The latest media take on this election is that some major subterranean disturbance has occurred deep below the political surface, only nobody will be sure what it is until too late.   It really isn’t that difficult, if only our over-paid and often rather lazy media would look in the right direction and not avert their eyes from what is painfully obvious.   Sadly they won’t do that because it challenges their, as well as the politicians’, comfort zone.

It isn’t of course one mysterious thing that’s gone wrong, but a steady build-up in disillusionments.   And it’s pretty clear what they are:

• the recession has taken a heavy toll, and whilst the bankers are recognised to have caused it, Labour is seen to have pampered the accursed bankers at the expense of their victims – the voters.   The Government didn’t regulate the banks properly in the first place, then refused to prevent them from starving businesses and homeowners of credit, and now allows them to flaunt their multi-billion profits and outsize bonuses when everyone else is struggling.
• the let-the-markets-rip culture which Thatcher started and New Labour promoted further has knocked the stuffing out of a sense of a responsible and caring society.   It has undermined accountability and trust in leadership.   It  cultivated spin and manipulation which has fostered distrust in authority, and culminated in the horrendous expenses scandal which destroyed all confidence in the system of governance.
• the grotesque ballooning of inequality has created an elite of stratospheric wealth at the same time as an increasingly alienated under-class of some 15% or more of the population, which has spawned a poison of simmering resentment, social fragmentation, and despair.   There are 2,500,000 unemployed: how many people realise what it’s like to have to live on jobseeker’s allowance of £65.45 a week if you’re over 25 and £51.85 a week if you’re undedr 25?
• the growing centralisation of power in our society, again started by Thatcher and taken further still by Blair, has left millions of people feeling helpless and frustrated when things go wrong.   Power is now even more unequally distributed than income.   The elites in the City of London, the Big Business corporations, and the Murdoch media empire, along with No.10, monopolise most of the power today with impunity, and the powerlessness and anger felt by almost evertone else is palpable on the doorstep.

Is then New Labour’s plight now so surprising when it has discarded all the values and principles that once enabled the Labour Party faithfully to represent the needs and aspirations of a majority of people in this country?

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