In the new world, the terms left and right are meaningless

I've been deliberately not writing this blog for a few months now. The one thing I always said I wouldn't do is pretend to be a political pundit spouting baseless opinions. What I'm about to write, I've been thinking for the best part of this year, but I now think the facts support what I am going to say.

With the rise of Reform, the political situation in the USA, the events in the middle east, many people have been forced to shift from very long held positions and reinvent their political stance. The odd thing is that whilst this is happening in people's front rooms, in pubs and clubs and in the queue for the bus, the one place it seemingly isn't happening is at the top table of our political parties. The leaders of Labour, Conservatives, Lib Dems, Reform, The Greens, etc all are stuck in the old mindset.

Until the election before last, we largely had three national parties that mattered. The big two of Labour and The Tories and the Lib Dems, who every so often were in a position to hold the balance of power, most recently 2010-2015. We thought we knew what each party stood for.  At the last election, Reform got a hell of a lot of votes, but were to badly organised to transform this into actual seats. The Tories seemed to give up, it is a wonder to me that they got the number of seats they did. Labour ran a brilliant campaign, in terms of organisation, where not a lot of votes, gave them a super majority. The Lib Dems also rana  classic Lib Dem campaign. If the Tories hadn't given up the ghost, they would probably have held the balance of power. Labour very quickly learned that winning is actually the easy bit. Governing is a hell of a lot harder. The Tories learned this after 2015. Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss and Sunak all soon found that actually running a country is a difficult job. In the year 2025, it is almost impossible. 30 years ago, we had to wait for the nightly news before we knew what was happening in the world. Now, a Prime Minister can stand up for question time and with Twitter (etc) by the end of the session, the whole political situation will have changed. It is almost impossible to be properly briefed in such a world. 

Historically, we have divided politics into three blocks. These are left, right and centre. I used to believe that the left believed in social justice, equality, wealth redistribution from the rich to the poor and state control of key industries. As to the right? They believed in free trade, market force, self sufficiency and dereuglation. The centre believes in a mix of the two. Labour has always been (whilst in power) centre left and the Tories centre right. True believers on both sides of the divide have always been frustrated, as neither party ever really followed a hard line agenda. Even the most doctrinaire Tory leader ever, Margaret Thatcher was far more of a centerist than her supporters want to believe. This is a fact, not an opinion. She never dismantled the NHS, she never privatised rail and the post office. She never reall cut benefits to any great extent. The problem for a centerist party such as the Lib Dems always was that both Tory and Labour had stolen their patch. In coalition, they got the blame for all the Tories worst policies (hiking tuition fees), and the Tories took the credit for their most successful ones (raising tax thresholds for lowest band tax payers). 

Now however, we are seeing something completely different happening. To me, it is rather odd. The rise of reform has seen two rather contradictary patterns. The first is that tradition Labour voters, who would never vote Tory are defecting to Reform. This is fuelled by the notion that Labour is doing nothing, except shafting the ordinary man in the street. What I find bizarre is that Labour's leadership seemingly cannot be bothered to address this view. There is a narritive that Labour is so obsessed with small, vocal pressure groups, fringe movements and other vested interests, that they have lost interest in their core vote. As Reform are not Tories, the core vote are finding the message of disaffection attractive. As the Tories did nothing for them for fourteen years, the Tories are simply not credible as an alternative. The other strand is that a string of, mostly oddball, Tories from the more right wing fringes of the Tory party, have defected to Reform. You would think that these people would totally put off traditional Labour voters, but I detect a sort of "we are as fed up as they are" mentality, so at the moment it is being ignored.

There is however another trend. We have seen this recently with the flag protests and also with Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (AKA Tommy Robinson) rallies. I have watched quite a lot of footage of Tommy Robinson. The more I see, the more the I think that Robinson is a classic example of the old saying "in the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king". I personally think Yaxley-Lennon is a fraud, anyone who changes their name to sound less posh is a fraud in my book. I have a posh name and I'd never change it. But what he is doing is saying a lot of things that chime with the heartlands of Britain. As he is the only person who is actually confronting difficult issues head on, many who previously identified as being left wing and Labour get what he has to say. There is absolutely no push back from Labour, who seem terrified to raise these issues, let alone confront them. In laymans terms, Sir Keir Starmer has gifted Yaxley-Lennon an open goal. Starmer seems to think that if you ignore difficult problems, they go away. The demise of Peter Mandleson and Angela Rayner is proof that burying your head in the sand simply doesn't work. 

What seems to have happened is that the tradition left vote, is now leaning towards the right. But what has happened on the right is perhaps slightly more interesting. The traditional position of the British right, which is pro trade, pro business, pro self sufficiancy, pro free speach and anti regulation is falling apart. Traditionally, it was the Tories, not Labour who encouraged immigration, as this gave businesses cheap labour. The pro self sufficiency mantra is also not part of the Yaxley-Lennon mantra. His appeal is very much based on saying things like "council houses should be given to British (white) people" rather than migrants. The right used to hate the idea of anyone, especially British people living in council housing. The right invented the stigma around living in a council house. Thatcher cemented her position by selling council housing cheaply to tenants, as she hated the whole thing. That was the seed of the current crisis.

The only major party that, to my mind at least, has a long term consistent position is the Lib Dems. Being staunchly centrist is something that they have not deviated from. Labour? I have no clue what they stand for. They have a super majority, but nothing they are doing is vaguely left wing. They are not interested in reversing privatisation, they have done nothing to lift the burden of cost from students with loans. I have no idea whether the NHS is safe with them. It is probably safer than it would be by any party funded by American billionaires, but that is not a vote of confidence. Kemi Badenoch has managed, in less than a year, to make the Tories seem completely irrelevant. She has accidentally moved the party to the left, mainly by making many of her most right wing supporters decamp to Reform. And then there is Reform. We tend to think of Reform as a Right wing party, but some of what Nigel Farage is saying is actually rather left wing. Clamping down on immigration is a long term aim of the Trades Unions, as the lack of cheap labour forces up wages. Other policies such as abolishing the House of Lords, abolishing interest on student loans, banning the UK from exporting waste seem to me to be more Jeremy Corbyn than Jeremy Corbyn.

I am not sure that the term left or right wing mean anything at all anymore. To me, the biggest problem is that Great Britain simply doesn't seem to have any serious politicians. To me Starmer is a lawyer in the wrong job. He's clever, but he is not a politician. Only possibly Andy Burnham actually looks like a politician with a grip on reality in Labour. Kemi Badenoch? The Tories should sack her tomorrow and simply replace her with James Cleverly. He is far from perfect but at least he is someone who can string two sentences together without making everyone in the room roll their eyes. Ed Davey is a good leader of the Lib Dems, if they want to always be a protest party. Then there is Nigel Farage. The more I see of him, the clearer it is to me that the man is a complete charlatan. He has had a big influx of Tories, who I assume will want to actually run the party as a professional political organisation. Farage is very good at being a fringe opposition figure. When he faces proper scrutiny, he becomes a different beast. I've no idea where this will lead us. I suspect that if any of the non reform parties get their act together, they might well clean up. I expect Reform to implode over the next two years. If you look at the likes of Anne Widdecombe, Nadine Dorries and the other Tories who have joined them, it is hard to see them ever evolving a harmonious party and winning strategy. They will need to do more than not be Labour to actually win a general election. Some Reform types are getting very excited about the idea of an early general election. The one thing I can guarantee is that turkeys don't vote for Xmas and whilst Labour are behind in the polls, with a super majority, their MP's will happily keep the wages rolling in. And as for Yaxley-Lennon and his dreams of an English civil war. It won't happen. We are British and we just don't do that.