Jack Straw: A Man Worth Betting on
by Sean Gabb

The newspapers this morning were unexpectedly jolly. We may be watching the nearest thing England can manage to a military coup. After a decade of putting up with his lunatic warmongering, the generals have lost patience with Mr Blair, and have decided on a course of public humiliation that might drive him from office sooner than he had expected. My own wish for his departure involves seeing the man hang head down from a lamp post, his body riddled with machine-gun bullets. In this, I shall no doubt be disappointed. When it comes, his resignation will be attended by a blast of hot air from the media and a Knighthood from the Queen. Even so, it will be nice to see an end to his catastrophic term of office.

This brings me, however, to the matter of who will replace him. Increasingly, I think this will be Jack Straw. Indeed, I am so inclined to think it will be Mr Straw, that I went off yesterday to a betting shop and laid £20 on his being the "next permanent Leader of the Labour Party". I was given odds of 66:1. He was at the bottom of a list of probables headed by Gordon Brown at 4:3.

I will give my reasons for betting on my prediction. These may be summarised in the statement that Mr Straw is easily the most suitable of the probables to become Prime Minister, and is easily the most likely to remain Prime Minister after the next election.

For all he is the current favourite, Gordon Brown strikes me as worth ignoring. He has been in the same office as long as most people care to remember. There is nothing fresh about him. He is tainted with all the crimes and follies of Mr Blair himself. This aside, he looks like the sort of man who would once have made it to the senior ranks of the Inquisition—or who, in early Soviet times, would have liquidated millions without one human thought.

Above all, he is a Scotchman sitting for a Scotch seat. It might be argued that, in its Scottish policy, the Blair Government has only registered a spiritual divergence between England and Scotland that began in the 1950s. Even so, the institutional changes made since 1997 have accelerated that divergence. The Government may have functioned so far with a majority of the English seats. The Prime Minister may speak with an English accent. But this has been peculiarly a Government of Scotchmen. They have occupied a disproportionate number of senior positions. Perhaps more importantly, they occupy a wildly disproportionate number of the junior positions; and they control the machinery of the Labour Party.

It may even be suspected that the European policy of this Government has been ultimately motivated neither by belief in a United States of Europe nor by the bribes of big business—but by a plan to destroy England. So long as there is an England, with its far greater wealth and population, Scotland cannot be other than a satellite. Let England be divided into European Regions, each with its own government, and Scotland is left as the only nation state on this island. It will not, of course, be independent. But it will have a seeming equality with a hundred or so other regions of about the same size. And there will be the immense moral satisfaction of having finished off a nation they have hated and envied since time immemorial.

Give us a Scotch Prime Minister, with a Scotch accent and a Scotch seat, and the latent hostility of the English—an hostility so far subdued by a worthless opposition and a corrupt media—will make it impossible for Labour to win another majority of the English seats. That would mean a loss of office, or being kept in office by the votes of Scotch Members whose own electors were largely unaffected by the Acts of a British Parliament. Neither outcome would be politically attractive for the Scotchmen who now rule England with the pretence of an English mandate.

The electoral system used within the Labour Party might allow Gordon Brown to become Party Leader. But there would be strong opposition in public and in private. We may reasonably look forward to at least a partial leaking of stories and alleged stories about the less public side of Mr Brown's life.

I do not think it will be Gordon Brown.

Nor do I think it will be John Reid, also given short odds. He also is a Scotchman. Add to this he is a reformed drunkard and used to preach Marxism-Leninism. And he has been both an incompetent and a frighteningly authoritarian Home Secretary.

It will not be Dr Reid.

Nor will it be Peter Hain. He may not be a Scotchman, but he is not English either. He is a South African with a long history of ludicrous statements and political gestures. He may in office have become a faithful apparatchik, but the discrepancy between what he once claimed to believe and what he now does has left him with the look of a man about to descend into madness.

It will not be Mr Hain.

We then have Alan Millburn and various others whose names and faces I cannot even recall. There are times when being unknown has advantages. It helped Stanley Baldwin. It helped Tony Blair. But this only helps when the main alternative is even more unknown or looking tired or discredited. The main alternative to Labour is a Conservative Party led by David Cameron, who is both fresh and reasonably well-known. Choosing an unknown new Leader would at the moment involve the sort of risk politicians like to avoid.

It will not, therefore, be any of these.

