the brilliantly leaping gazelle

Thank goodness the crisis has passed! We can all relax now. By we I mean the parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) of course. They are the MPs in Westminster, who because of their last minute support for Stymied, have kept him in his job but crucially, without any actual power. They are like a ventriloquist; they have absolute control over everything he says or does. He knows his ability to direct events is a thing of the past, although it could be argued that even that was largely a fiction, given how he was beset with difficulties from the moment he took office. 

Be that as it may, that is ancient history now. The upshot of the last few days is that the PLP is lot like Rod Hull. But this Emu is a different beast entirely. Gone is the wild, chaotic and unpredictable of who terrorised ‘Parkinson’. The PLP have created a tame Emu, one who will say and do whatever they want or worse still, do and say whatever he thinks they want preemptively.As far as I can tell, the PLP is made up of people who long for a more ‘left-wing, almost socialist government, precisely because they have no experience of living under one. Thats why they can get all misty eyed about something they know nothing about. 

Whilst this may suit the PLP, the Labour Party membership and the grassroots activists, this is an absolute disaster for the country. Even before his humiliation of the last few days, Stymied couldn’t bask in what appeared to be a magnificent triumph at the 2024 general election. Winning  411 seats (64% of them) seems impressive enough, until one considers that alternatively, Labour won only 33% of the votes cast – hence the title of my blogs –  and less than 60% the electorate voted.  

So that already obscene disparity between votes cast/seats won becomes even more so if one then introduces into the mix the missing 40% who were on the electoral roll and didn’t vote. Added to that are those who weren’t on the electoral roll to begin with and those who spoiled their ballots. Whichever way one puts it all together, an emphatic victory, a resounding success or clear mandate from the people it was not.

But now Stymied is Emu. Whatever power he had is gone. This means that in all negotiations, be they with trade unions over pay deals for their members, to find a settlement to implement the Supreme Court ruling on single-sex spaces based on biological and not imagined sex or with the EU regarding ever closer ties, everyone will know that whilst he might well be saying the words, it is the PLP that has written them. 

This matters. Because as Jacob Rees-Mogg recently pointed out in one of his excellent You Tube clips, the voters that Labour has lost to Reform are never returning.. But the voters that have moved to the Greens could be enticed back. So an appeal to those voters might be seen by the PLP as a wholly rational thing to do. There have already been moves towards an ever closer union with the EU, and these will only accelerate, and on far worse terms for Britain. The EU can set the terms knows that he has to appease the PLP. 

Same with public sector pay. Trade union leaders would be criminally negligent if they failed to press home their new found power. One only has to remember how Labour MPs rebelled over welfare reforms, eventually watering them down and ultimately reversing the two child benefit cap, to see what an open door they’d be pushing against.

As I pointed out in an earlier post, this will only increase the amount of money the government has to borrow, which in turn will only increase the national debt, which will in turn cause proposed cuts to government spending and the welfare bill, which will be be abandoned in the face of fierce PLP opposition and lead to more government borrowing, which in turn…

But who cares? Certainly not the PLP and most definitely not the Greens, whose leader is blissfully unaware of the realities of government borrowing.  But then the Greens are highly selective on what they do and don’t believe. They believe the scientific truth of climate change, but not the scientific truth of biblical sex.The PLP are already very ambivalent -to put it mildly – in their defence of the Supreme Court ruling, and any attempt to woo voters back into the fold would only exacerbate this. 

So to with closer ties to the EU. Stymied was hot for that in opposition, but has wavered to counter the electoral threat of Reform. Emu, by contrast, will be fully engorged. He’d be like Benjamin in ‘The Graduate’ The Greens love all things EU. So to does the PLP. It doesn’t matter what the electorate think. The half that aren’t racist are bigots, so why even give a toss what they they think?

So Emu might struggle on until the next election, or he may not. The PLP have the power now and it’ll only be circumstances, bad luck or his own ill health that’ll wrest it away from them. The irony would be that if they don’t try and woo back the voters who’ve switched allegiance to Reform, they are effectively anointing Farrago as our next PM.

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When I wrote that Jacob Rees-Moggs You Tube clips are excellent, I was being serious. I don’t always agree with his eventual diagnosis, but the analysis he uses to arrive at that is top drawer. It is reasoned, considered and coming from a former senior government MP, it is also imbued with an authority some commentators lack. He speaks direct to camera, quite calmly and in one single rake, without any of the cuts or edits found every other You Tuber finds necessary. Thats impressive enough, but he also doesn’t, like almost every other You Tuber I’ve seen, ask viewers to like, subscribe or get notifications of a new video. Refreshingly, he has confidence that the content alone will do that. 

Essentially its a serious man talking seriously about something serious.