These are questions well worth asking, if only because the Labour Party is generally regarded as the Official Opposition to the Government in Parliament. Or is it?

The Labour Party is supposedly an established independent political party like the Conservative or Liberal Democrat Party and should not to be confused with the Official Parliamentary Opposition though each might claim to be part and parcel of each other. The point I’m getting at is this, how much do we hear about the Labour Party itself these days because it’s most certainly the case that when this Party is referred to in the news media what they actually mean by it is The Parliamentary Labour Party. That is, Ed Miliband and his associates sitting in the House of Commons or Lords. But then again I ask, what is their connection to the Labour Party itself?

Indeed, it is again well worth asking what the Labour Party actually is and why it seems to be such a mysterious entity to the public at national level because, to all intents and purposes, its role and character seems to have been usurped, firstly by its Members of Parliament and more importantly by the Leader of the Opposition to give Ed Miliband his formal title and members of his Shadow Cabinet. It is this Leader and his Shadow Cabinet who have, to all intents and purposes, usurped the name of the Labour Party. They have ‘become’ The Labour Party in the mind of the public! The question then becomes, how representative are they of the Labour Party itself and again, what the hell IS this Party.

When all the world was young, and actually that wasn’t so long ago in the fifties, sixties and seventies, most people whether active in politics or not had heard of a Labour Party. It had an Executive whose members were democratically elected by the free vote of local branches in towns and cities up and down the country along with a trades union input. This Labour Party Executive was an important body that once, together with the trades union movement, dominated the annual Labour Party Conference with either an existing Labour Government or more usually Labour in Opposition, in a subsidiary role. In short, the role of party members through its branches and up through its Executive was the dominant force of the Party, their beliefs and values the driving force of its Parliamentary representatives. Today, this is most definitely no longer the case. The importance of its membership, branches and Executive have all but vanished.

There has been a profound change. The role of the Labour Party itself, that is the views of its members has in practical terms been usurped by its Parliamentary leader and ‘Shadow Cabinet’, a structural process that began mainly from the time of Neil Kinnock and subsumed within the mind of the public by long term media manipulation. The effect of this takeover to all intents and purposes is that the Party membership itself is without political voice and its structure virtually castrated. Indeed to most people it no longer exists. So that when you think ‘Labour’ these days you either think Gordon Brown or Ed Miliband… and what a thought that is! The many hundreds of thousands of people who were once local party enthusiasts are gone. It is the Parliamentary Party that sets its political policies and tone, not its Executive and certainly no longer its members.

Once these members were often socialist. They believed in its ideas and ideals. The leaders of the Parliamentary Party and their cronies have long abandoned such beliefs that were the mainstay of the great immediate Post-war Labour Government of Clement Atlee. Socialism then was the watchword of both the Party and its Parliamentary representation. The latter clearly dominated by the former. The slow, gradual reversal of roles was first begun by Hugh Gaitskell and reached its climax under Tony Blair when the role of the Party itself, its branches and its Executive as a political force was all but wiped out and its role taken over by the Parliamentary Party.

In the 1950s and 60s the Labour Party itself had a ‘left and a ‘right’ wing of membership but its Executive was ‘left’ leaning. Its Parliamentary representation was broadly left-centrist. During the immediate post-war period party membership was mainly made up of the industrial working class and, through trades union representation, the Parliamentary Party included many former manual workers. The political values of both were broadly socialist. They firmly believed in a National Health Service, in the public ownership of a broad swathe of services from public utilities such as water, electricity and gas to transportation facilities such as the railways, aviation and buses. This belief in socialist values incorporated free primary, secondary and higher education and went hand in hand with a concern for social equality and a kind of universal egalitarianism. Things began to change in the 1970s and 80s. The core belief in socialism by the Party itself steadily faded and along with it the central driving political values of the Party, public ownership and nationalization of the utilities. The impetus for this abandonment was the leadership of the Parliamentary Party whose character was changing. The working men and women of the post-war period were being replaced in Parliament by people from other professions such as lawyers, accountants and businessmen.   The working class with its socialist values and belief in a universalized equality was replaced over a period of some thirty years by men and women with essentially middle class values.          