That really leaves us with Jack Straw. He has just about every advantage the others lack. He is English. He looks more or less like a human being. Certainly, he looks as a Prime Minister ought. He is known in this country and beyond. He has occupied two of the great offices of state. He was not absolutely contemptible in these. Whatever it may be in absolute terms, his performance as Home Secretary was quite decent compared with that of Michael Howard and David Blunkett. Granted, he was Foreign Secretary at the time of our disastrous interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. But he let it be known he opposed the most lunatic of the Blair and Bush initiatives. And it is a matter of record that he was forced out by American pressure when his opposition became too firm.

As Prime Minister, he would be excellently placed to beat the Conservatives for a fourth time. He would be able to present himself as a man of experience, and at the same time distance himself from the worst follies of the Government in which he had gained that experience. Compared with him, David Cameron would look like an ambitious schoolboy.

There are certain claims regarding what Mr Straw may have done in office for his relatives. But these are old claims; and any discussion of their truth or falsehood can probably be kept out of the Establishment media—which, even now, is where most people go for their news.

I turn to his comments on the veil. It seems generally to be thought that these have damaged his career. I disagree. I dislike talking to people who can see my face but whose faces I cannot see. There are women who insist it is their culture to go about looking like black pillar boxes. Well, it is our culture not to feel happy talking to such people. And this is still supposed to be our country. In this respect, if in none other, Mr Straw speaks for me, and probably for the liberal middle class of this country.

He also speaks for the great majority outside this middle class. The more traditionalist of all classes and the white working classes dislike everyone whose faces are darker than their own. The black Christians and the Hindus and Sikhs dislike Moslems. He has lost no votes for Labour here.

As for the Moslems, many of these do not vote. Those who vote Labour do so for tribal reasons very similar to those of the white working classes. Let us face it, if these people can still vote Labour after five years of war on the Islamic world, a few comments on the veil—of which not all Moslems themselves approve—is hardly likely to change matters. If it does, the worst that can happen is a mass defection to the Liberal Democrats; and this may, given our electoral system, work more to squeeze the Conservatives into third place in many constituencies than to lose seats for Labour.

Furthermore, what Mr Straw said about the veil should not be taken as an unprepared personal statement. He is the sort of politician who never says anything without prior attention to his own interests. I think he is preparing his leadership campaign already, and he is doing so by being first to articulate an emergent consensus among our ruling class. One can see in general a change of rhetoric as regards the new demographic settlement in this country. For the first time since the 1970s, there is far less talk among those who matter of multiculturalism than of integration.

Now, I disagree with Robert Henderson when he insists that ruling classes have no other objective than the retention of power, and that they will switch ideological justifications as easily as a woman changes her dress. There is some truth in this. Since our first growth of big government during the Great War, its ideological justification has changed several times. But these have been slow changes, taking many decades, and with much overlap. Bearing in mind the shared assumptions and the patterns of government spending that hold these people together, I do not expect our present ruling class to start borrowing policies from the British National Party Website.

This being said, there is room for changes in rhetoric. Until Mr Cameron came along and announced his love for the whole existing order of things, the Conservative Party had for many years been following a Quisling Right strategy. That is, it specialised in making or implying promises of actions it had no intention of taking. It spoke about restraint while it was increasing government spending. It spoke about cutting taxes while it was increasing them. It spoke about following the national interest while systematically betraying it.

As said, the Conservatives have given up on this for the moment. That has left a void that Labour might now be trying to fill. Mr Straw, as Prime Minister, would do nothing to reverse or even stabilise the cultural and demographic changes of the past few decades. But there are probably votes in appearing not to like these changes, and in fixing on some symbolic point of opposition to them.

It may be—as happened in the Soviet Union during the late 1980s—that the Establishment is about to start a debate that will then run out of control. Perhaps an allowed discussion of the more radical forms of Islamic dress will proceed unstoppably to discussions of the general state of affairs in which this discussion has become necessary. But so long as this does not lead to 40 or 50 seats for alternative parties in the next Parliament, it may seem a risk worth taking.

I therefore put my money on Mr Straw. This does not mean I think he will be a good Prime Minister. I only think he will be the next Prime Minister. And, I say again, I think he would, as Prime Minister, easily beat the Conservatives at the next general election. So far as it may bring on the collapse of the Cameron strategy, and either force the Conservatives to think again, or lead to their replacement by a more genuinely conservative party, I think this about as good a political outcome as any that may reasonably be expected.

But this carries me to other arguments that I will explore another time.

For the moment, I will turn to a private examination of my coming enrichment. £20 at 66:1 brings a gain of £1,320. That will buy me any number of shiny electronic toys from China. It will almost pay my Council Tax for the year....