Winter of Discontent: Labour isn’t working

Dominic Turner

Image © Murdo Macleod

As we enter 2012, we have a Government perceived as out of touch and elitist, ramming through a failing, unpopular, and treacherous economic agenda. The government has been mired in phone hacking scandals, rising unemployment, outbreaks of riots in the capital, and the likely prospect of another recession in the new year. The very least that one expects in the midst of such a storm is that the sails of the opposition might be filled. But as we enter 2012, the Tory Party has once again regained the lead in most opinion polls. Because of the media’s pathetic obsession with the intrigues of party political gamesmanship, this coalition is not judged by the ideal but by the alternative and the established alternative, the Labour Party, is proving woefully feeble at standing up to coalition.

The public remember that 13 years of Labour weren’t substantially different than what came before or after it. People remember Peter Mandelson proclaiming that Labour was “intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich.” They remember Blair and Brown praying at the altar of Rupert Murdoch and the rest of the right wing, corporatist ilk that is laughably called the ‘free press.’ They remember the butchery of Basra, the folly of Afghanistan, and the Prime Minister of this country following a neo-con cowboy into wars of oil and treasure. The killing abroad was coupled with the repression of civil liberties at home, with the government attempting to impose mandatory ID cards on the population, and the eradication of ‘habeas corpus.’ They remember PFI, tuition fees, the introduction of the profit motive into the NHS, all of which lay the groundwork for the Coalition’s malevolent schemes. But most of all, they remember it was a Labour government who increased the gap between the rich and poor and instituted the biggest transfer of wealth from the needy to the greedy with the bank bailout, to be paid off by cuts to public services.