From Triumph to Disaster

How has it gone so wrong for Labour - and what might be the outcome?

“We are the masters at the moment, and not only at the moment, but for a very long time to come.” Sir Hartley Shawcross, UK Labour politician, 1946.

One of the problems in western democracy, as I set out in my opening article, is the gulf between the elected and the electors. Voters feel that voting makes no difference, so turnouts decrease, as they have in the United Kingdom, or extreme options pick up support, as is happening in Germany.

The Labour politicians who have recently come to power in the UK, and who seem to be only in it for themselves, are exacerbating this problem, and ought to have been able to avoid it. 

In the run up to the recent general election, I expected the Tories to lose heavily, because although the economic outlook seemed to be brightening, too many parts of the state were not working. Immigration was too high and the small boats continued to arrive. Routine services, whether booking  a driving test, calling HMRC or even obtaining a doctor’s appointment, had not recovered from the effects of covid and the backlogs and bad practice that had ensued. For our opponents to create a picture of broken Britain was too easy and a fairly simple message to sell. Once in office, all they needed to do was to govern competently and the world was their oyster.