austerity, universal credit ...... three words that did not resonate with voters!


Just reading Andrew Murray’s The Fall and Rise of the British Left: Chapter 2 The Overpowering Tragedy starts with a quote from Tony Benn:
‘I am very, very depressed. This sense of overpowering tragedy in respect of Britain and the Labour Party has got me by the neck at the moment’.
Different context in 1983 but same feeling!

The different context of course was the Labour Party's shift to the right. Influenced by monetary policy and the impact of inflation on wage packets and general well being.

But here we are some 36 years later and despite the tremendous impact of Labour's election campaign just a couple of years ago we now record the worst election result since Michael Foot.

Like Tony Benn I am  very depressed.

But it seems that this time around Labour were caught in the eye of a perfect storm.

A combination of Brexit, Anti Semitism and Marxism which managed to almost remove the impacts of Austerity, Food Banks and Universal Benefit.

In the week before the election I went to watch the film Sorry we missed you, Ken Loach's traumatic exposure of life at  the  sharp end of Zero Hours contracts, the ruse of self employment and the role of carers paid only from the minute they enter the property and not reimbursed for travelling time. I watched the film in company with our Labour Candidate for Hexham and Ponteland and her thoughtful comments afterwards were very telling.

If the financial monitoring bodies are right, if the impact of leaving Europe is as we have been constantly warned is negative, we will become poorer whilst the Hedge Funds and Currency Traders will thrive.

But the desire to leave Europe was reinforced by those three words, Get Brexit Done, people bought into politician's promises without considering the length of time it will take to renegotiate complex agreements and that the risk of a no deal exit remains very real.

There is also the complexity of Europe, Tony Benn focused on democracy and Yanis Varafoukis described the struggles of Greece with the Troika (World Bank, IMF and the European Union)led, by the German Finance Minister who wrote the script.

There is a powerful argument from the left that leaving Europe is the sensible thing to do given that we shouldn't have joined in the first place. Andrew Murray expresses doubts that Jeremy Corbyn's manifesto would have been allowed to be enacted by the Troika.

So there was a believability problem made worse by the press who made so much more of the alleged anti semitism within the Labour Party and of course the Marxist Manifesto was considerably less left wing than those of Norway and Sweden.

What I find has me, in Tony Benn's words 'by the neck' is that austerity, Food Banks and Universal credit have simply become aspects of the way it is.

Watching the film I became very conscious that during the afternoon I had ordered three items on Amazon. 

I did so because it was convenient, they would arrive the next day and it saved me time and money and driving into town.

As I watched I began to realise that I was a moral (immoral?) accomplice in what was happening to the family who were the subjects of the cruel turn of fate that the film was describing not least their desire to become home owners which had been frustrated by the collapse of Northern Rock.

Todays Financial Times argued that the Labour Party should become less 'left wing' and that by implication Capitalism is the best way to generate wealth as indeed the private sector is the best way to deliver goods and services.

Ken Loach's film challenges that view viscerally and tragically.

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