Political Observer comments.
JUN 4, 2023
What might The Reader make of Daniel Hannan’s June 3, 2023 essay on the Spanish election, as an object lesson to New Labour’s Keir Starmer?
Headline: Cut taxes and trust people to choose: what the Tories can learn from Madrid’s election winner
Sub-headline: Socialist parties throughout Europe are being eviscerated. Labour is the one exception. Why should Britain be different?
Keir Starmer is swimming against the European current. Across the continent, traditional parties of the Left have been wiped out. The Dutch Labour Party won 5.7 per cent at the last election, the French Socialist Party 1.8 per cent in the presidential election. Only in Scandinavia and Iberia have parties of the mainstream Left clung on. And even that is about to change, with Spain set to give its socialists a brutal clubbing.
The notion that Starmer is a ‘Socialist’ in a product of Hannan’s imagination, in search of a reason, the New Labour dullard Starmer is headed for a defeat ?… un-mentioned is that the Labour Party, New and Old is still experiencing a continuing purge of the once ascendant Corbyn Wing of the Party. And that Corbyn was the target of defamation from The Times, The Guardian and The Telegraph. While this from Al Jazeera Investigations is subject to an historical erasure -its a Stalinist gambit. And Starmer’s banning Corbyn from running as a Labour candidate.
Mr. Hannan resorts to the role of Political Oracle, in times past, ‘thinkers’ like Alvin Toffler were deemed ‘Futurists’ who described what the possible New World would be like. Hannan riffs on those themes of yesterday, in the final sentence of my quotation. He trades upon a past that lives in the present: in France Macon’s unconstitutional Pension Reforms have re-ignited those ‘syndicalist embers’ ?
Before we get to Spain, though, it is worth delving into why the old Left has seen its support collapse. It has to do mainly with changing work patterns. I don’t expect my children to have “a job” as we understood that word in the 20th century. Rather, they will go through life constantly reskilling, freelancing and adapting as technology accelerates.
Artificial intelligence won’t make us redundant; that claim has been made of every advance in mechanisation since the industrial revolution, yet the number of people in work keeps rising. What it will do is diversify the employment market even more. When machines take on our old tasks, they free us up to find niches that no one had previously imagined.
In such a world, parties linked to mass industrialised workforces look not so much old-fashioned as cultish. The structures, slogans and symbols of syndicalist struggle seem to belong, quite literally, to another century.
Its not that Mr. Hannan doesn’t offer some interesting analysis of the Spanish Election, but that he garnishes it with …
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Tellingly, Tony Blair could never bring himself to pronounce its name. Knowing how electorally toxic the word “socialist” was, he referred to it incorrectly as “the European Labour group”. Perhaps that is why, of the eight leaders Labour has gone through over the past 45 years, Blair is the only one to have won a general election.
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He then presided over a coalition of separatists and Left-wing extremists; precisely the kind of wacky alliance, in fact, that Starmer might end up leading here. Almost immediately, he started losing elections – in Galicia, Madrid, Old Castile, Andalusia and, now, the whole country.
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The above quote, reminds me of Ferdinand Mounts book ‘The New Few’ the chapter titled ‘Closing the local’ pages 154 and 155 ‘the looney left’ an epithet used twice by one of Mrs. Thatcher’s cadre of the ultra respectable.
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No, our Labour Party will find scant comfort in what is happening across the Pyrenees. But our Conservative Party might learn a thing or two.
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So, in shops, in cafés and in queues (which Spaniards are much better at than they used to be)…
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First, young people are not monolithically Left-wing. Indeed, many of them support Vox, the party that overseas commentators almost always describe as far-Right.
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It is here, I think, that our Tories have the most to learn. The head of Madrid’s regional government is the unapologetically Thatcherite Isabel Díaz Ayuso. If the PP had had the sense to make her its national leader last year, it would now be sweeping the board.
Spain had a bad pandemic, combining a strict lockdown with a high death rate. But Ayuso kept Madrid open, campaigning under the one-word slogan Libertad. She went on to cut taxes and give people more choice over which schools and hospitals to use. Her most recent campaign was launched in the bullring. Madrileños repaid her with an absolute majority.
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All that the Left can do in response – beyond unleashing the personal abuse that female conservatives always seem to attract – is to accuse her of being too close to Vox and, by implication, an extremist.
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Isabel Díaz Ayuso is an ‘ unapologetically Thatcherite’ : she is an Extremists, by definition, Thatcherism was a political catastrophe! Daniel Hannan attempts to re-write History.
The final three paragraphs this essay:
If calling your enemies fachas doesn’t work any more, what does? The old infrastructure of organised labour has gone. Wokery in its various forms – racial, gender-based or sexuality-based – is unpopular. Greenery has a certain appeal but, as the sheer expense of net zero becomes clear, voters want it toned down.
The strongest argument for the Left is the unpopularity of the other side. Since 2004, when José María Aznar stood down, the PP has been seen by many of its supporters as a milk-and-water alternative to the socialists, who made all the running. That is why Vox came into existence in the first place.
If there is a lesson from Spain’s local elections, it is that voters don’t much care about accusations of extremism. But they do care about rising taxes and rising prices. When Rightist parties are trusted on those issues, the Left has nothing left.
‘Woke’ is a term of political abuse, its meaning lost in the fog of accusation. In the British context Mr. Hannan has missed the the rising star of Mick Lynch, the most articulate leader of ‘syndicalist nostalgia’ that is experiencing unparalleled political vigor, in the face of Tory maleficence.
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