Yet another year of this?

So this is it! Another twelve months of crisis and cock-up as this sorry government under its sorry leadership limps unsteadily along to its sorry expiry date. It is hugely depressing. I did ask myself a year ago whether I could live with two more years of this; this final year will drag on and on.

What a sorry, pusillanimous, and frankly, despicable bunch these Labour ministers are! They are content it seems to rumble along, draw their salaries and perks and take their inevitable copper-bottomed pension when it comes. How hard it is now to work up any respect for any of them. If they speak, I shall tune out. I used to admire John Denham, for example. I thought he was decent and principled and I respected his stand on Iraq, which probably set back his ministerial advancement by several years. But even he has found feet of clay this time around.

Our form of democracy is best served by a balanced two party system, be it Whig or Tory, Conservative or Liberal, Labour or Conservative, but all these things run their course and the system is seriously out of balance and has been for the past thirty years - firstly with a weak and out-of-touch Labour Party, then with a weak and out-of-touch Conservative Party, and now it looks as if we will see the Labour Party headed for oblivion.

Regardless of our political leanings we should take no pleasure in the demise of the Labour Party. If a resurgent Liberal Party is able to come forward to replace Labour as the alternative governing party then there is no great harm done, but how many years will that take? If the Liberal Democrats were able to gather enough electoral support to form a government in ten years time then normal service could be resumed, with the Labour Party as a regional party along the lines of Plaid Cymru or the DUP. In some respects this would be a good thing because this would take union funding and influence out of government.

As I see things this morning, the Labour Party under Gordon Brown will grow more-and-more out of touch with the electorate. decisions will become more centralized and be increasingly taken by a tiny isolated group of karaoke afficionados. The lies will increase in number and frequency and the House of Commons (let alone the Lords) will remain an unreformed cesspool.

Does anyone in the so-called Westminster village seriously believe that the British public will continue to fall docilely into line?

I grew up in what used to be a working class town. Families lived in red brick terraced houses. The men were skilled artisans who walked to work, paid mortgages on their houses, went to church or chapel on Sunday, paid cash for everything, respected the law, educated themselves at night school and voted Labour. What could they do now? Labour sees them as electoral fodder, won't listen to their concerns and condemns them in the vilest terms if they vote BNP. Blair seemed to understand that the Labour Party needed to have a broader appeal than to cloth capped working men and well-to-do, privately-educated idealists, but it does appear that the party is losing the former and keeping the latter. And it is the latter group, who have very little contact with the great unwashed, who are setting the agenda for the party. So a minority controls an increasing minority. They get used to telling people what they want rather than asking people what they want, and I have increasingly heard this from members of government in recent time. "What the people of this country want is . . . . . . "

If the Labour Party heads for electoral oblivion, losing the south and east of England, parts of London, a good tranche of the midlands, the they will deserve it, richly, and it won't just be Gordon Brown's fault.