A Warning From History

And all the clouds, that lour'd upon our house,
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.

If any of you witnessed this week’s Prime Minister’s Question Time, you’ll have been left with a keen sense of just how sky-high expectations are of our president-elect. In fact the flood of congratulatory, come adulatory statements from Labour Party front and backbenchers were ever-so-slightly cringeworthy.

Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;

Even Prime Minister Gordon Brown joined in lavishing BO with words of praise, and I'm sure similar statements will have been made in parliamentary pits throughout the world. Apparently, the great sigh of relief could be heard from space.

Our stern alarums chang'd to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.

It may all be true, perhaps...

Grim-visag'd war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front;

But, victory shouldn’t taste as sour as it did last Tuesday, by Wednesday progressives were given a stark and timely reminder of just how far we had left to travel...

- 60 million adults in this country were prepared for an Alaskan with a double digit IQ to become the most powerful person on earth.
- Potentially, a majority of voters in one of our united states were happy to be represented by a federally convicted criminal.
- Bachman re-elected.
- Saxby Chambliss and Norm Coleman still have extremely good chances of holding onto their Senate seats, etc. etc.
- but the most disingenuous action by members of the US electorate, happened in my own state with California’s passing of Prop 8.

Those are just a few of the reasons I didn’t celebrate as long as I would’ve liked on Wednesday, but the main reason my celebrations were tempered was because I’ve experienced a sensation like this before. No, not the election of an African American as President, but that which Barack Obama represents for the rest of us -- hope.

Hope that we can bring about real change.

Hope that we can believe in our government.

Hope that we can believe in our democracy.

Hope that we can finally believe in our President - Barack Obama.

Hope, that we finally have a leader worthy of leading us.

Consider this my warning from history if you like...

Some of my compatriots will remember having a similar sensation on a lavish spring morning back in ‘97. It was a fine time, everything was going to be OK, Tony would stand for social justice, he was smart like BO, but then again most of our Pms are, we’ve never suffered like you poor sods and the dumbing down of our elected officials, sure a few idiots slipped in, but none of them would reach the heights of Prime Minister. Perhaps Oxford educated Ted Heath was the closest we came to ‘I’d like to have a beer with him’ PM, but you really wouldn‘t be wanting to ‘have a beer’ with the rest of them!

Blair was legally trained like BO, he also assumed power at 46 like BO, but that’s where the similarities stop, Blair never knew what a food stamp looked like, he came from a privileged background.

Unlike, the speed in which those dark conservative clouds that had lowered upon our house found themselves in the deep bosom of the ocean buried, the let down wasn’t at all that quick, it was a long slow painful process of disillusionment. A lot had been done in the name of power, the marginalizing of union power within the labour party, the lurch to the center, then the quick-step right (wtf is with this Center-Right bollocks anyway?), the rapid distancing from the party’s socialist roots, socialism became a dirty word very quickly under Blair, they dropped the singing of ’the Marseilles’ at Labour Party conferences faster than you could say Chairman Peter Mandellson. They moved from beer to white wine spritzers, from sandwich meetings to cheese(y) soirées.
The heart of Blair’s Labour Party was not to be found in the embattled working men’s clubs of the north, but the swanky wine bars of Islington. As the mere inference of toil was to be avoided, so the working-class were now referred to as the middle-class, (familiar?) the Labour Party no longer perspired, it aspired.

Many of the loyal ‘old-guard’ (read honest brokers) were left confused, caught in a whirlwind of Westminster whiz kids, they were left to look and feel awkward. Their tatty jackets, leather elbow patches and polyester ties were replaced on the back benches by custom cut suits, leather soles, and silk waist coats. Backbench Labour MPs no longer emitted a comforting tang of Old Spice, stale tobacco and too many left-wing meetings, but a sickly smug scent of Paco Rabanne and too many potpourri fragranced air fresheners.

After 300 years of Thatcher and followers of her ism, Brits had actually began to believe the grand conservative lie, that they were a nation of 'center-right' voters (familiar?). Blair’s Labour Party looked (and smelt) more Tory than the Tories, but sadly, it was no camouflage, it was the surreal thing, and it had all been done in the name of getting elected. What had began as the party adopting an electable (read Tory) façade, ended with the party adopting their f*&*#d up policies too.

We’d been out of power and in the political wilderness for so long we were ready to believe/become anything to capture it. I mean for all we knew this was what we had to do, this was how political party’s won power, this was necessary this was called compromise, but this was bullshit.

I’m not suggesting that this is what a Barack Obama administration will become, in fact Barack Obama's lack of Washington exposure will surely work in his favor, he is clearly a grounded human being, but I can’t say that I haven’t seen reason to question, because I have.

Call it a warning from history if you like, but please fellow progressives keep your eyes open, stay true to your beliefs, and remember that the change we need is in government, not in the way we see our government.

If something looks, smells and feels like a Republican policy, in my experience it usually means that it is a Republican policy.

Don’t be too hard on me, I’m just sayin’...