MAROONED ON A FANTASY ISLAND

The Labour party in U.K under the leadership of a pro Pakistan, pro Muslim, Jeremy Corbyn suffered the worst defeat last fortnight to the resurgent Conservatives led by Boris Johnson. This election keeps the Labour out of power since Tony Blair resigned after a decade in power on June 27, 2007.

The Labour Party is a centre-left political party in the United Kingdom that has been described as an alliance of social democrats, democratic socialists and trade unionists. The party's platform emphasises greater state intervention, social justice and strengthening workers' rights. Now if all this sounds too familiar to you it is because this is exactly what the opposition parties in general and the Congress in particular is in India today. Labour’s pro- Pakistan, pro-Muslim line on Kashmir looks very much similar to the Congress stand and its refusal to identify the religion of terror too follows Congress lines. Now as we are living in the same world, with almost the same challenges of terrorism and illegal immigrants, any party which fails to identify these challenges and believes in minority appeasement as its USP to gain votes, is bound to share the same fate.    

Even the successful Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair has warned the defeated British Labour Party it will remain "marooned on fantasy island" if it doesn't change course from Jeremy Corbyn's hard-left socialism, which voters emphatically rejected.

The crumbling of the red wall - seats in the north and midlands, including Blair’s own constituency Sedgefield - was "no ordinary defeat" but "a moment in history" he added.

Both Labour in the U.K and Congress in India have to understand that the voters are against socialism. Congress’s promise of Rs. 6000 per month as Uniform Basic Income, loan waivers to farmers, free electricity and Labour's "wish-list" manifesto filled with unbelievable promises of "everything for free" including fibre broadband connections to everyone's house are dreams which the voters of today simply refuse to see. Both these parties have to leave their “fantasy islands” and eventually migrate to the mainland of reality. 

In a press interview Tony Blair said that under Corbyn, "the takeover of the Labour Party by the far left turned it into a glorified protest movement, with cult trimmings, utterly incapable of being a credible government". Now does that not sound familiar once again? This is what Mamta Banerjee is doing in West Bengal, Arvind Kejriwal is doing in Delhi and Kamalnath and Ghelot in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan respectively. Agitating in the streets against the Central Government is not the job of the State Governments and their Chief Ministers. They had representatives in both the houses of parliament and they have made their points and failed to convince the majority. Laws have been passed and States have to implement them without exceptions.

In the same interview Blair likened Labour to a football team, "whose striker was directionally oblivious, its midfield comatose, the defence absent in the stand chatting to a small portion of the fans and its goalkeeper behind the net re-tweeting a clip of his one save in a 9-0 thrashing." And again you see the familiarity, the Congress soft power centres re-tweeting and posting falsehood about Article 370 and Kashmir, about Citizenship Amendment Bill, about the historic legal culmination of the Ayodhya dispute and about Triple Talaq! In fact it is Pakistan which is using their posts to make their case in the international arena!! How do they intend to win back the confidence of their electorate when all they are doing is providing fuel to the enemies of our nation?

Unlike the U.S.A, both India and U.K operate a “first past the post” electoral system, in which parliamentary seats are awarded to the candidate who wins the most votes in each individual race, rather than by proportion of the total national vote. When you don’t have two parties, the first-past-the-post system is really bad at translating voter beliefs into seats. So while BJP in the 2019 General elections won 303 seats and its NDA alliance won 353, as against Congress’s 52 and its UPA alliance’s 91, BJP’s vote share was only 37.4% and NDA’s 45%. Now the opposition is out there crying hoarse that though BJP has a brute majority and can get all that is in its wish list passed by both the houses of parliament, they only represent 37.4% of the electorate and thereby 62.6% are not with them! By this measure Congress has only 19.5% of vote share and so 80.5% of the electorate are not with them!

This weakness was on display in the most recent U.K election, in which the roughly half of the electorate who oppose leaving the European Union found that their votes had only a fraction of the power that votes for the pro-Brexit Conservatives did.

While in theory the Labour and the Liberal Democrats in U.K and the Congress and the rest of the opposition may have a point but such arguments will not stop the Narendra Modis and the Boris Johnsons of this world from going ahead with their pre announced and well planned agenda. Their voters voted for them knowing fully well what they expected them to deliver, and they are delivering exactly that. The Labour and the Congress have to get their act together and stitch a worthy alternative and tell a believable story.  Right now I will have to give it to Tony Blair, he has made the correct diagnosis – these parties are "marooned on fantasy island". I will go a step ahead and say that they are trying to paint on a white canvas with invisible colours depicting good old days, which are never going to return for them as they have failed to pick the pulse of their nations.