This is a cross-post from The Gerasites by Jake Wilde
Ian Dunt’s swift analysis of the 5 May elections is excellent. His description of the Labour Party as “the walking dead, aimlessly trundling on, a parody of political life” is as accurate as it is brutal. Like all good writing, it got me thinking. Firstly about the counterfactual: what if ithad been a wipeout, a disaster, a game-changer? And secondly where does this zombie Labour Party stagger off to next.
(How counterfactual the counterfactual is does depend where you live. If that happens to be Scotland then, as a Labour Party member or supporter, you may now aspire to be the undead as opposed to being the actual dead. Third place. In Scotland. I am not going to attempt an in depth analysis here but the most obvious conclusion is that there’s only one question that matters in Scotland – the SNP answer it unequivocally one way, the Tories unequivocally the other way and Labour, well Labour don’t.)
To return to the unfulfilled worst case scenario Ian Dunt suggests that:
“A catastrophic result might – just might – have got some Corbyn supporters to think again. Maybe not enough for a leadership challenge in which he’d lose the internal vote, but enough to precipitate that happening the next time there was evidence of how badly he was doing. It could have been the beginning of the end.”
Could Labour under these circumstances, as Ian suggests, have been brought back from the dead? The people behind Corbyn, the hard-core activist layer who may or may not do very much work for the actual Labour Party, would be untroubled by an apocalyptic outcome. They would find “reasons” to explain it as they have with every opinion poll that tells them what the rest of the population already know. Eventually the finger of blame would be firmly pointed to others in the Party – as it was being ahead of and even on polling day – and in the direction of the media.
Do read the rest of Jake’s post here
