Strange Death
Martin Kettle wrote an interesting article in The Guardian the other day about the strange death of Labour Britain which you can read for yourself via the following link.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/14/strange-death-labour-britain-liberal-britain
The essence of Martin's argument is that there's a precedent for what's happening today to the Labour Party and that is the fate that befell the once mighty Liberal Party just over 100 years ago, after the Liberals won the 1906 general election by a landslide.
Not unlike the New Labour Party in 1997.
The first issue that Martin highlights in the strange death of Labour Britain is its failure to come to terms with nationalism; Scottish nationalism, of course, whereas the challenge facing the Liberals at the start of the 20th century was how to handle the emergence of Irish nationalism.
The second big parallel for Martin is the failure of the Liberal Party to accommodate the influence of an increasingly powerful labour movement, whereas today Labour finds itself being pushed around by powerful union bosses who are effectively deciding who becomes Party leader - Ed Miliband in 2010 and, as seems highly likely, Jeremy Corbyn in 2015.
Finally Martin zeroes in on the democratic credentials of both the Liberal and Labour parties with this 'killer' paragraph:
"Then there’s the third issue that broke the Liberals – women’s rights. I admit that this could wreck my theory about Dangerfield’s modern pertinence. Labour, after all, is a party of women’s rights. But if we reframe the suffragette challenge as an essentially democratic, rather than a gender, issue, the parallel is much clearer. Labour does not do modern democracy. Labour won’t reform the voting system, won’t revive local government, won’t abolish the House of Lords, won’t energise industrial and corporate democracy and won’t revive its own internal party democracy either. It is a top-down party, much as the Asquith Liberal party was."
Now having been at the forefront of the fight for equal pay in Scotland for the past 10 years I can say that's been my experience as well because while Labour talks the talk on equality issues, the reality is that Labour-run councils and Labour-supporting unions have been a big part of the problem.
But have a look at Martin's article yourself via The Guardian web site - it's well worth a read.
