Labouring the old delusions - why Labour lost the UK elections

Britain’s divide isn’t North v South or Red v Blue. It’s between the ugly intolerant Left and the rest of us.

-      Douglas Murray

Politics is a tool through which people in a large, diverse place can come to an agreement, or at least compromise, about the rules by which they would all agree to live, and to do so without bloodshed.

In recent years however, the extreme leftist elements have made the mistake of thinking that politics is everything. That it is the fount of happiness, or that if gotten right, politics can solve all your problems.

But, as the late and much lamented Christopher Hitchens wrote (himself from the leftist tradition before it fell to pieces) in his magnificent Love, Poverty and War:

The search for Nirvana, like the search for Utopia or the end of history or the classless society, is ultimately a futile and dangerous one. It involves, if it does not necessitate, the sleep of reason. There is no escape from anxiety and struggle.

Having fallen through the trapdoor of unalloyed Utopianism, the extreme leftists also reveal themselves by their constant peacocking and halo-polishing. As T.S. Eliot wrote in the chorus from The Rock, echoing Hitchens’s warning about the sleep of reason:

They constantly try to escape
From the darkness outside and within
By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.
But the man that is will shadow
The man that pretends to be.”

The crushing victory of the Tory party over Labour in the most recent election once more highlights the great delusions that the hard leftists have allowed themselves to wallow in. In spite of the clear reality, some leftists try to persuade the public, in one of the richest, most diverse, liberal and safest countries in the world, that it is among the worst places to live. Is it any surprise that this is backfiring?

Not only do they not realise that it is largely their extremist positions and the patronising tone in which they are preached to the working class that have lost the left their historic voting base, but also that they have missed the fact that they are more guilty of that which they accuse their opponents.

Despite the hard left’s apparent ownership of ‘progressivism’ , beneath the slogans and protests are some ironic truths. Here are a few delusions around the most hash-tagged themes that the extreme leftists like to hold dear to their microphones, and here I will try to illustrate just how easy it is to shatter them by measuring the leftists by their own stick.

Women

For the leftists who like to think in this fashion, it might be worthy to point out that the two female PM’s of the UK are from the Conservative party, whereas the Labour party is yet to even have a female party leader.

Concerning women, in the cases of the horrific child sex traffic rings uncovered recently in Rotherham, Rochdale, Huddersfield, Manchester, Oxford, Newcastle, Derby and elsewhere, the attitude of the left is telling. For most of us, the systematic drugging, trafficking, rape, threat, physical abuse and even branding of girls, as young as 11, is among the worst crimes imaginable. However, for the leftists, this clear moral issue is made cloudy for them by the sheer fact that the vast majority of perpetrators are Pakistani men.

In Rotherham alone, over 1,400 children were sexually abused between 1997-2013. According to the Independent Inquiry Into Child Sexual Exploitation in Rotherham, these cases were made known to authorities but were systematically ignored. What is glaring is that when the Labour Shadow Cabinet Minister Sarah Champion spoke out about this, and asked that research should be done to find out why the perpetrators are overwhelmingly of Pakistani origin, she was forced to quit her position by Jeremy Corbyn in 2018.

This is not surprising given the treatment of Ann Cryer, a noble former Labour MP, who fought a one woman battle to bring awareness to this problem and the mistreatment of women in immigrant communities in general. She was patronised and ignored by people like the Labour London Mayer Ken Livingstone, other Labour MPs who ignored the issues, and the Guardian newspaper, and faced accusations of racism, Islamophobia and religious hatred, since the early 2000’s.

Compare this with Naz Shah, a Labour minister with a history of anti-Semitic social media comments. She re-twitted a tweet from a parody account of a leftist journalist Owen Jones, clearly thinking that it was the real Jones, which suggested that the girl victims should keep their mouths shut “for the good of #diversity!”. Shah is now Shadow Minister of the State for Women and Equality. Nothing much has changed for Labour regarding women’s rights where it really counts.

Race

The Tories are often called racist. But looking at its current cabinet minister line up might perplex those who believe in this narrative.

The Tory party currently has a female Home Secretary of Ugandan-Indian origin in Priti Patel, and a Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sajid Javid, who is of Pakistani background. The Foreign Secretary, Dominic Raab’s father was a Jewish refugee from Czechoslovakia after the Munich agreement. Even Johnson himself is descended from a Turkish journalist, poet and politician Ali Kemal, who was Johnson’s great-grandfather, making Johnson 1/8 Turkish. So the four Great Offices of State of the United Kingdoms, the most senior and prestigious posts in the British government, are all occupied under the Tory party by persons who are not ‘white British males’ by the rules of the left.

On the other hand, I have written about the Labour party's serious problems with anti-Semitism that goes up to the top of its party machinery.

Gay

It was the Tories and Lib Dem coalition that enacted the Marriage (same sex couple) Act 2013. The current Tory party has more LGBT members of parliament than Labour.

So here we are, with Labour left with not even the pretence of moral superiority. And the election result to prove that the majority of people have noticed this glaring double standard within the left. To quote another great poet of the 20^th century, W.H. Auden, who might have written the summation and obituary of the extreme leftists:

We would rather be ruined than changed,

We would rather die in dread

Than climb the cross of the moment

And let our illusions die.

But when even the hard leftist newspaper the Guardian is compelled to publish an op-ed titled ‘Labour has no hope of rebuilding unless it breaks the cold grip of the hard left’, it might just mean that finally, the left will do some naval gazing and make the painful journey towards rehabilitation that the UK and the world sorely needs.