I found this article, if nothing else, useful for helping piece together the years when I’d more or less abandoned any interest in British parliamentary politics, from about 2004 (post-Iraq throwing in the towel) to the 2010 election (gloomy slow return to consciousness at having to countenance, once more, the 80s demonologies). I voted – usually for Labour – throughout that time, but that was mostly all I did.
What happened in those missing years to a seemingly moribund party? The process described repeatedly here is the ‘hollowing out’ of Labour, the widening gap between voters and leadership, and the narrowing of strategy and vision down to personal ambition and a short-sighted obsession with ‘keeping the machine going’. Okay. God knows that’s what it looked like from the outside too.
The other striking thing about this is that Cowley’s subjects – young bright 90s-vintage graduates offered immediate paths to the top – describe themselves and are described as never having had to fight politically. Which again confirms suspicions and explains some things. I’ve been looking on this past year and almost marvelling – the oatmeal blandness of Burnham and Cooper, the disconnected coups and counter-coups, the lurching pound-shop-Kinnock catastrophe that is the Owen Smith campaign – just wondering why they couldn’t seem to get it together, couldn’t structure a coherent alternative, couldn’t organise across factions, just how come they were so bad at this. “The Golden Generation never had to fight.” Well, there we go.
