the brilliantly leaping gazelle

The fact that Labour think that Andy Capp is the answer to anything proves only that their asking themselves the wrong questions. Instead of asking themselves ‘How can we defeat Reform?’, they’d better off asking themselves ‘Why have so many former Labour voters switched to Reform?.’ And more crucially, ‘What can we do to win them back?’ Before asking themselves ‘But anyway, are the sort of people who’d vote for Reform the kind of people we’d want to vote for us?’

As has been noted by many others many times, changing leader may offer Labour MP’s, councillors and party members an illusion of change, but the real problem isn’t the leader. They’re just the figurehead. The problem is the Labour party itself. It has ceased to be what is was created to be; a vehicle through which the working class could effect political change for their betterment. Now it seems to view the working class, well the white portion of it anyway, with a contempt bordering on loathing.

And the single root cause of the reciprocal loathing which the working class feel for Labour is best expressed in a single word; Brexit. No other issue in British political history has had such a polarising effect upon quite so many people. The betrayal still smarts, passions may not be so inflamed but they’re still smouldering nonetheless.  It is the prism thorough which every most every political action since then can be properly understood.

Sick of all the judicial attempts to thwart it, the political reluctance to properly enact it and the widespread fury of every elite towards those who had voted for it, they majority who voted for Brexit had had enough.  The 2019 general election triumph of Boris’s Johnson was proof of that. And when that didn’t work, when the wheels finally came off that bus and the general election of 2024 happened, Reform UK got nearly 15% of the votes. Not bad for a party that a month and one day earlier – June 3rd – had basically never existed. However, on June 3rd, Farrago announced he’d be standing for Reform UK and from that moment on, the battle lines were redrawn.

Whatever charges might be levelled at Farrago, no-one can question his steadfast refusal to betray his beliefs. One might disagree with them, but he’s never wavered from them. And they all stem from a single proposition; that uncontrolled immigration was ruinous for the British people. And because membership of the EU meant we longer controlled our borders, we should leave it.  Simple and not confusing in the least. The people that hold him single-handedly responsible for Brexit are conveniently overlooking the fact that the EU we voted to leave was not the EU we joined.

For a start off it wasn’t called the EU. It was the European Economic Community (EEC). The then PM signed a treaty with it in 1971 and after three years of ‘associate’ membership of it, the British public finally got a vote on whether to join or not. Which they did. As well they might. Back then the EEC was, as the name implies, focused on almost exclusively on economic ties; trade harmonisation, closer co-operation and loads of other stuff that normal people tended to ignore in favour of having a life. 

Then in 1992, the EEC suggested a radical expansion of its remit. Not content with being just an economic trading entity, it sought to become a social, judicial one and financial one. Did John Minor, the then PM have any qualms about surrendering a a large part of Britains sovereignty to Brussels, for their courts and laws to supersede ours or to allow loads of European workers to flood in and undercut  British ones? Or was he just as terrified by their reaction as he was of his own ‘Eurosceptic’ backbench MP’s – who he called ‘bastards   Did Minor put this proposal to a public vote, or did he just nod it through? The fact that we had the referendum vote in 2016 answers that.

The fact that that result was stymied answers why Farrago made the decision he on June 3rd. By then vast swathes of the electorate, regardless of their previous political allegiance,   had come to realise that a vote for any of the existing parties was a vote for the existing state of affairs. Quite why Reforms success shocked anyone was shocking. From nowhere to almost 15% of the vote in a month is a clue as to the deep-seated mistrust of a sizeable minority of the British people of the Westminster elite.

And how did the Westminster elite attempt to prove them wrong? What efforts did they go to that might indicate that they were finally addressing the grievances which Brexit had revealed? What strategy did they employ to bring that 15% back into the political mainstream? By demonising them, of course. Calling them ‘far right’, ‘bigots and ‘racists.  Denigrating them, questioning their motives, making all manner sinister inferences. Ironically, doing all this while calling for unity, for tolerance, and other brazen hypocrisy’s. 

The only unity that the Labour Party achieved in securing was that a new leader would be the solution. That it was Emu alone who bore all the responsibilities for their dismal standing. However, if the Labour Party believes that the answer to restoring public trust in politics and the democratic process is to impose a new PM on the British public without calling a general election first, it just proves why people distrust it all in the first place. 

Well, the majority that voted for Brexit and who now vote for Reform, anyway.