Blighty finished? I’ve heard it all before...
THERE are not all that many advantages to age but here is one: when the world is becoming hysterical and the headlines scream, one can remark, “I remember when that happened last time.”
Since yesterday week and Labour’s massacre at the polls, the pundits have been in their pulpits telling us it is all over for them as a political force. Others glance at Scotland and predict the United Kingdom is now all history bar the shouting.
Well, the Tories were slaughtered in the general election of 1945 and, seemingly impossibly, Winston Churchill was out. They came back under Macmillan, then out again, then back under Thatcher in 1979 who by 1983 had a majority in the House of 144 when Labour was led by poor old Michael Foot.
Tony Blair crushed the Tories three times under who-he? leaders, and here they are back again.
North of the border Labour once owned the landscape.
Their votes were collected by the tipper truck, assessed by tonnage. Then they took their voters up there for granted for too long and the SNP took over.
But here is my minority opinion. I suspect the Scottish mood will change if, as a nation, we recover from Covid, prosper again and share that prosperity from Land’s End to John O’Groats.
As for the rest, what is changing is the electorate itself. The image of the “working man” in oil-stained overalls, spanner in hand, trudging into his factory, a poor unionised wage-slave whose sons will be exactly the same, is becoming a figure from the past.
They are there, but not enough to elect a government. Yet a vibrant democracy needs a viable Opposition to hold Government to account on a daily basis and it will come back – but probably not as a factory wage-slave.
The Tories will remain the party of the striver but drawn from a catchment area from castle to council estate.
Labour will be the party of the public sector, the civil servant, academic, politically correct, the “woke”, the freshly-degreed “uni” graduate, the jobsworth.
But that revolution may take a long time, ten to 20 years.
I doubt I shall be around to see the next Labour government, nor that I shall see a Green or LibDem one, though there may be shifting alliances.
But democracy is not over and Old Blighty is in no way finished.