Losing my touch. Something about the Labour Leadership candidates has been making me angry since the contest began, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on what it was. At first I thought it might have been the Received Pronunciation or the media training or just not being very naturalistic in their presentation (some refer to this as ‘punchable’ but we don’t condone violence at Gore Towers).
Another bugbear is David Miliband’s habit of firing out his lines so quickly that even 3 seconds later you’ve forgotten what they were which is incredibly irritating, but it wasn’t that either.
The answer, at last, came from the BBC’s Question Time Special and their answers to the question, “Why did Labour lose?” and, bing! There it was. Turns out the ‘thing’ is something I’ve whinged about many times before: Labour had an excruciatingly annoying knack of volunteering their own ‘failure to communicate’ as an alternative to throwing their hands up and apologising, and they’re still bloody doing it.
It sounds like they’re being open and honest, but in reality they’re still saying that they’re brilliant and any fault, if there is a fault, is yours. Yours for not getting their point. Yours for not understanding their bigger picture.
There was no hint that they accept any responsibility for the economic situation, or any sense that their domineering, controlling, centralising authoritarian instincts were in error or that their attempts at social engineering have been a divisive and unpleasant disaster.
No, Labour’s never accepted that the reason they lost the last election was that they were tired, incompetent, arrogant and, in the end, shovelling bags of money into fires with one hand and printing money with the other. Is it really so hard to admit that and then, moving on, explain how you’d repair the damage and do things differently in the future?
Okay, so, perhaps an internal election is always ‘preaching to the converted’ time. Perhaps once they’re talking to real people things’ll be different… I just don’t see it. If being able to say, “We’re shit. We’re sorry. We’ll do better” was easy it wouldn’t have taken Labour 18 years to get back into power last time, it wouldn’t have taken the Tories 12 and it wouldn’t have taken the Liberals several Ice Ages. As so many others have discovered, it’s hard to become the leader when your message is “This party is shit.”
It’s very early days but I’m not seeing Labour troubling the Coalition in 5 years times at this point. Where it really matters, when it comes down to the fundamentally broken parts of the Labour machine that lost them the election, Labour hasn’t changed a thing. Shame really.
