Chapter 23 Party PoliticsFuture of Swedish Labour Party; Future middle class dinner parties; New voters; Force of Law and Law of Force; Angry young men.
Though we label it forecast, yet in reality it is but a speculation. Its purpose is not to predict but to portray something of the forces at work and the manner in which their actions, reactions and resultants will spiral off into the real world of votes and parliaments.Of ‘extra-parliamentary’ forces little has been said. So it was in Germany in the 1930s and the parallels run altogether too close for our children’s comfort.
But let us play out our hand. Like the theoretical scientist who deems it helpful in his search for truth to conduct his thought experiments, so we might find some succour in our game. Perhaps we will come to understand better the forces of the currents and the tides.
Perhaps such knowledge will help us to ward off the lightning thrusts of this EuroLaw or that EuroBank and to keep our distance from the EuroInfantry with their EuroDraft or the EuroPirates with their EuroBurglars. Perhaps some little thing might have some mighty consequences of which we can scarcely conceive? Ignorance of ones own ignorance is Man’s greatest folly.
Consider for instance the Swedish Labour Party. The substantial green element within the party will try to arrest their decline by pushing them into the Ideologue camp on a Green Populism platform. They will meet with considerable resistance from the grey establishment but will make ground with the support of the pragmatists. Many will abandon the party for the Green Party.
Meanwhile the Conservative Party propaganda will be taking its toll as it hits out at collectivism and stridently proclaims a new Randian vision of individualism. Dismantling the corporate state will be a popular song and many will follow this pied piper.
As the old Labour coalition crumbles, others will perhaps find their way back to a revitalised Farmers Party, calling themselves Rural Democrats or some such. Farmers and fishermen unite! Without food you town dwellers are nothing!
Still others may discover their grandparents’ religion and move across to the Christian Democrats.
The working classes meanwhile - the bedrock of the Labour Party coalition - were they to vote their self-interest, would leverage up on the coming scarcity of supply in the wage labour market. They will shift their wage bargaining and solidarity politics onto the shoulders of a vigorous expanding Communist Party, particularly if this discards nineteenth century marxism for twentieth century shavian distribution socialism as it approaches the twenty first century. This is after all the direction of economic democracy in China and the consequence of political democracy in glasnost Russia.
Carlsson might manage to rally the troops with brave attempts to out-tory the tories, but the evidence of the British electorate would suggest that the Conservative Party privatises better than the Labour Party because it can persuade itself to really believe. Given the choice between Thatcherism by Thatcher’s Conservatives or half-baked Thatcherism by revisionist Labour power bosses, electors seem to prefer their medicine undiluted.
Meanwhile the suburban chic will shift away from the Liberals and will attach themselves to either the Hard Right Tories or the Soft Left Greens. Suburban dinner parties will no longer be host to gentle conversations on the Liberal Party’s approach to funding child care, but will resound with the clash of a brash shallow greed ethic disguised as individualism and middle class morality dressed up in Green clothing.
The competition for the ladies eye will be as keen as ever. Only the style and substance of the debate will alter. The purpose of dinner party politics will be unchanged. But nonetheless it will be here that radical collectivist and individualist agendas will be moulded into the shape of party policy by the sharp incisive cutting edge of middle class feminine sensitivities.
New voters coming of age during the nineteen nineties will show less and less interest in the surface ripples of the party political pond. The young men brought up in the Swedish working class neighbourhoods will be the first to see through the representative democracy sham. They will gaze directly at the candle caring little for the shadows on the wall.
The force of law will be confronted repeatedly by the law of force. The tailored suit will mark a man out. Property and conspicuous wealth will be seen as ‘ours’ by right. The sofas will start to empty as the poverty begins to bite, and the taverns will echo once again to the urgent tumult of angry men out for revenge and booty.
These men will see quite clearly that the political mechanism is being crushed by the power of the industrial, sanctions, administration and education mechanisms, for it will be their own families, their women and their children who they see being squeezed into slavery and despair by the lawyers and the clerks as they carry out their invisible orders.
These men will seek out the means to protect themselves and their own as the financial mechanism attempts to invade their land and suppress their rebellion by tightening the wheels and sharpening the teeth of the megamachine.
But by then the guns will be out of their holsters and the soldiers will be on red alert as ready to march against the enemy within as the enemy without. Unlikely? Impossible? Never heard of such a thing?
Civilization is an awfully fragile thing. The rule of law has never overruled the iron law of justice. Always ‘the haves’ are found out in the end and laws are seen for what they have become, devices for legitimizing injustice.