To wreck one party is coincidence, to wreck two, misfortune, to wreck three… March 3, 2016

Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized

…is a line that comes to mind reading this comment from 1798Mike.

Pat Rabbitte will learn nothing from the debacle he helped to create. However let us acknowledge the unique achievements of Rabbitte, Gilmore and others: They have wrecked, dissolved or destroyed three political parties – The Workers Party, Democratic Left and now Labour – in pursuit of their own personal ambition. Of course, in the destruction of Labour they were enthusiastically aided by Howlin, Quinn, Burton, White, Kelly O’Sullivan and a herd of TDs, who totally accepted the right wing consensus on austerity.

The disgust and rejection that their behaviour in government engendered is really well illustrated by what happened in the last count in Dublin Bay North. John Lyons (AAA/PBP) had reached the really magnificent total of nearly 8500 votes and when he was eliminated, huge transfers went to Tommy Broughan, Finian McGrath end Denise Mitchell of SF. Aodhan O’Riordan received a humiliating 382 votes. Thus O’Riordan, who looked quite comfortably placed right through the counts, lost his seat. An object lesson for someone beloved by the media and regarded as being able, articulate and personable – someone who would have been an obvious candidate for the leadership of the new mini Labour Party.

Has Rabbitte taken any notice of the message sent from Dublin Bay North? Absolutely not.

It is, by any standard, an unenviable track record. The WP was left shattered – an organisation that survived but was left for a long while on the ropes. Democratic Left dissolved into the Labour Party. The Labour Party itself now at its lowest ebb in a generation or more, and worse with fewer seats and a vastly more competitive political environment than say, 1987 when it won a similar vote share but returned more or less double its current number of TDs.

Of course it is not just Rabbitte, Gilmore et al whose fingerprints are on this last. But they have to take full share of their part of the problem. And really, it comes back to vision. What vision did Rabbitte have of this state, what vision did any of them have? Nothing that would resonate in real terms with sufficient numbers of citizens. Because one can’t just bring out the usual line of ‘well, they got more TDs than the AAA-PBP or I4C or whoever’ because they now have as a group numbers far lower than a broad left of Labour caucus of TDs which includes (just about) the SDs, independent left TDs, I4C and AAA-PBP. Oh, and SF if one wishes to throw them into the mix (I do if only to irritate Rabbitte et al).

And on that last, if they bemoan the rise of SF, well, it is very much their own fault. A cohesive WP, or even DL would have, one suspects put some brake on SF by being a pole of attraction through the 1990s. Indeed vestigial as DL was as a party it did fulfil that function.

To see, though, SF steal the LPs supposedly ‘social democratic’ clothing must be bitter indeed. But the truth is they’ve done it with an effectiveness the LP could only dream of.

Still, how did it come to this? I don’t buy into the idea that for all of them Labour was the destination all along – though I do think the logic of their approach led in that direction (certainly I felt that that was the case when I left DL after a year or two of its foundation). Their path has been too chaotic, too shambolic, too inept, for it to have been worked out in any detail. Instead they strike me as people who were buffeted along by dynamics well beyond their capacity to harness. If not for the collateral damage to formations that contained (or in some cases still contain) good leftists, if not for their central role in pushing those formations rightwards, if not for the sheer lack of ability, it would be risible.

As it is I think of all those who either found themselves in reduced circumstances politically, or walked away from the battle as that self-serving band-wagon passed through and reserve my sympathy entirely for them and a working class who were sorely misserved and misrepresented by that bandwagon.