Sometimes, one cannot separate national politics from mendacious geopolitics, joke pandemics and globalist corporatism. The UK Labour Party’s latest in a long list of regular meltdowns both supports and reflects a growing trend in the Anglosphere away from globalism and collectivism. The tricky bit to work out at the moment is “towards what?”. The Slog offers an answer.

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Labour was crushed in Hartlepool, in two ways. First, because ex-Kippers didn’t return to the fold; and second, because huge numbers of traditional Party supporters stayed at home. (The turnout was only 42.3% – given the importance for the Leadership, and the media attention applied to the by-election as a “test of strength”, that was a damning condemnation of the Starmer-Rayner team).

That team is no more: Starmer aced Angela Rayner yesterday – a flatface firing a bonehead, one might observe. But in truth, neither of them are to blame for the electoral humiliation their Party received.

Over sixty years ago, Anthony Crosland declared Labour’s ‘flat-hat’ wot abart the workaz image to be holding it back. British social mobility was transforming politics, and the economy was changing from mass workforce to what people quaintly called “light engineering” in those far-off days. Technology was the future, and Labour had to show the new baby boom technocrats that they could ‘Go With Labour’.

In fact, Crosland was merely recognising that the PLP had already changed from being working class Trade Union sponsored to made-good middle class Oxbridge. They sat uneasily with the Nye Bevans. They still do.

The perenniel Labour split was dubbed “our broad church” and “this great spectrum of ours”. It was, however, an uneasy alliance between posh social democrats, fiery working class tub-thumpers and (after 1960) the harder end of younger post-war radicalised graduates like Jack Straw. Over time, it gradually became Hard and Soft Left.

At first, the friction was largely caused by the TUC; after Thatcher’s arrival, by Militant and other assorted crypto-communists. Victories and defeats in both directions followed – SDPs, Foots, Kinnocks, Blairs, Milibands and Corbyns. But essentially, after 1979, Labour only ever gained Office by pretending to be, er, not Socialist.

So effectively, for forty-two years the Party has been two Parties….and with every sellout – be that to market-led Thatcherism or minority identities – the farce has become more obvious.

At this point, I want to switch to bold type and register one very important point: only a relatively small number of UK voters, if you tumble the numbers, actually want either full-on Thatcherite Toryism or full-on pc loony Left Momentum.

Don’t be fooled: BoJo’s populist antics are every bit as much a sham as Starmer pretending that knee-bending to Bames is what he’s really about. They are both committed to technocracy and power at any price: when it comes to Covid hype and the vaccination narrative, for example, they are as one.

Which is why, this time around, the Labour Party’s irrelevance to majority electoral opinion is beyond being political or UK constitutional in nature – as it was in 2015. It’s now a geopolitical issue as well. Bear with me.

Dom Cummings soundbit the media on Friday with “The centre ground no longer exists” in British politics. This led me to wonder (not for the first time of late) whether Dom is suffering from a marble deficit. There’s no call for a wishy-washy centre Party, because there never was: but there is an aching need for a Party of Opposition. And what it needs to oppose is the spectrum of big business, neocon spooks and useful pc climate-to-race-and-gender idiots – many of whom imagine that they can carry on excreting all over the average citizen with impunity….perhaps even unto wiping the poor devils out.

Of course, no Party ever got anywhere by saying what it isn’t. I pounce upon the capitalised word ‘Opposition’, because we don’t have one any more in England – and this is where it goes beyond a constitutional issue to become geopolitical….because an absence of opposition is precisely what the Reset Alliance wants to make the New Normal.

Boris Johnson is in what appears to be an unassailable position after the elections in Hartlepool and elsewhere, but this is misleading: let’s wait and see what early winter brings to bear in terms of lots of “vaccinate” mugs falling over. And Bojo hasn’t really ‘torn down’ Labour’s northern Red Wall….it’s just that now the UKIP/Brexit schisms seem to lack an urgent cause, their votes are going to the Tories, while Old Labour is abstaining. This is a giant leap forward to the One Party State.

It’s not as if I haven’t been saying that for a long time: this Slogpost from 2010 states the danger of irrelevant radicalism in a neoliberal world; a second effort from 2013 reaffirmed the disassociation of the decent voter; a third in 2019 restated and updated the need for a grounded Opposition; and the latest one from early 2020 lamented the squabble over Labour’s coffin.

Equally, it is impossible to divorce Covid from events that went before. For thinking people, tolerating the media-perversion and debate-controlling amorality of globalists, bankers, bought politicians or bureaucrats was only going to end in place: dystopia.

The place to start (I increasingly believe) is with a sort of internationalised localism. That is to say, regaining power to stop the juggernaut at community level….while linking to those elsewhere with a similar mindset about responsible control of personal destiny – or PDC. Something, at long last, reflecting natural grass roots feeling rather than manufactured ideology.

For the forseeable future, national political Executives have sold their souls to the hegemonists. The time is right for bottom up to start challenging top down.