Foundation and Labour

If the great science fiction author Isaac Asimov had been born about fifty years later than he was, and lived in England, I suspect he might have written his Foundation and Empire episode that revolves around General Bel Riose with this nation's Labour party in mind.

In that story, a logic truth table demonstrated that, whatever combination of emperor and general(s) existed at the time, because of the social and galactic structure of the period, the decaying old empire would fail to defeat the Foundation.

Running the same kind of exercise with the Labour party, its current leader at any time, and the 'generals' waiting to make a name for themselves so that each of them could push to become the party's next leader, I found that a more elaborate but again consistent truth table emerged. The main difference here was that there would be several changes of party leader, both in and out of government, during the decade that was to follow.

The details are too involved to try to explain here – it would make for long and (probably) tedious reading for most, and some of it isn't easy to explain in words or diagrams anyway. All one needs to do is think about how the party was faring, in government, under Tony Blair ten years ago, and all that has happened since.

That starts with the Gordon Brown moves to oust Blair and take over, the inevitable failure to win the (long-awaited) next national election – and the almost equally inevitable failure to have gone for an election much earlier, when he might have succeeded – then passing through the Ed Miliband era (and the Union manipulations to get their de jure puppet to succeed Brown).

The big Unions' bosses' failure to do what I thought they might – force a replacement of Miliband at or by the autumn 2013 Labour party conference – meant that Labour was almost certainly not going to be forming the next government. Although I kept my powder comparatively dry in public, I did occasionally drop hints to trusted people in conversation during the eighteen months that followed. I knew, or at least strongly suspected at first, when I wasn't yet certain.

Incidentally, if they had engineered a change of leader (which would have been easy to arrange, by putting Ed-M in a situation where he'd have resigned: he almost certainly couldn't have been ousted), with the possible replacements realistically in the field at the time, that would have generated a whole new 'branch-off' for my logic table. Those could have been interesting times!

A Miliband-led Labour party was bound to be going nowhere, as we all knew he was incapable of presenting an electable face to the nation, either personally or party-wide, with the results we saw recently at the General Election just two months ago as I write this.

All of this led to the current party leadership election: a long, drawn-out process lasting a full four months from May to September. Now they have four contenders from across Labour's (not exactly unlimited) part of the political spectrum. The truth table shows that, because of their inherent nature, the party will be extremely unlikely to elect anyone on the so-called 'Blairite' wing of the party – which is the only potentially winning kind of contender.

No: their Foundation and Labour deduced positioning means that they will, whatever happens, head in the opposite direction when it comes down to the wire in selecting their new leader. They will repeat the mistakes of the recent past, again strongly aided by the Communist-run big Unions whose financial backing is essential to Labour having any election fighting funds anyway.

All this was predictable, and of course some of us foresaw it long ago. It is the beginning of the possible end of the Labour party – though that will depend on when the Unions' other failure to do what at least one of their bosses had been planning isn't revived. That was to either create a new Left-wing party or (more likely) to promote an existing one, such as the Socialist Workers' Party (SWP), as a replacement for Labour.

I have a feeling that the wind isn't blowing in a favourable direction for that just yet, so the Communists running most of this country's big Unions are no doubt finding it necessary to stay their hands for the time being, and play the game of getting involved in Labour's current leadership contest – hence UNITE's support for outright lefty Jeremy Corbyn. Yes, it's probably just tokenism, as I am sure they still have those other plans – which I have of course accounted for in my tables.

Overall, it is an interesting time, and exactly as was predicted by events in recent times when applied to my 'logic modelling'. The Labour party's future existence will depend upon the outcome of this leadership contest (including, to a lesser extent, the deputy leader election) and the way the wind blows thereafter.

While the time is not yet ripe to kill off Labour and heavily promote its replacement (probably the SWP) then it will limp on in opposition. One day, though, that situation is likely to change. That day is when a part of my modelling is brought into out the daylight for the first time since it was constructed...