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Election news: aftermath.

“Nothing but a battle lost can be half so melancholy as a battle won,” said Wellington after Waterloo. Unless it’s a battle won against Labour, that is, in which case the the joy should be abounding.

Labour have had a full week to absorb the shock of their election defeat but they’re going to need more than that to work out why they lost even though everyone else already knows full well: wrong policies, wrong people.

Miliband was hopeless as a leader: a left-wing intellectual surrounded by people who acted like “mediaeval courtiers” according to Dan Hodges, bolstering his delusion that everything was running in Labour’s way; a man so badly advised and so abstracted from everyday concerns that he thought having his pledges carved in a block of stone would make him appear serious rather than an embarrassment, and that scurrying off to have that interview with the Brand buffoon would secure him the youth vote.

Labour complain about the right-wing press and Tory propaganda, but even the media were content to keep repeating the left’s lies about the “bedroom tax” and the awfulness of austerity. No one can say the BBC didn’t do its part in promoting the Labour campaign. They were happy to attack Ukip and Farage wherever possible and quiz Cameron about foodbanks all day.

What they didn’t factor in was the general public. As it turned out, the public accepted (unlike people such as Len McCluskey) that the debt and the deficit existed, were a result of the last Labour government, and needed dealing with. They also recognised that the economy was starting to recover, employment was increasing, unemployment decreasing, and wages beginning to rise. They saw no reason to endanger this recovery by electing the same bunch of incompetents who caused the crash in the first place.

Now the battlefield is covered with the corpses of political careers, and possibly parties (whither the LibDems?). Labour are trying to find a leader who can gather the dead from the field and put stakes through the hearts of those representing its past. At the same time they’ve got to work out what’s the point of a party originally set up to represent a class that no longer exists, with a philosophy that has not and can never work, and which the populace generally do not want. Those who have put themselves up for election (self-eliminating swiftly and with no chance of resurrection like Farage) are tenth raters who have nothing to offer but personal ambition and terminal indistinction.

Back in the political mansion, of course, Cameron and his team, unencumbered by the squishy obstructionism of the LibDems, are busy getting on with the job in hand – and working out how to keep us in the EU. The field may be heaped with the corpses of the enemy but not all the battles have been won.

Michael Blackburn.

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