Election reflection: Labour delusions persist

Wouldn’t it be nice if Labour showed a little humility after their catastrophic election performance? Especially as they were warned that their refusal to oppose Brexit would be a disaster.

Instead Lord Adonis (pictured), failed Labour candidate for the European Parliament, writing as Andrew Adonis in the New European, launches an attack on the LibDems, asking whether they should continue to exist!

Columnist Simon Jenkins writes in similar vein in the Guardian - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/16/lib-dems-tories-split-vote-labour

Inconvenient fact: while Labour's vote collapsed, the LibDems' increased by three times more than the Tories'. But because Labour has always teamed up with the Conservatives to prevent reform of our undemocratic electoral system, the LibDems actually ended up with fewer MPs.

Adonis and Jenkins also seem unaware that the LibDems have more than 2,500 local councillors in England and Wales. Do they want them to be forced to join the Labour or Conservative parties too? And to hell with the people who voted for them? 

Oh and by the way, do they want the Greens disbanded as well, and what about other Remain parties like Plaid and the SNP? If they all packed up, the Brexiters could get on with the job of wrecking our country without anyone asking them awkward questions.

It is infantile and demeaning to blame others for your own failures. If this is the best Labour can do, they're going to be in the wilderness for a very long time.

UK election: the next government should.....do nothing

One of the more bizarre criticisms of the UK’s coalition government was that in its latter stages, it entered a ‘zombie’ phase. In other words, for once, MPs were failing to carry out their supposed duty of rushing through poorly drafted new laws which they have not read properly, and which have disastrous unforeseen consequences.

It is the kind of mentality that saw Labour inventing 3,600 crimes in 11 years, and we wonder why the prisons are overflowing. Or that had the Tory-dominated coalition mounting yet another complete reorganisation of the NHS – something David Cameron had specifically promised not to do.

What we seem to get more and more is government by vanity project. After all, how is a politician meant to get into the history books by making sure the health service or public transport ran efficiently? No, they want to be the man or woman who shook up the NHS, or built HS2.

How many times have you heard governments promising to ‘cut red tape’? But power is so delightful, and the temptation to boss other people around just too great to resist. Back in the nineteenth century when a colleague demanded that Prime Minister Lord Palmerston should pass a new piece of legislation, he replied: ‘There are too many laws already.’

Somebody once said the trouble with elections is that whoever you vote for, the government always gets in. Whichever government wins this time, expect a flood of new laws and regulations.

More on this from Simon Jenkins -

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/apr/02/government-ministers-public-servants-change-reform