The Dodo and the Phoenix from the Ashes

The Labour Party was born out of the bad conditions coal miners endured in the late Victorian era. Keir Hardie created a Labour Party specifically for them. But today most of the miners no longer have a job. The country does not have an economy based on the coal mining industry. One hundred years on from Keir Hardie's success England is a very different country. Why would Labour think at all that the country needs a Labour Party? Quite clearly it does not, at least this is what you would think. For it was evident at the last election when not only did the SNP have a landslide victory but Labour lost many seats to the Conservatives.

At the moment it is the Conservatives who appeal to the majority of the British public. England's electorate is no longer the great mass of 'working class' people it was: the type that lived in nineteenth century terraced housing, had no central heating and not much in the way of modern facilities. Today's core voters are very different. They will not vote for Labour, a party founded on the fortunes of coal. This is in the past and today's Britain is very different. Now, with better conditions, most people live more of a lower-middle class life. With widescreen TVs, refrigerators and the ubiquitous cars there is no room for flat caps and miner's galas. All that has changed. That is why the Labour Party, if it is to continue to exist, must change too.

Tony Blair of course realized this in the 1990s and called it New Labour, but as far as I can see the term 'Labour' needs to be ditched completely. Labour needs rebranding. Woolworths, the famous store, could no longer go on in the twenty first century; it had too many low income associations, so it disappeared completely. So it is with Labour. It is entrenched in an image of low incomes and back breaking work. Labour needs to change its name. It is of course a socialist party and there is nothing wrong with that, so why not call themselves the Social Democrats. In Germany they have a party called the Christian Democrats. Christian would not go down too well in England, however, as according to recent polls England is not the Christian country it used to be. So Social Democrats seems to be the right rebranding.

Labour needs a completely new image. The old miner's party was crumbling and being dismantled in the Thatcher years. When Margaret Thatcher closed the pits in the 1980's she was saying goodbye to the Britain of the past, the Britain of old Labour. The Labour Party is the dodo of British politics and now what is required is a phoenix to rise from the ashes. We need to see Social Democrats rise from these very same ashes. The old Labour Party can never win an election again, it is dead. The last defeat was not just about Ed Milliband's 'unable to eat a sandwich' image, it was about the whole Labour concept of a late Victorian party made for miners we no longer have in Britain. Today Britain is a very different country to what it was in Keir Hardie's time. Labour definitely needs to rebrand, only then can it soar like the phoenix it surely is.