Time For The Labour Party To Wrap Up Their Tent
The news that Brendan Howlin is stepping down as leader of the Labour party will be noticed by few and mourned by less. His four year tenure as leader of that party was remarkable for being utterly unremarkable.
During his time as Labour leader, Howlin attempted to re-invent himself as a radical, dynamic champion of the working class, but instead come across as bland, tired and desperate. In last week’s election his party won just six seats. That’s one less than it won in 2016 after implementing five years of savage austerity on the Irish people.
Last Friday’s electoral disaster came despite Labour being gifted an open political goal on housing, health, transport and childcare by Fine Gael - policy areas that would historically have been seen as ‘Labour Party issues’.
Since Labour went into opposition in 2016 it has also enjoyed the unquestioning support of the largest trade union in the country, regular access to the establishment media and millions of Euros in state and other funding. But none of that mattered a damn to an electorate that no longer trusts Labour.
Joan Burton during the an anti-austerity protest in Jobstown in 2014. Dozens of people were subsequently arrested for taking part in this protest, with some being eventually charged and tried for the false imprisonment of Burton and her aide.
The scale of the problems facing the party is perhaps best illustrated by the electoral performance of Joan Burton, the Labour leader that preceded Howlin. Despite being one of the highest profile political figures in Ireland, Burton was eliminated with less than 2,500 votes on the fifth count..
Burton was first elected by the people of Dublin West during the ‘Spring-Tide’, an electoral surge that saw Labour secure almost 20% of the popular vote and 33 seats in Leinster House. That victory was deemed to represent an historic breakthrough for Labour and an apparent end to the 'two party system’.
The victory was, however, squandered as Dick Spring turned the party into a political mudguard for first Fianna Fail and then Fine Gael. The subsequent election in 1997 saw the Labour vote and their number of TDs almost halved as the electorate took their revenge.
It took until 2011 for Labour to again reach the dizzying electoral heights of the ‘Spring Tide’. In the aftermath of the Troika taking effective control of the state, Labour once again won close to 20% of the popular vote and 37 seats in Leinster House, the largest number of seats in its history.
And once again Labour decided to play the role of political mudguard as it went into coalition with Fine Gael. What followed was nothing short of an undeclared war on the Irish people as taxation soared and public services were shredded to protect the banks, developers and capitalism.
For the second time in twenty years, Labour had betrayed its election promises and turned on the very people that had voted it into power. Brendan Howlin, as Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, was one of the chief architects of the austerity programme, a fact that few voters were wiling to forgive or forget last Friday.
Labour is now facing the most serious existential crisis in its 108 history. Among large swathes of the Irish working class the party is considered to be political dirt, as demonstrated by the fact that it secured just 4% of the popular vote last week.
Alan Kelly became a hate-figure for many because of the role that he played in attempting to impose an unjust water tax on families that were already being crucified by austerity.
Unlike in 1997 or 2011, Labour no longer has a monopoly of the social democracy. Sinn Féin, the Social Democrats and The Green Party have now all successfully colonised the social democratic space on the political landscape. And they are doing it better with younger, more articulate and more trusted TDs than Labour.
One of the front-runners to replace Brendan Howlin is Alan Kelly, an individual who is despised by many for the role that he played in attempting to impose the Water Tax from 2014 onward.
The fact that someone like Alan Kelly would even be considered as party leader exemplifies the distance the modern Labour has travelled from the Labour party that was founded by Connolly, O’Brien and Larkin in 1912.
The Labour party of 2020 is neither socialist nor even social democratic. It has become a pathetic caricature of what it should be. The only thing it can be trusted to do is act as a mudguard for the political establishment and Irish capitalism.
After decades of repeated betrayals of their own voters and the wider Irish working class the time has come for the party that masquerades as ‘Labour’, and that falsely claims to be the party of Connolly, to wrap up the tent and go home.