Love’s Labour’s lost

In its infantile squabble about which wing of the party is to blame – the student neo-Trotskyist Corbynites or the fashionably liberal, metropolitan Blairites – Labour has failed to understand that it is both.

Cartoon by Crid.

Labour was not so much defeated in the Hartlepool by-election, as smashed.

The Conservatives won to such an extent that the constituency has overnight turned into a safe Tory seat. What we are now seeing in Britain cannot be captured by the traditional election-night swingometer. Instead, it is a seachange, like the interwar switch from the Liberals to Labour as the main party of the left, and in the US in the 1960s-70s, when the Southern States of America flipped from Democrat bastion to Republican heartland.

Labour shows no sign of being able to hold back the tide.

In its infantile squabble about which wing of the party is to blame – the student neo-Trotskyist Corbynites or the fashionably liberal, metropolitan Blairites – they have failed to understand that it is both.

The only question now is whether the Tories can avoid self-sabotage.

‘Boris’ Johnson is a liberal who has been able to hitch his wagon to the coming force of social conservativism and economic Keynesianism and nationalism because he is a shameless chancer.

However, if his instinctive social liberalism, and his party's love of Thatcherite liberal economics, reasserts itself, everything is up for grabs.

In such an eventually, we must hope that there is a decent party that can step into the breech, because the field would be open to some very nasty characters indeed.

Even Boris Johnson is preferable to Tommy Robinson.