Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead - Peter Hitchens

Peter Hitchens on what he views as the centre left's domination of British politics:

Our political parties are corpses and democracy as we used to know it is quite dead

Peter Hitchens

I expect the Labour conference this week will be very like a funeral I once attended, in ice-cold rain, under black skies, in the shadow of a Victorian prison, where the heavy clay soil was so wet that the grave had to be held open with steel props in case it closed up with a gigantic squelch before the final prayers were over.

In short, it will be so gloomy that it will almost be funny.

Like the world banking system, Labour has gone belly up and can survive only if it is rescued by outsiders and entirely rebuilt.

What’s more, this is the second time this has happened to the decrepit party in two decades.

Two years ago, it seemed invincible and it was the Tories who were a despised and failed brand.

Now it’s indefensible and the Tories have mysteriously become, if not popular, then bearable. What happened? Why the sudden, violent swing?

The cold, miserable truth is that both our major political parties are corpses, their original purposes long forgotten, their loyal members driven away or sidelined, their traditional voters taken for granted.

Every so often, by a mysterious process, one of them is declared electable and the other is declared unelectable.

And we, the voters, do as we are told. By whom? For what purpose?

Labour really died around 1983, in the years of Michael Foot.

It was then invaded by young men and women, sometimes smirking, sometimes scowling, bleeping with the latest electronic devices and attired in costly suits, accompanied by spivs with suitcases of bank notes.

It was like watching a stately, traditional company being taken over by asset-strippers.

Its older inhabitants underwent a callous process of humiliation and scorn, while its honoured brand-name was turned to other uses by people who had never much liked it anyway.

Now that’s over. What began in the age of the bleeper has ended in the age of the BlackBerry.

The costly suits and the dodgy donors have migrated, for the moment, to the Tory Party. Who knows where they will go next? Back to Labour? Or somewhere else?

Funnily enough, those Tories who have much of a memory will remember their party’s similar death.

They will recall Blackpool in the autumn of 2003 - unbelievably, only five years ago - when poor Iain Duncan Smith sat alone, much as Gordon Brown does now, listening to the whispers of a thousand plotters planning to get rid of him.

He knew, as Mr Brown does, that he was finished.

But, as the son of a Spitfire ace who had himself been raised in the military code, he saw no honourable way to go except to wait for his enemies to come and kill him. This they duly did.

The assassination of IDS was one of the strangest and most important moments in British politics.

IDS did actually represent the force and mind of the Tory Party, bewildered and demoralised, after its wholly unjust 2001 defeat.

He became leader because none of the supposed ‘big beasts’ of Toryism liked Tory voters or party members, or shared their views.

And most of the medium-sized beasts preferred to go away and make some money, rather than have pails of lukewarm swill chucked over them by a media who were then wholly in the pocket of New Labour, just as they are now in David Cameron’s pocket.

What happened next is so fascinating that everyone missed its significance.

The Michael Howard palace revolution against IDS was a blatant takeover of a Right-wing party by the ‘Centre-Left’ establishment.

It was played out almost entirely on the airwaves and in the newspapers. MPs did what they were told by the media.

It was made easier because the ‘Centre-Left’ media have always inaccurately portrayed Mr Howard as being Right-wing.

He isn’t. He is actually a conventionally liberal career politician of the sort you find near the top of both big parties.

After IDS had been utterly destroyed, it was made plain to all Tory MPs (with the help of the media elite) that they had better not stand against Mr Howard for the leadership.

So nobody did. And he was ‘elected’ unopposed in a way that makes Vladimir Putin look like a fervent democrat.

Compare the absence of media fuss about this with the bitter media condemnation of Labour for installing Gordon Brown without a vote.

The Tory Party had been put into receivership. Its supposed owners - those who voted for it and supported it - had lost control over it.

The ‘Centre-Left’ establishment, Britain’s permanent government of media types, politicised moneybags and their approved pundits, had taken over, and their task was to make it as unconservative as possible, as quickly as possible.

Mr Howard made it plain that his coronation was the end of anything remotely Right-wing.

He ruthlessly sacked two candidates, Danny Kruger in Sedgefield and Adrian Hilton in Slough, for making apparently Right-wing remarks that could be (and of course were) misrepresented in the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

Then he went a great deal further, and sacked Howard Flight, the serving MP for Arundel, for a similar offence.

Mr Howard almost certainly had no legal power to do this, but once again the ‘Centre-Left’ media decided it was not a scandal.

The imposition of the liberal careerist David Cameron on the Tory Party, once Michael Howard had finished being the establishment’s caretaker, was also achieved by the ‘Centre-Left’ media.

They adopted Mr Cameron as their candidate and propelled him to victory despite a very poor start to his campaign and an equally poor performance on live TV, later on, up against his more conservative rival, David Davis.

You’ll notice that it is the same people, that ‘Centre-Left’ combo of media types, who did a similar job on the Labour Party back in the late Eighties and early Nineties.

Interestingly, that revolution was much more about image than about reality.

The Tories have genuinely dropped most of their remaining conservative positions.

Labour remains a very Left-wing party. Most of its radical 1983 manifesto has in fact now been implemented, though in more subtle ways.

The only lasting deep change in Labour policy since the Eighties has been the party’s lobotomised conversion to support for the EU and globalism in general.

Nationalisation hadn’t mattered for years, the old industrial unions were as dead as the industries they helped to ruin, and the H-Bomb wasn’t an issue any more.

Labour’s real ‘Clause Four’ - its bilious hatred of selective state schools - remains untouched. What’s more, it has now been openly adopted by the Tories as well.

The rule nowadays is that you cannot become the government unless you bow to the views of the ‘Centre-Left’ media elite, especially the broadcast media elite.

That elite speaks for the 1968 generation which fanned out in the Seventies into the civil service, education, entertainment, the law, the arts, rock music and - above all - the media.

We no longer have elections where two evenly matched parties go into a fair contest with competing ideas and it is over only when the last vote is counted.

Instead, we have wild swings in which the approved party goes into the Election with a giant poll lead and then wins the Election with a mad, crushingly enormous majority over the unapproved party.

And the winner is always the ‘Centre-Left’, which claims to be moderate but is in fact a swirling cauldron of wild Sixties Leftism - anti-British, anti-family, anti-Christian, anti-education and pro-crime.

But if you dare to oppose this stuff, they’ll call you an extremist.

British democracy, as we used to know it, is quite dead. It just needs to have a new funeral every few years.