Rochdale, calling her a "Bigoted Woman" when she took him to task about the economy and immigration summed up the attitude of the Labour party at that time.

They were out of touch. They had allowed a huge influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe which depressed wages of the working poor even further. They saw the patriotic working class as right-wing (even though they still voted Labour). They failed to support the working class.

We had suspicions of where their allegiances lay,  but our suspicions were confirmed when Gordon Brown ordered the bailout of the banks. His chums in the Banks and the City of London had made a catastrophic financial error, but instead on letting them fail and mitigating the affects on the poor directly, Gordon Brown chose to support the bankers, propping up their six-figure salaries and their corrupt institutions.

Along with the Bigoted woman comment, the working class saw by their actions that the Labour party and the political elite had turned their back on them.

In 2005 the working class could no longer vote for Labour, but also could not decide who could best represent them, so brought forward a hung parliament.

In 2015 thanks to his promise of a referendum on EU membership, David Cameron's Conservative party were elected with a slim majority. Enough to push through the legislation for the referendum.

In 2016 the working class geared up to give the elites of the Labour and Conservative parties a bloody nose. They had been ignored for decades. Even the Labour party, the party that supposedly represented their interests had left them in the cold and instead had depressed wages and bailed out the bankers with taxpayers money.

The 2016 referendum was a chance to make a point. And boy, did we. The shocked faces on the televisions during morning of the 24th was to put it bluntly marvellous.

But then...… the machinations of Parliament, desperately trying the reverse the decision. The outright lies of the 2017 election, the promises of honouring the result, all fell apart when it came to the crunch.

MPs finally showed who they were working for.

So we waited for our opportunity... again.