Working class activist Party membership fell away, both under the effect of the middle class moving into the Party and trades union bureaucratic incursion. A process reflected in the fast growing change in the social character of Parliamentary party representation where it became comprehensively middle class so that by the 1980s, socialism, nationalization and a desire for social equality, already now muted, was finally dropped. The architect for this wholesale abandonment of socialism being Neil Kinnock. From the 1980s to the mid- 90s the process continued unabated. The Parliamentary Labour Party and the Trades Union Movement, wilting and partly destroyed under the attacks of nouveau-right Thatcher Toryism, instead of rediscovering its old values and beliefs, finally ditched socialism once and for all under the scorn and hatred of the Murdoch press and took up a fully-fledged belief in Social Democracy. The views of public ownership and social equality became anathema and an object of ridicule. Already dominated by a Parliamentary leadership whose views had become synonymous with private ownership and enterprise, rampant personal wealth creation, fee paying higher education, the loss of maintenance grants for students and the profit motive as a sole governing force in business activity, Labour Party membership fell into steep decline, the social and political character of its Executive falling under the control of different people who believed in different things.

The old Labour Party died. It was replaced by a new infusion of middle class men with middle class values and became The New Labour Party or New Labour, dominated now by men such as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Peter Mandelson all of whom were responsible for infusing the Party with new values. What was contemptuously regarded as Old Labour meant people with outdated anachronistic beliefs such as fairness and equality. The only room for these people was a place in the corner or the butt of a joke. The new fresh faces were there to stay. Their moment of triumph came in New Labour’s stunning victory of the l997 General Election, its architect being Peter Mandelson, and the rise to power of Tony Blair’s Government of private enterprise and above all the financial services industry, based primarily on investment banking and the insurance services. Not a word about socialism, by now thoroughly old hat and dirty. No repeal of Margaret Thatcher’s well hated anti-trades union legislation, no repeal of Michael Howard’s deeply reactionary Criminal Justice Bill of 1994, no equalizing modernization of the Criminal Justice System that allowed so many ghastly miscarriages of justice both under the Callaghan and Thatcher Governments. Instead a total relaxation of controls regulating financial activity, business practice and immigration.

As we now know, the relaxation of immigration control had the effect of allowing into the UK three to four million immigrants from Asia and an additional million from East Europe. A consequence of the former has led to a serious and disturbing cultural change in the character of British society along with many unwanted problems and violence. For some reason, generally unknown, New Labour Home Secretaries allowed Muslim hate preachers to publically denigrate British people of other faiths and values, along with women, unchecked and unhindered. More important however was that in the final years of the New Labour Government led by Gordon Brown, the now out of control financial services sector and a totally relaxed taxation regime allowed a vast and contemptuous fraud and illegality to be perpetrated by the banking system and an equally contemptuous taxation avoidance regime to be perpetrated on Government and its Exchequer by multinational corporations and their financial advisors.

And the general consequences of all this? Under the auspices of New Labour Government there was a near collapse of the banking system causing a gigantic social debt to be placed on the poorest elements in our society. And the means for its payment? Firstly under New Labour an attack on the Welfare State the Party had once set up in the face of terrible social deprivation and inequality back in the days when it cared about such things. Secondly the continuation of such an attack by the Tories and Liberal Democrats that followed them in Government.

In short, Tony Blair’s so called New Labour Government of Social Democracy led to the despoiling of what was once a fine cultural harmony and a generalised lowering of living standards for the poorest in our society. The Labour Party became New Labour. Its beliefs and values changed with the change of its membership and with it the structure of the Party itself. The Labour Party as a Party today barely exists. It has no youth movement, and branch membership has all but imploded. No-one knows who its Executive is anymore, when they meet and what they stand for, except that they almost certainly reflect the views of the Labour opposition in Parliament and its Shadow Government in particular. No discord if you please. In short an independent Labour Party Executive no longer exists and any say its membership has is artificial and manufactured. Worse still, the decisions of its annual conference are likewise artificial and manufactured. There’s no room for any divergence of view as been shown recently when conference stewards recently surrounded an old man representing somewhere or other and bundled him out the hall. A bit like Gordon Brown being caught on camera telling a colleague that an elderly woman who’d asked him a question was ‘ignorant’!

With Gordon Brown putting millions of Britain’s poorest people, from workers and the unemployed to pensioners and savers, into the hands of financial speculators, crooks and exploitative moneylenders you’d have thought that the Labour Party couldn’t sink any lower. But then who’d actually heard of the Labour Party itself during his wretched years in office? Come to think of it for that matter who’d actually heard much about the Labour Party during Tony Blair’s preceding years in power? The Iraq War… the failure to control, or perhaps rather-more encourage mass Asian and Polish immigration… the failure to repeal Thatcher’s anti-trades union legislation… the rise of the Islamic hate preachers… the failure to deal with unemployment and countless other issues the Labour Party of old would have opened its mouth about but instead, time after time on so many of these things, a deafening silence. Apart from a bit of well controlled chatter around Annual Conference time the Party itself is to all intents and purposes a dead dog.

