The Hopium Wars

The unprincipled basis upon which Hopium's Eleven have come together was illustrated in the press conference they held yesterday.  The lack of principle of MP's, who claim to represent the silent majority of voters, the mythical centre ground of politics, of people who have been longing for a party to vote for, as opposed to Tory or Labour, but who themselves deny them that right, by failing to stand down from their seats, and put their claims to the test, in a by-election, is obvious.  But, more than that what the press conference showed is that, in addition to all of this paternalistic, hypocritical hogwash, there is no principled basis for these different MP's to have come together at all, outside the fact that they all oppose Brexit, and, more importantly, they are all facing being kicked out by their own local party members!

Anna Soubry, was asked whether she defended the actions of the coalition government of 2010-2015, of which she was a part.  Of course, she did, including all of the austerity measures that Osborn pushed through, and including all of those attacks on welfare that even her Tory colleague, Heidi Allen, has made a cause out of opposing.  It would, of course, be easier for Uncle Vince Cable's Liberals to justify a hook up with Soubry's support for Tory austerity, than for the Labour MP's, like Umunna, because Cable also sat in that coalition government, carrying out all of those drastic austerity measures, even though, prior to the formation of the coalition, Liberals had been, rightly, saying that, not only was the austerity not necessary, but that it was economic lunacy, in the face of the need for the economic recovery that was underway under Labour, to have taken hold.

Of course, in reality, the right-wing Labour MP's like Chris Leslie, and Angela Smith, have not, themselves, been marked by their hostility to Tory austerity measures either, or for their opposition to the privatisation of things like water supply.   It's not that these right-wing Labour politicians, in practice, hold positions that are, ideologically a million miles from those of the Tories - they don't, which is the characteristic of the conservative social democracy (neoliberalism) that dominated the period from the 1980's to 2008.  It is that, presentationally, that shared ideology required two parties to advocate it, each branding the same ideas in different boxes, like the same soap powder simply put into differently boxes, aimed at different segments of the market.  It required that actual differences, over substance, be replaced by differences over presentation, and beauty contests between different political celebrities.  Once those political personalities are forced into the same soap powder box, the illusion is shattered.  

The Labour splinter within the new formation cannot now continue to present itself as, in some way, "anti-austerity", on the old basis of hiding a shared political stance, by nuance that vanishes to infinity, or by a clash of personality, because that would mean a clash of personality within the same organisation, one of whose main features is being presented as that of being all sweetness and light, of "shared values", though no one knows what they are, beyond motherhood and apple pie, in place of the actual political ideas and policies that are required to put any values into practice.  Challenged on TV, Soubry claimed that one of these values was "sound economic policy", as though any politician is going to go on TV and say, "we are forming this new party on the basis of our values, which includes the implementation of unsound economic policy." 

As soon as the question of what this value of "sound economic policy" is raised, then we find that for Soubry, it means the implementation of the kind of Tory austerity, seen over the last 9 years, that first sent the economy into an unnecessary recession, followed by stagnation, and which imposed severe, hardship on millions of people.  Umunna and the rest might not, in practice, disagree with that, these are after all, the same Blair-right MP's, who refused to oppose the Tories £12 billion of welfare cuts, but who, in order to retain votes, have to not shout about it from the rooftops.

Their politics, like that of the Liberals, and of the Blair-rights still inside the Labour Party, is based upon Hopium.  It is based upon the hope that the world could be different, and that somehow it will be different, and return to the world they enjoyed for the previous thirty years.  It is a hope based upon delusion.  Hopium.  It is a delusion based upon the idea that there is some huge centre-ground of politics out there waiting to flock to their door.  Yet, they are not so confident in its existence that they are willing to stand down from parliament, and test that belief in by-elections.  Every week, local party members, should be out campaigning in the seats of these MP's, presenting their new candidates, and demanding that the old MP's stand down, now that they have no mandate to hold on to their seats.

The fact is that this mythical centre ground does not exist, the material conditions for its existence collapsed with the financial crisis of 2008, which showed that the thirty year period when asset prices could be simply inflated, by the state printing money, and encouraging people to engage in gambling on stock and property markets, had come to an end.  It has been continued in the last ten years, only at enormous cost to the real economy, and has only made inevitable an even bigger crash in financial and property markets.  Conservative social-democracy (neoliberalism) was itself a delusional economic model based upon the idea that ever rising asset prices could be used as the basis for extracting revenues as taxes, or to finance consumption by individuals, by borrowing in place of wages, rather than that ultimately, revenues can only be increased by creating new value, which means an expansion of capital, and the employment, thereby of additional labour.

Rather than there being some huge reservoir of voters aching for some political party to emerge to which they could give their support, the emergence of Hopium's Eleven only demonstrates the opposite.  It shows that the centre ground of politics is already full of parties seeking a diminishing number of votes in that sphere.  Where the SDP quickly was scoring 45% in opinion polls, the current splinter is scoring only 14%, and much of that seems to have come from the Liberals, and other existing centrist parties.  No wonder then that Hopium's Eleven, have rejected the idea of joining up with the Liberals, whose own politics is based upon Hopium, instead, in typically arrogant and paternalistic fashion, demanding that Liberals come and join them!  The lack of any real voter base in that centre ground, means that the centrists will have to fight ever more intensely between themselves to grab it.  Already, the emergence of Hopium's Eleven has caused that other centrist party, based upon Hopium, the Greens, to fracture, with its Liberal wing seeing the new group as a positive development, and its more radical wing decrying it.  As these Hopium Wars between the various centrist parties intensify, expect to see these groupings themselves be the ones that fracture, more than the Labour and Tory parties, as the centrists simply rearrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.