Falling toward apotheosis

By Pete North - April 7, 2021

A Survation poll yesterday points to an easy win for the Tories in the Hartlepool by-election. (CON: 49% (+20) LAB: 42% (+4) NIP: 2% (+2) LDEM: 1% (-3) REFUK: 1% (-25) GRN: 1% (+1))

This point to serious problems for Labour. If it can’t win in Hartlepool of all places, then we can safely assume that the link to its traditional base is all but completely severed. This raises questions about Starmer’s leadership, particularly on the left of the party who are itching to get rid of him anyway – even if he wasn’t losing.

Of interest is the choice of Labour candidate, a remainer, which on the surface explains the migration of the Brexit Party vote to the Tories. Though the Reform Party ought to be the beneficiary of those votes, a lesson was learned at the last election that Farage and Tice saved Labour from a near total wipe out at the last election.

This is perhaps why Boris Johnson may go for an early general election. Riding high on the relative success of the vaccine rollout and with Brexit consequences masked by Covid, if the same dynamics are repeated but without the Brexit Party in the mix, it could finish Labour forever as a national party.

I don’t imagine, though, that it’s quite that simple. It’s easy to graft simplistic narratives on to one poll, but one should never discount the local dynamics. Moreover, Johnson does not enjoy quite the same popularity on the right, and the stakes would not be as high so a great many would simply stay at home. I think the next election will be marked by a fall in turnout.

The real story from this poll, if it becomes the trend, is that the small parties do not feature statistically in any meaningful sense. The Tories have successfully absorbed the insurrection on the right, and any right wing alternative has to start from scratch. Reform UK has lost the initiative, and in all likelihood will fade into irrelevance.

As to what’s left of the insurrection on the right, Ukip is stilll festering under the surface, taking on the role of the new BNP while Tice’s vanity project is largely the rallying banner for the anti-lockdowners, but there’s really no future in it for either. Brexit, for now, has extinguished the civil war on the right.

Essentially we are back to two party politics, and may even become a de facto one party state if Labour keeps going the way it is. This goes beyond Brexit and I think Labour’s under-performance in Hartlepool is little to do with it. We have, after all, left the EU. The word is out. Labour is rotten to the core.

One would expect that in the not too distant future that the effects of Brexit would become more noticeable, but by then, we won’t be the only ones looking at dismal economic fortunes. The further we get from Brexit day the harder it is to pin blame on Brexit. Labour may not get their window of opportunity.

For the time being, politics will be completely absorbed by Covid, and though this government will fumble from one shambles to the next, Labour has little to say in terms of actual opposition. They should be pressing for a return to normality as soon as possible, but on the whole they support whatever bureaucratic and draconian measures the government dreams up.

Methinks that the opposition force is not going to come from within politics. We have to wait for a convergence of events before we see what form it takes. This is where the government has lit a short fuse. It’s crowing about its own vaccine successes, meanwhile daily deaths are flat-lining, so the public will want to see a dividend. Spooking the public with threats of a deadly new wave of a mutant strain isn’t really an option since it points to the futility of the current vaccine strategy.

Over the summer months we can expect the public to pretty much give up on social distancing. Last summer there was a certain novelty to it but most have now tuned out of government press briefings, nobody knows or cares what the rules are, and outside in the sunshine it will be impossible to enforce.

No doubt the police will have their crackdowns on raves and large gatherings, resulting in late night confrontations and rioting, largely by bored youths but unless the police are going to put up road blocks, they can’t keep people away from beauty spots and the coast. The more they try, the more they make the police the enemy of the public.

One suspects that by next winter, if there is a Covid surge, and the vaccine has proven to be largely useless, then the case for ongoing lockdowns collapses. The government will have had two years to expand treatment capacity and get test and trace working. If then a lockdown is the only way to prevent the NHS becoming overwhelmed, it won’t be Covid to blame. They cannot claim to have been caught off guard. Another lockdown is purely to mitigate the complete failure of the Johnson administration.

Even now it can be argues that the winter lockdown we’re now emerging from is a consequence of the abject failure of this government to institute a test and trace programme. Billions have been spent, fortunes have been made, but on balance we’d be in a better position have the government done nothing at all and let people take their own precautions.

It now looks like Covid is irretrievably endemic and and resource the NHS accordingly. If there was a window to contain Covid, we missed it and now we have to live with it. We lack the policy coherence and competence to do anything else and further turning the screws on our own freedoms and livelihoods in perpetuity is simply is not an option. We may meekly go into another winter lockdown, but by then the Tory party will need to review their leadership choice. Something has to give.

I’m not exactly noted for optimistic prognostications and doom and oblivion is always just around the corner, yet strangely we keep plodding on, never bumping into the consequences of choices and without paying the price. We always manage somehow to kick the can down the road, or get away with it by the skin of our teeth. There never seems to be a contact point for the snowballing institutional decay and incompetence. But it must be coming soon. It has to be. If it doesn’t then I simply do not understand politics. I guess Newton’s third law just doesn’t apply.