The Exile

See you next week.

Well this is just too sweet for words. Kosovo may very well turn out to be one gigantic oil field, and just to add the cherry to the cake, so might Bosnia.

As the Serb Blog points out, the Americans grabbed over 1,000 acres of Kosovo in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 aggression and have now built a massive military base there. The point is that the plans for that base, known as Camp Bondsteel, were hatched a long time before the fist bombs fell. Needless to say, the base was built by Halliburton, and now plays host to over 6,000 American troops.

You just couldn't make shit like this up, could you? All the more reason to support Serbia and Russia as they try to prise Kosovo back from western imperialism's grasping claws.

We haven't heard much from Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani for over a year, but if this report is true then he could be the man who will end the American occupation of Iraq by uttering just a few words. What the report says is that he is close to issuing a fatwa, or religious edict, which will call on all the Shia to expel the United States' forces from that country.

If this fatwa is issued then it really is game over for the occupation. The question then would be, how will they manage to get out in one piece, given that just about every Iraqi will be taking pot shots at them?

Got your popcorn ready? The main feature could be about ready to begin.

The Guardian is having a po-faced moan about the British National Party's use of the Daily Telegraph's blogging feature by Cllr Richard Barnbrook, who sits on the Greater London Authority.

Instead of moaning about the blog, the Guardian should be wondering why the right are so much better at using this new, cheap technology than the left. Let's face it, the BNP has its own television station. Well, sort of, what it has is a page on a website where its videos can be freely downloaded, but that is a damn site more than most leftist parties have.

The left still seems to think that all you need is an old printing press that can be used to knock out a paper. Then you get your activists to go and sell the damn thing on street corners. Yeah, just like they did in 1908 - as if nothing has changed in the meantime.

Folks, I have bad news for you: a lot has changed, especially over the past decade or two, and it is time that the left came up to date.

Let's just look at that BNP TV page as a case in point. Technically the videos are first rate. Somebody has obviously worked in television and can pass on the skills needed to the rest of the party's activists. Furthermore, they have got "three broadcast quality camera units" which they use to get their message across. What has the left got? Sweet fuck all in comparison.

The Exile has been banging on about the need for working class activists to start using video as part of their agitprop for quite some time. As usual no bugger has taken any notice, but the right have got in on the act in a big way.

Luckily for the left, in spite of the technical quality of the BNP videos, the content is pretty dreary. What makers of agitvideo need to understand is that anything over a couple of minutes will cause them to lose their audience. The BNP are churning out ten minute epics which may be of interest to their party members, but not to anyone else. As I argued here, what is needed are short, snappy 30 to 120 second videos that grab the attention of the MTV generation. Again, as I have said before, in this day and age less is more - so keep those vids short and snappy, folks.

Given that this is the agitprop future, is anybody even listening on the left?

The news that the half price fares for London's poor will end come August was slipped out on Sunday in the hope that nobody would notice. The question still has to be asked, why was it done?

London seems to have gained from the deal that saw Venezuelan oil bartered for the city's technical know-how in various aspects of transport policy. Before anyone starts laughing, the issue is not what Venezuela gained out of it because that is a matter for them. What matters is that London got cheap oil which meant that the poor got cheap rides on the tube and buses. This being so it is hard to accept the Boris argument that the deal was bad for Venezuela. Boris was not elected to get good deals for foreign countries, but to ensure that the people of London get decent services. The oil for advice swap was certainly that.

This makes the decision to cancel it all the more puzzling. Boris Watch reckons that it is all about keeping in with "his chums at Policy Exchange," a right-wing think tank, but that argument strikes this writer as a bit thin.

The point is that whatever ideological differences the mayor may have with the government of Venezuela, at the end of the day politicians don't tend to go out of their way to make enemies unless there is an advantage to be gained. As far as the cheap fares deal goes, why make enemies out of the 250,000 or so people who gained from the policy, especially since it cannot be presented to the middle class as a cost cutting exercise?

The only sensible answer that we can come up with is that Boris did it as a test to see if Labour would respond. Labour hasn't responded, and so the message has gone out that nobody gives a stuff about the London poor. The newspapers are quite happy to circulate the line that this is all about Venezuela, not because they have bought that line, but because the people who write for those papers don't give a shit about the London working class either.

Looked at in this light, the policy change could mean that yet more cuts are on the way. Let's face it, if Nu-Labour can't even be bothered to defend something as basic as cheap bus and tube fares for its core supporters, the party can hardly be expected to defend anything.

A piece in the Observer should remind us of just how much the British middle class loath the old upper class. To a certain extent it is good sport to watch a feud that doesn't concern us, but on the other hand, it should remind people of the urgent need to push forward our own political demands. If we don't then the upper class Tory Party may very well offer a few policies of its own to try and grab our people.

Does that sound far fetched? It shouldn't because working class Toryism has a long history in Britain and it could quite easily return. The Conservatives used to have a body called the Tory Working Men's Association, which had a presence in almost every industrial city. What brought the working men in was the cheap beer, but they would often stick around and listen to the frightening speeches which told them that a vote for Liberalism was a vote for yet more bastard work with temperance thrown in to boot: "Better England drunk than England enslaved", as the Tory slogan went.

The old Liberal Party of a century ago reminds the reader irresistibly of Nu-Labour today. It was earnest and sober and it believed in uplifting people through temperance and education. Toryism was quite happy to accept working class people as they were - indeed, as they wanted to be - and work with them on that basis.

The really worrying thing today is that there are a lot of policies that the Tories could propound which would actually save the state money and which would be popular amongst the working class.

