about last night

Now that everyone’s sleeping the sleep of the satisfied political anorak I might as well pitch in with a few words about the significance of it all, at least when viewed through the wrong end of an empty bottle of…but that joke’s getting old.

So. Were you still up for Oona?

I wasn’t. Too knackered. I salute, however, the gorgeous one’s indefatigability. I got a sort of anecdotal sense that something like this was on the cards just from reading the blogs. Lenin and his mates came across like happy warriors. Despite supporting a mainstream, nominally left wing party, it was the forces of decency which sounded like bitter sectarians.

They also bet their credibility in campaigning for Labour in Bethnal Green, giving political cover to a party whose activists have established a track record in stealing muslim votes and which played a full and active role in one of the filthiest campaigns in living memory. And they lost.

The Legions of Alcoholic Ribena held their nerve, and fought the good fight. And they were right in their essential point. You can keep out the Tories while giving the Blairites a kicking. But it was plain from the way in which Labour were bullying this constituency that it doesn’t really want its votes. It just needed them at the time, and felt entitled to them. It’s difficult to see how it’s going to get them back except where Labour have MP’s who have declared themselves open and consistent enemies of Blairismo and all its works.

I haven’t got a clue what Charlie Kennedy’s going to do with all these new votes. It seems to upset the Lib Dem strategy of knocking off the Tories. But that was always going to hit the wall at some stage. There will always be a Conservative Party of some sort. It’s on the left where the churn goes on and the only way I can see the Lib Dems building on what they’ve got already is to replace the Labour Party. So how hard is it to become a left libertarian party anyway?

Replacing Labour isn’t the tall order it sounds. The New Labour project was really about establishing Labour as the “natural party of government”, that is to say an authoritarian managerial party of the centre right. One really noticeable thing about last night is the way in which people have defected from Labour in all directions. Somewhere on the journey from Hampstead to Wanstead, the wheels have come off. The project lies dead, stinking up the high street. It only remains for the vultures to descend and strip the great, fat carcass.

More prosaically, no-one really knows what a Labour vote means any more. I’d argue that it means that Labour votes are up for grabs by pretty much anyone.

In other news, most of us don’t want to live in Daily Mail land. The Tories got 33% of the vote, which is probably close to the exact number of people who would define themselves as right wing. They got those, and no others. The authoritarian right can’t hack it, whatever dog whistles they blow.

Overall, I think this is about the best result any of us in tendence Shiraz could have realistically hoped for. We held our nerve, and voted to keep our self respect. I feel pretty good today.

A fresh hell, of course, beckons over the next five years.