1/4
On the one hand I admire those who think channeling left wing politics through Westminster is the only game worth playing.
On the other, I think it’s in danger of misconstruing where we are, where we’re going, and how much time we have to play that sort of game.
It took 18 years and a World War to go from the official founding of the Labour Party to its first spell in a minority government that could only last 9 months.
In 18 years it will be 2043 and… things will be *very* different…
2/4
…and it took a second World War and another 21 years for Attlee’s government to come to power. That’s 39 years from founding. In 39 years it will be 2064.
Have a look at 2043 and an implied 2064 below. Yes the below is a hand-wavy projection. It’s a heuristic, not a prediction
3/4
…Despite the early 20th Century being fractured by cataclysmic war it was nonetheless a period of astonishing industrial growth and technical invention.
We are just *not* in the same place. Sure, geopolitical conflict seems to be a recurring theme, but the rest of our lives are going to be a time of endings and contraction.
Unintentional things like mass extinction will grow. Some intentional things like machine learning might continue to grow despite it all. For a bit.
But…
4/4
…to play the Westminster game *conventionally* is to invest in an institution that is for another time that has gone.
I hope that Sultana, Corbyn et al are thinking clearly about this. I suspect they are not.
And I worry that their project will be like that Life of Brian scene
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