Labour meltdown

It is embarassing to think that I was once IN the Labour Party, given its current degenerated state - and indeed given its dreadful record in office. Dreadful, as in for those of us on the receiving end of the policies it dished out. For those on the inside and in power it was business as usual of course. Still, to see it in its death throws (today another MP has called for Brown to go and has got dashed off, five MP's have demanded nomoniation forms be sent out and the whip has been sacked and so on) does not bring about unalloyed joy. Sure a twinge of, what, schadenfreude, perhaps, no doubt misplaced. For however wrong the Blairites were about everything they touched and fucked up, they got away with it and got the book deals. Is it a feeling of vindication? A powerless urge to scream 'We fucking told you so you bastards'? Well one is allowed at least some consolation. A dread foreboding about what the future Tory administration has in mind for when it duly gets it 200 seat majority. That certainly. But, having said that all the problems Brown faces does, albeit passively, prompt some joy at least, I have to say. For it could be worse, from a revolutionary's perspective. The Blairites could have been right all along. We could now be in the midst of a neo-liberal paradise of smoothly functioning economies inhabited by happy slaves, zero price inflation and successful wars of liberation where the ingrate foreigner actually DID lay flowers before the glorious triumphant Western armies. But then again, that was never the deal, of course. They never really cared about 'it' working. There never was an 'it'. Only a 'me' and 'my' and 'career'. Even the wars of liberation were probably a cover for the real and monetary reasons for 9/11 going down. (Face it, it WAS an inside job). So that rationalisation is as unsatisfactory as all the above reactions to Labour's disintegration. Perhaps, though, one should indulge in something long forgotten and left at the bottom of the box. In the tale of Pandora's box, of course, after the heroine of the story had let out all the terrible things contained therein, hope was the one last thing at the bottom. One was urged at school, in fact one uncritically accepted that, hey, at least there was one good thing in the box. No one could live without hope. Fate, or the gods or the future could not be all bad. Bourgeois bastard education! This naive optimism soon got knocked out of you though. For, like Grandpa in 'The Grapes of Wrath', hope, one saw more clearly after a hundred or so trips down the Job Centre, is a delusion followed by disappointment and death. But every now and then, one decends into the cellar to fetch the old dusty bottle with its mouldy etiquette and cobwebbed top and uncork it and allow half a goblet of the dark red stuff to gurgle out. Take a sip and hope just one hope.

Believe for once.

That when the Tories do get in, the ruined economy will topple on their overeducated heads and one enormous social whirlwind will sweep them and their Tweedle Dee other into the broiling sea.