Well, That Happened...
It Woz The Substack Wot Won It. Not really, but the end of the election bollocks doesn't mean all is well
Well, well, well. What a week. It surprised no one that the Tories got fucked out on their arses. It should also be of zero surprise that pollsters got it wrong. I would just like to pat my own back for this piece of prognostication:
“It is also worth noting that this is why The Reform Party are a panto backdrop, soon to be put away once the show is over.”
The Tony Blair Sneer Review (24/06/2024)
The awful bastards of Reform Ltd wrangled four seats from a thoroughly fucked off electorate, which is an improvement over UKIP’s ineffective one, but still insubstantial.
The 14% they managed, plus the Tory’s miserable 24%, shows, resoundingly, that people aren’t that stoked on Neoliberalism and that folk have had enough of Brexit. We’ve moved on from the self-inflicted bloody nose we gave ourselves in 2016, and it turns out that actual Conservatives might not be too keen on the simpleton student politics we’ve been forced to deal with for decades now. I won’t bother going on about electoral reform as that is only popular outside of the winner’s enclosure, like Lord’s reform. Both are the tinsel on the manifesto tree, which gets taken down once the election ends. I’d like to see change here, but it’s as likely as Christmas in July.
The above figures also reveal how wafer-thin Labour’s lead is. This is simply because saying “change” all the time is not nearly enough. Indeed, it has been reported that many in Starmer’s cabinet have been paying attention to Joe Biden’s failure to convert actual economic gains into victory. I would argue that this idea, The Death of Deliverism, is just more Third Way, pseudo-left apologia for the failure to do anything substantive in the lives of ordinary people. Perhaps Sleepy Joe should shuffle out from under the duvet his true-blue Conservative party shares with Health Insurers and stop medical bills being the number one reason for US bankruptcies. Maybe then people would be less happy to welcome back some tangerine jailbait.
The same failures plague France right now, with an alliance of left(ish) parties putting the kibosh on Le Pen’s rather nasty set of Neoliberal race baiters waltzing into the Parlement français. Our new PM should pay attention to this: a failure to actually and substantively deliver. Blair, Clinton, Obama, Macron, and Hollande, to mention a few, have brought us to this point. There is indeed an alternative. No law in nature says the neoliberal consensus is some kind of equilibrium that must all suffer through. And suffer we do:
Whilst correlation and causation are different things, we should look at why mental health gets worse the more inclined a country is to favour neoliberal policies. The UK is the most heavily invested in this failed philosophy in Europe. This brings me to why I am not swayed by Starmer. Like Obama, he says change a lot:
But to quote Sarah Palin, “How’s that hopey-change stuff working out?” Even a broken clock is right twice a day, and all that, but her words should serve as a key insight; without substantive change, chancers of her ilk get traction. Reform didn’t just appear out of nowhere. Trump isn’t an aberration or blip; Nazis didn’t get into the Reichstag because everything was going super-well in 1930s Germany. Starmer boxed cleverly by saying very little and promising even less. Still, if he cannot make things substantively better, then perhaps Reform will copy his strategy of targeting marginal seats next time, and their hollow promises might land.
I am not enthused. Much as I wanted hope over hyperbole, my lack of enthusiasm comes from following that old journalistic maxim: follow the money. To that end, I am less than enthused that many Tory donors have defected to Labour. It should also be noted that Labour takes more money from companies than trade unions and is also actively courting the UK Finance sector. These sectors and interests have profited heavily from an environment rife with austerity in which mental health in this country has become a national emergency. One need only look at any busy street and see just how much worse homelessness has become to understand that this is indeed a crisis. Hopefully, the change Starmer goes on about is not just in which bank accounts the wealthy deposit their cheques.