But then I have to ask, do you think that after Gordon Brown, things could get any worse? That what is these days is generally thought of as The Labour Party, sorry, New Labour, could stoop any lower? Alas, the answer is yes. Under Gordon the Labour Party totally abandoned any concern for working people and the poor. Now, in the hands of its new leader, instead of promising to reverse the current Tory-Lib Dem Coalition attack on the Welfare State, it’s publically voiced an intention to maintain it, even take it a step further if it wins the next General Election! Maintain the visceral means tested attack on Disability Living Payments that they themselves began before the Coalition Government took power, continue with the reduction of Child Benefit Payments and cut the Winter Fuel Payment for over six hundred thousand people! In other words maintain the Tory directed attack on the poor.     

So instead of rolling back the Tory attack on the Welfare State by making the poor pay for a crisis caused by the regime of financial speculators and crooks set up and running by the last Labour Government, something that surely would have been fought for by the old Labour Party, Ed Miliband wants to keep it going. That raises a serious question. With the total demise of Labour as a political party IS THERE NOW ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THEM AND THE TORIES? AND JUST AS BAD, IS THERE ANY REAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN LABOUR AND THE LIBERAL DEMOCRATS? Answer, nothing important that I can think of. There is of course plenty of demonstrable Miliband enthusiasm, along with that of his current Treasury chatterbox Ed Balls, for attacking the Coalition, but if you consider it all carefully it amounts to practically nothing. There are no major policy differences, just a bit of around the edge trimming and smoothing out. Like cutting some of the fat off the old Tory meat. The meat’s still the same only Miliband just wants it to taste a bit better. Make the attack on the poor and the Welfare state a little more palatable. Easier to swallow.

In short the three main political parties all stand for the same thing. There’s no real, no fundamental difference between them. No real opposition from a supposed Official Opposition. So how healthy is that for democratic government when they all believe in the same thing? Answer, it’s thoroughly unhealthy. It’s as if modern parliamentary democracy has collapsed. Died a death with the demise of the Labour Party itself. When the party leaders chatter they all chatter the same way and about the same thing. They talk the same language. Yes, and they even sound the same!

Fear not however. There’s change on the way! Not from anywhere around Labour I have to say but from much further right. New kid on the block Nigel Farage and UKIP are dragging the Tory Party itself, its electorate and a fair section of its back-bench Members of Parliament away from what was once traditional Toryism to somewhere different. With David Cameron now taking his Party into the center ground and Ed Miliband likewise with Labour the two could meet somewhere on the quiet and play Coalition kiss-kiss again with poor old Cleggy out in the cold. Fearsome Farage leading Tory anti-Europe politics from the right with a Cameron-Miliband National Coalition of Tory-Lab Democrats forming Government at the center! A kind of ‘socially responsible national Government. There to save the ‘nation’ don’t you know!

Forget the old Tory Party. Most of it’s sunk under Gay Marriage and Europe and going to UKIP. The rump under Cameron is fast remaking itself as a socially responsible crew and now cuddling with Labour lads who never knew the meaning of social equality let alone socialism, that old long forgotten idea of a thousand years back!

Yes, forget the old Tory Party… And if you vote Labour at the next General Election what you’ll actually be voting for is the New Tory Party, with plenty more kicks up the arse for the poor. That’s what happened to the Labour Party. It took a cyanide pill and became fully fledged NewTory. But please, don’t tell anyone because the rascals doing it all haven’t quite finished pulling the wool yet.

That’s it then. In such a brief space of time a once great political party, forged in the fires of poverty and deprivation, a once great campaigning party for equality and justice, for the betterment of the conditions of life for all working men and women, allowed itself to be poisoned by treacherous values. Taken over and turned into something utterly opposed to what it once was until it died a miserable death of non-existence or better still, contempt from those still old enough to remember. A real shaming of the honor and sacrifices of those who once made it a great and noble creation. Gave us free health care for all and working lives that working men could be proud of.     

So goodbye Labour. Shame you forgot how fine you once were and how you once cared about ordinary people, not just the rich.