The most poignant scene in the aftermath of the British General Election was defeated Labour leader Ed Milliband’s ‘victory’ speech at the declaration for his  Doncaster constituency. True to custom, he used the opportunity to recognize the enormity of Labour’s defeat, and effectively conceded the election. But it was not the words of this left-wing, intellectual misfit’s eulogy that got me; it was the fact that behind him stood fellow candidate Nick the Flying Brick of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party. As Milliband all but resigned the leadership of his party, it was as if fate had decreed that Labour supporters look carefully into the eyes of the nutter at his rear, ready to step up to the plate and probably give the Labour party as much chance of election in 2020 as Red Ed had now. Although the Party Manifesto was centre-left, just about everybody –  the ‘somebody-help-me’ areas of the North and  their brother inner-cities that returned Labour MPs, and everywhere else that did not – seemed to believe that Milliband’s gang would not manage to keep their high-taxing, statist paws behind their backs.

It was King Solomon in Ecclesiastes, later echoed by The Byrds, who told us that there is a time for everything. Well, there was a time for statism. Had I been voting 100 years ago, I may well have voted for the Labour Party. The Liberal Government of the time  had been the most radical government in history, bulldozing reforms for the benefit of the wider  population in the pre-war years. But, by the time the Great War  was over, its coalition with the Conservatives had (you’ve heard this one before) guaranteed its obliteration. The  Labour Party was still embryonic immediately after the First World War, but it came fully into its own after the Second. When I did vote 30 years ago, I chose Social Democrat (ie Liberal Democrat in today’s sad terms). It was time for a change in the mix of the mixed economy,  gradually working away from the statism of the post-war years. Had I been able to vote in the  election this week, I would have voted Conservative. The country has changed beyond recognition.

The challenge of the 21st century is not the exploitation of labour by the owners of capital; it is the fast-approaching lack of need of labour by the owners of capital. The world needs new solutions to old and new problems  (including the perennial wealth gap), all within the concept of a global economy. The tired old mantras cannot and, indeed, should not be allowed to persist. If anyone doubts this, they need only look at the Official Monster Raving Loony Syriza Government in Greece – a Greek Tragedy waiting to happen.

When the Greatest Generation came back from the Second World War, there was an urgent need for mass employment and the rebuilding of the country. The British Electorate, unswervingly grateful to Churchill for leading the nation to victory, brilliantly recognized the dichotomy between War and Peace, and promptly charged Clement Attlee’s Labour Party with the task. When, a generation later, Margaret Thatcher set about the necessary task of dismantling Attlee’s enterprise (albeit, IMHO, too fast), she was still able to refer to him admiringly as ‘all substance, and no show’.

Well, there were 13 years of Labour Social Democratic government under Blair and Brown. The election of Ed Milliband to lead the party in 2010 looked at the time to sane observers, not as an exorcising of the progress made in the previous two decades, but  as the swan song of the, yet unburied, left on its way to a waiting grave.  It almost guaranteed a decade-long Tory stewardship. I, for one, never feared that the British electorate would be stupid enough to send Milliband to Downing Street. It wasn’t. The leadership election in the coming months will probably decide whether it is only a decade. Let’s just hope that in 2020, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is not an Official Monster Raving Loony Party doppelgänger.