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History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme. We look back to make sense of complex and bewildering moments. As we face exactly such a time now, my mind keeps drifting back to the late 1970s and the foreboding gloom that something still opaque, still nascent was starting to cast its dark shadow over our lives and our country. Back then, what was to become known as Thatcherism, was still ill-formed, the old was not yet dead but was dying, the new had not been born but was gestating. And all around were morbid symptoms, not least Labour's Winter of Discontent.
Today it is Labour's Autumn of Discontent. It isn't just that they languish in the polls even slipping behind the Greens in fourth place in one, that the Prime Minister is the most unpopular on record, that tens of thousands have left the party, or that they face wipeout in their heartland of Wales following the Caerphilly by-election last week. It's that they have no plan to change any of this, no inspiring vision for the country, no alternative economic model, no way of running public services, no culture that creates the necessary alliances and networks for big change. The tragedy is that they actively reject the very ideas and the culture that will get them out of the dead end that they have decided to drive themselves into.
Instead, what we get is a Government on its knees to the shrine of growth, a goal over which they have little if any short or medium term influence and end up not with a mantra of long term investment in people and places, but desperate attempts to kick start an economy with tried, tested and failed remedies like "cutting business red tape", while repeating the economically illiterate mantra of the right that governments can't spend more or it will 'max out on its credit card'. We have been here before. We know where all this ends.
Having tried to blame the Conservatives for the doom and gloom, which was valid because of the economic inheritance they bestowed on Labour, but without any real narrative of hope, the Government is now starting to blame Brexit for its woes. And of course, Brexit was and is economically damaging. But we left the European Union before Keir Starmer became Prime Minister and they therefore knew about its economic consequences before they were elected. The case for rejoining the EU will grow stronger, but that will only be achieved on the basis of a consistent approach, not as a mere excuse for why this government is failing to lift people's living standards.
The Reform Backlash: Caerphilly By-Election Result Shows Nigel Farage's Party Is Much Weaker Than It Looks
Despite widespread media predictions of a Reform victory on Thursday, Farage's defeat shows his party continues to be overestimated, argues Adam Bienkov
Adam Bienkov
After little more than a year and with a huge majority, this is a Government that is now in survive the day mode and they will be shameless in pulling any rabbit, like the sudden announcement on ID cards, from any hat, to get them through the next 24 hours. Virtually none of it will be thought through or strategic and will reinforce the same self-defeating behaviour. The Government is in a nosedive of its own making.
Whether the Deputy Leadership election changes any of this remains to be seen. Lucy Powell now has her own independent mandate from the membership which she can use as radically as she decides. Given the existential crisis of the party, as the new Deputy Leader the onus is on her to push not just for reforms of the party but policies that first stop the haemorrhaging of support which has seen membership fall from over 500,000 to reportedly little more than 200,000, before credibility can be rebuilt. If she doesn't push sufficiently then what currently feels ominous can become inevitable and history will start to rhyme once mo...