Fallen asleep?

Charles Clarke, the red wine swilling former Blair cabinet minister who made such a poor shot at being Home Secretary, has had a go at Gordon Brown saying Labour faced ‘utter destruction’ under his leadership. No one seems to have had the courage to rally to his banner but there have been other grumblings in the Labour ranks that the party faced wipe out in the elections. Having lost a poll lead to being 20 points behind in just one year must mean that nobody would rule it out.

But if it were to happen, and I am far from sure that it is, what would it mean for British politics?

Since the War, Britain has effectively had a two party system. The Liberals / SocDems / LibDems were there if you wanted a protest vote, and following the excellent example of David Such there has been a host of small parties, Greens, UKIP, Loonies etc. But nobody ever thought that the government would be anything other than Labour or Conservative.

Anyone who has been canvassing will know the depressing experience of finding ‘No, we’re a Labour / Conservative family’. I used to feel like slapping them until they remembered it was their duty as members of a democratic society to register an objective vote on the merits of the case which would at least involve reading the bloody literature, but there you are. Democracy is about dealing with the people you have got. This blinkered attitude is as bad if you are campaigning in Gloucestershire for the Labour Party or in Pontypridd for the Conservatives.

What will these people do, then (I mean the staunch Labour voters, we can pretty well guess what is going to happen in Gloucestershire)? You see, the other fault line in the British Electorate, as well as thinking that your political affiliations were laid out for you at birth, is that they like to back the winner, as if voting were the same as punting on the 3.30 at Epsom. When I campaigned for UKIP a lot of people would say that they agreed with the party policy (at that stage it was just about leaving the EU, none of this immigration claptrap) but that they wouldn’t vote for us because we couldn’t possibly win.

I believe most people will come to think that Labour can’t possibly win the next election. Note, though, that it takes a surprising amount of time for this sort of feeling to trickle down to the electorate. The Westminster village reacts immediately to poll swings but the people are, rightly, slower to convince. By 2010 however even the guy in the Pontypridd housing estate is going to think they can’t win and, statistically, several of his ilk are not going to vote for them. But will they vote for anyone else?

My fear is that they’ll vote for nobody and there will be a Cameron landslide caused by Labour not getting its vote out. That would be far from healthy. But what happens in the election after that? Will Labour do as the Tories did, sit it out and wait their turn to come back into popularity? Or will the party apparatus split into Old and New Labour?

My guess is that the old left will die: that there will never be another serious politician in the Brown mould, believing in State manipulation of the economy and of the lives of the people. That would be nice: we must guard against the re-emergence of these people as we must guard against the return of fascism. They are the same.

But the possibility remains, as Tony Blair said of the Tories, they won’t have died, they will just have gone to sleep.