St Oona: Pearly King posted by Meaders

Posted by Meaders at Dead Men Left

Bat's reproduction of the Times' paen over defeated New Labour lickspittle, St Oona of Bethnal Green, reminded me of the days when King herself was leading the parade of lovable cockneys in mourning for the "last Empress":

I speak in this debate to represent the people of the east end who, as the whole country knows, held the Queen Mother in great affection. I shall speak not about what the Queen Mother inherited or passed on, but what the Queen Mother merited. She merited respect, and nowhere is that respect greater than in my constituency—land of the pearly kings and queens who were inspired by the sparkling monarch who picked her way through the rubble...

The century the Queen Mother spanned has closed. She was the last Empress. Although the world in which she was born and in which she moved has vanished, the characteristics with which she is associated endure, and we in the east end give thanks for them.

"She only ever hurt her own kind," you might add, except (of course) the Queen Mother's immense reserves of bile and bigotry are a matter of record.

It ought to be easy to dismiss King, and her achievement-free time in Parliament, as the unpleasant by-product of New Labour's ascent to power: stripped of anything worth fighting for, the last vestiges of radicalism burned away and replaced with a pappy mash of platitudes and warmed-over Thatcherism, to be a foot-soldier for New Labour under the Tories only really presented itself as an attractive option to a particularly desperate sort of careerist. Those with principles and with talent went elsewhere, where the rewards - spiritual or financial - would be immensely greater, leaving behind a mediocre army with little but its clawing ambition to offer. Hence King in Parliament, and a whole grubby crowd of dozy bumsuckers and habitual crawlers bowing and scraping alongside her on the green benches. Her defeat was the blowback from her own foolishness, or incredible arrogance, in supporting the Iraq war.

For New Labour, however, the blow was perhaps greater. This career politician was forced, during the campaign, to do something almost unheard of: to find her principles, and parade them, loudly, for the benefit of the greater good. New Labour demanded the ultimate sacrifice: rather than - as if by magic - discovering some previously unknown doubts about the Iraq war, King oversaw the delivery of thousands of leaflets, repeated the same message in her public appearances, and fought a whole campaign on the premise that the Iraq war was worth fighting on the best possible "progressive" grounds. This was a high risk strategy for New Labour: to remove the possibility of hurriedly looking a bit concerned about dead Iraqis was to fight the electoral battle on the worst possible terrain.

Had the gamble paid off, New Labour would have been some way towards reclaiming the invasion of Iraq for the "left". A rag-tag army of columnists and bloggers have tried the same, but to have bagged Galloway's scalp for the pro-war "left" would have counted rather more than the (increasingly dishonest) rantings of Nick Cohen. To ideologically reclaim the invasion of Iraq would have made the whole sorry mess so much more digestible: Labour could have swallowed the poison, have steadily continued on its smooth course towards the Right, and no major convulsions or crises would threaten themselves over the issue. No doubt New Labour were confident of victory; Alastair Campbell, a few days before the ballot, declared off the record that Labour would win by 700 votes. As usual with Campbell, the more inaccurate his predictions are, the better for the Left. King's defeat has made opposing the new imperialism so much the easier.