The silly behaviour stage has been reached now. Labour has been damaged dreadfully by the usurpation of the prime ministership and the defenestration of its winning Leader. The process by which this was achieved, by the steady attrition of career suppression and driving out of any popular Labour politican threatening the Brown ascension was fascinating to watch but atrocious to have suffered.
The Party has lost a generation of its middle-ground, and middle-aged, cohort. It is left with elderly men disappointed in the sacrifice of their hopes for social democractic politics and what could have been delivered for working people, in the bitter standoff between individuals rather than the rational negotiation of policies.
The coming electoral ousting of the Regime is the ousting too of this, literally old, guard and even of their permitted younger cadres, too badly tarnished with the failures of growing inequality, lack of housing, poor state education, an inadequately delivered at-point-of-use health service and, lest we forget, the letting down of a military improperly used for propaganda and aggressive war which, nevertheless, needs funding and resources just as much as would war for just and proper purposes.
The conjuring-up of the worst slump since the 'thirties and all its concomitant suffering and permanent loss of growth and employment is unique to the UK; the result of the politics of personal power across all and every aspect of government practised over all these years of the destruction of the country's social democratic party.
Social democratic votes are transferring to the one nation Conservatives and to the Liberal Democrats. The declaration that the destruction of social democracy in England will continue after electoral rejection of current Labour politics is, as Mr Cameron's Conservatives remarked, 'Truly terrifying'.
Not only will the UK be the only advanced capitalist country with such damage to its prospects. It will be alone in having no organised, alternative social democratic policies, and no organised, democratic political party through which to express valid and widespread beliefs and objectives for our society.
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I was pleased by Blair's victory in '97.
Pleased that the tired, weary, sleazy Tories were going to go. The Tories were only offering stick with us and it will all work out in the end ideas.
But nothing new. Nothing to put an end to the 80's and hope for the 90's.
Blair did.
The unforeseen consequences was the implosion of the Tory party. The scale of the defeat that they suffered left them knowing power was a decade away, if even then.
Who wants to join up for that?
The damage for the UK was no credible opposition. No checks on a government with a majority that could and did pass any law , no matter how impracticable or unworkable or ill advised, that it liked.
One law a day for every sitting day of parliament isn't it?
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