The UK Labour Party Wants to 'Reconnect' with People by Doing Nothing About Welfare Cuts

This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

According to a recent report by the British Election Study, the shock Conservative victory in this year's election didn't, in the end, have anything to do with "shy Tories"—people who told pollsters that they were voting for someone else, but then once in the voting booth, trembling with masochistic excitement or puppeteered by the robotic instruction to bow to one's betters, ticked the box by the Conservative candidate. Instead, the liars were all Labour voters.

A big chunk of the electorate said they would vote Labour, out of a hazy sense of duty, but it's not as if the party had really given them anything to be excited about: When polling day came, they couldn't be bothered. It's in this context that Labour's mass abstention over yesterday's welfare bill starts to make sense.

The party's humanoid grandees, wittering clones in suits that look like they've been stitched directly on to their necks, can't shut up about how Labour needs to "reconnect with the public." This is what that looks like. Clearly someone has decided that we're all slumped and catatonic, marinating in our own sweat and stupidity in front of a flickering TV, indifferent to suffering, neutral to evil, and silently hoping for our own deaths—and that the best thing to do would be to imitate us.

The welfare bill that just passed is a recipe for mass social cleansing. The proposed cap on benefits payments to £20,000 [$31,100] per family (£23,000 [$35,800] in London) would make the entire south of England—and many cities in the north—effectively uninhabitable for thousands of families. It's a Londonification of the whole country—this island is now a fortified playground for adult babies with swollen pockets, and anyone who can't afford the price of entry will be bussed out to some managed slum in the wind-battered hinterlands, where they will hopefully die without costing anyone too much money.

There's not much point in getting angry with the Tories for all this: birds fly, fish swim, the Conservative Party is the sublunar manifestation of a howling evil from beyond the stars, it is what it is. But when it came to a vote, Labour, who as an opposition party should at least be expected to do some opposing, instructed its MPs to abstain.

According to Harriet Harman, the acting leader of the opposition, the decision to abstain was supposed to let voters know that Labour were a realistic party capable of sensible reform. In a way, this is a good move. The British have always prided themselves on being a gentle, mild, and faintly boring people. But across our tepid moat, we're surrounded by fanatics: spittle-flecked Christians with incomprehensible signs, murderous Salafists zooming about the desert, swarming Continental mobs roaring their unreasonable demand that they be allowed to live. Believing in something is dangerous; here, it's tantamount to treason. This is why any attempt to articulate "British values"—for some reason, this is something governments keep on trying to do—always ends up producing a list of empty nothings. British values are no values.

The Tories have done a good job cloaking their deeply ideological policies in a kind of reality principle—it's just what needs to be done, like changing a tire or mowing the lawn. Labour, who still call themselves a socialist party, are stuck in a bind. If they oppose the bill, they look like ideologues; if they support it, it looks like a betrayal. So the Parliamentary Labour Party collectively jammed their fingers in their ears and rolled around on the floor of the House of Commons, because in our political system the most inspiring thing they can do is to do nothing.

In the Book of Revelation it is written: "I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." But the Labour party, a limp and lifeless thing expressing nothing but a feeble desire to not be spued, has found a way around this: to be hot and cold at once. In the aftermath of the vote, Andy Burnham, a Playmobil figure that wants to be Prime Minister, posted that the party "simply cannot abstain on this Bill." On the face of it, this is a strange thing to say, given that abstaining on the bill is precisely what he'd just done. But really it's a symptom of the party's general personality crisis: trying to be all things to all people, a national party that wants to reflect a deeply divided public, it ends up precisely nowhere.

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