The Conservatives are the natural party of government

Labour has never been the “natural party of government” in this country. Harold Wilson’s claim was based on only one resounding election success under his leadership. Tony Blair, like him or loathe him, was perhaps a natural prime minister, the only Labour leader who was able to reach out beyond Labour’s comfort zones and into the socio-economic parts of Britain without which you cannot command a sustainable majority. Even in the face of his Iraq horror show, Blair led his party to its third comfortable election success.

Scotland is now pro-nationalist, and even perhaps willing to vote for independence in a year or two’s time. It has long been another country in political terms too. While it was revolting over the poll tax, England considered the mild radicalism of a Welsh Labour leader and, shyly, voted for John Major’s Conservative Party. Yesterday the Tories got a majority after hurting poorer “hard working” families for five years while those not in need of in-work welfare benefits feared that the Labour Party would somehow jeopardise the flimsy certainties of what, statistically at least, is an economic recovery.

The NHS is the exception to the rule, the last surviving nationalised industry and one that, broadly speaking, is popular. Labour may have won the 1945 election because its promise to introduce socialised medicine was the most believable, but after only six years in office it was out for another 13. Labour’s two election victories in 1974 were barely deserving of the name. The Labour government that lost office in 1979 had essentially been a minority one for most of its rule.

Now Labour has to consider whether a more authentically social justice and home rule message in Scotland and Wales will remotely help it in England (where Westminster elections, after all, are decided). To paraphrase Neil Kinnock, if you think that that is right, then go into the semi-detached homes of people struggling to pay their mortgage in the south of England and “tell it there, tell it there.”

The United Kingdom is under threat, and the very self-serving economic reasons why we joined the Common Market are increasingly being seen in England as not being upheld by the EU today. What will Labour do next? A lurch to the left will this time definitely consign it to the dustbin of history. There will be no electoral reform to save it, while Labour has lost Scotland (and its parliamentary support) whether it becomes an independent sovereign country or not. To be elected and then to govern in England will be impossible for Labour without being able to both appeal to aspiration and not somehow abandoning its so-called electoral base. In the 2015 election Labour absurdly pandered to that base without offering anything more than half-hearted apologies for past errors and an unconvincing line on deficit and debt reduction. The outcome was its third worst General Election result since 1935.

The recession was a fork in the road. In this election Labour tried to plough down the middle by refusing to say it had overspent in the last government whilst claiming it would reduce the deficit faster, but somehow more fairly, in the next. Electing a new leader who mouths the same (and, ironically, non-inclusive) platitudes about hard working families will not cut it, in England or Scotland. Something major needs to be tried. Reaching out to everybody, right across the Union, is an even taller order right now. Perhaps more honesty would help. If Scotland hasn’t already left the building by the time of the next Westminster election, tell voters that you will work with the SNP precisely to save the Union, that we should stay in the EU for the sake of jobs and, yes, for the sake of political stability across Europe, and that ever-expanding health and welfare budgets are not the answer. Otherwise, just carry on regardless.

Shaw’s Major Barbara at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin

“Major Barbara”, currently showing at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, is not a must-see performance. However it has some very good performances, and, despite being over 100 years old, many still relevant themes.

In a moment of almost childlike Marxist didacticism, Paul McGann, playing the splendidly saturnine arms manufacturer Mr Undershaft, tells the audience that European governments do his bidding. Written less than 10 years before World War 1, the play’s author, Irishman George Bernard Shaw, is celebrated for his apparent power of prophecy.

Yet GBS’ more telling, and more pertinent observations for today's audience, concerns liberals self-righteously raging at the world’s many inequities. Undershaft, a man born of East End poverty who married into an Earl’s family, is the play’s only morally uncompromised character. GBS enjoys giving him many of the play’s wittiest and most perceptive lines. Undershaft’s morality is based on a gospel of material salvation that only money can bring. Socialists of the time scared this businessman by also preaching material solutions to soulless drudgery. However his daughter, “Major” Barbara, played by Claire Dunn, is rather less threatening. She sees the Salvation Army as the surest solution to want: bread and treacle in exchange for a (declared) devotion to God.

The least satisfying part of the play is Barbara’s naive, soul-searching, purity amidst more worldly compromises. At times hammy in actualisation, the difficulties of her role are only compounded. Sadly, but inevitably, it is Barbara’s declamations that end the play. Her “realism” has led her to embrace the pragmatic (or cynical) Adolpus, her fiancé, in his apparently reluctant decision to agree to run (and one day inherit) Undershaft’s business. Her reasoning is that she can then focus on converting less materially-needy souls at his factory. This version of changing the system from within smacks of the same simple-minded wisdom that Lady Britomart (Barbara’s mother, wonderfully played by Eleanor Methven)  elsewhere dismisses as typifying the insights of The Times newspaper.

The most witty, incisive, and electric dialogue is that between Undershaft and Adolphus in the second act. The former, ironically perhaps, often carries the audience in his deployment of well-informed cynicism against the almost puritan pleadings of his soon to be son in law whose version of changing the system from within leads him to imagine that he can make the arms trade more moral. The final line of the play is Undershaft saying to Adolphus, a man of normally more leisurely hours, that he will see him at the factory at 6 am.

Undershaft’s signature claim that only a willingness to kill can change anything, whereas voting only changes the names of cabinet members, suggests a utilitarian use for arms. Eleven years after this play was written, WB Yeats observed that in Ireland a terrible beauty had been born. In Egypt a willingness to kill, or more likely be killed, is convulsing that country, although the most likely outcome is regressive.

This is an antidote, perhaps, to Undershaft’s contempt for the naïve parliamentarianism expressed by his son, Stephen. Either way, “Major Barbara” speaks straightforwardly and often entertainingly to many complex and still contemporary issues.