The first would be to allow people to smoke once more in public buildings. As things stand the state is shelling out a fortune in grants to councils to pay the wages of the inspectorate who have been hired to police this nonsense. A Tory pledge to repeal that legislation would almost certainly bring in thousands of mainly working class voters who want to go back to the pub for a beer and a smoke.

The second thing that they could do would be to repeal the legislation that has created a large, parasitic social work industry. As this blog has pointed out time and time again, living in a working class district is increasingly akin to living in a colonial territory. The residents are the natives, and the social work filth are a part of the colonial elite that governs those natives.

Those are just two examples of policies that the Tories could adopt and which would give them working class votes. They are also policies that this blog has argued for a working class party, so does that mean that we should just vote Tory if they steal these clothes?

No, because what we want to do is to cut the cake in a different way. By all means let us save money by cutting the social work industry to the bone, but then the funds should be used as part of a drive to re-industrialise Britain. The Tories will do it as part of a drive to cut expenditure and nothing more.

The need for a party that represents the working class is now pressing. Unless it is created, the Tories will take some policies that are popular with ordinary people and run with them. If that happens the chances of creating a working class party will be greatly diminished.

We will be fucked in other words.

What's Mexico like? Even when sober it's loud and in your face and it doesn't give a stuff what you think about it. A bit this this blog. . .

Have a great weekend and we'll be back together on Monday.

As I predicted yesterday, the excuses for Nu-Labour's disastrous performance are coming in thick and fast, especially over at the wankblogs. A consensus seems to be building up that it is all Gordon Brown's fault, and if only we had the Tony Blair leading the party, all would be well.

Sorry lads, but the figures don't back that up. Let's take the constituency of Oldham West as a case in point. In 1997 Michael Meacher was returned and turnout was 66.1%. By 2001 turnout had fallen to 57.6%, and in 2005 it fell again to 53.3%.

Now that is pretty much true across the board. People will not turn out to vote for a party that tosses them a few table scraps, and then expects them to be happy with that.

Since 1979 people in places like Oldham West have been gagging for revenge. What they got was Nu-Labour.

Fine: if they want to delude themselves that the class war is over and that all that matters are the votes of the middle class arsewipes, then let those same arsewipes turn out to vote for them.

Let's talk about tits. More specifically, let's talk about big tits: the type of big tits who make up Nu-Labour and who managed to lose Crewe & Nantwich pretty dramatically.

The Tories took the seat with a massive 17.6% swing. Turnout at 58.2% was only slightly down on the general election's 60%. The full results are:

No doubt by the time people read this in Britain the excuses will be rolling thick and fast. Ignore them all, is my advice, because what we have here is more than just a by-election defeat.

This is the end of Nu-Labour. It started with the general election of 1997 when so many working class people saw through the little Fettes fuckboy and simply refused to vote. It continued at subsequent elections that saw Nu-Labour returned with middle class votes and the old Labour residuum. Now that residuum has gone and what is left is a gaping hole in the political spectrum that a new working class party will eventually fill.

The realignment is not yet over, but Crewe & Nantwich is yet another sign that it is under way.

The polls haven't even opened yet for the Crewe & Nantwich by-election, but Paddy Power is one bookmaker that has already started paying out to those punters who backed the Tories to grab the seat.

The question now being asked is who will take the second place slot? The assumption has always been that it would be Nu-Labour, but the money seems to be heading in the direction of the Liberal-Democrats.

Remember that Crewe is a working class railway town that fought the Tory privatisation of the railways tooth and claw. In 1997 Nu-Labour came along and did sweet fuck all about that privatisation.

Crewe isn't going to vote for scum like that, so let's hope that Nu-Labour does finish well down the pack. The new Tory majority will come from the leafy suburb that is Nantwich.

To any Nu-Labourite who reads these words, I hope that he remembers that during the Thatcher years Crewe was a sea of red at election times, with almost every house sporting its Labour poster. This defeat is part of the price that Nu-Labour must pay for the betrayal of so many hopes, and so many desires for revenge.

Having tried to paint the Tories as the party of the upper class for the benefit of the Crewe & Nantwich voters, it is now emerging that Tamsin Dunwoody, the Nu-Labour candidate is not only the grand-daughter of a baroness, but that she owns a stately pile of her own in Wales. Oh, and the top hatted fellow on the left of the above picture, just happens to be an ex-public schoolboy. People, even your friendly Exile couldn't make shit like this up.

So what's the line for today's fun and frivolity? You could vote for Gemma Garett, the large boobed, firm buttocked beauty pictured on the left. Gemma started out as a joke candidate, but Political Betting now sees her as the one who could take serious votes off Nu-Labour. Given the sympathy that should have come her way when Nu-Labour insulted her at the start of the campaign, to say nothing of her incredibly dignified response, that might very well be enough to give her a respectable vote.

If you are determined to vote for a serious party, rather than an individual, why not consider giving your vote to the UKIP? Remember that it was the Tories and the CBI who originally supported Britain's entry into the European Union. They obviously thought that it would be good for them, and so it has been. Equally obviously if something is good for them then it must be bad for us.

However, you could decide that it would be nice to be on the winning side today. The party that will win the election is the bollocks to 'em all party. That would be a great way to demonstrate your contempt, wouldn't it? Just sit at home.

Don't vote: it only encourages them.

The Crewe Blog is running a poll of the candidates for Thursday's Crewe & Nantwich by-election. Your friendly Exile thought long and hard before casting his vote for the lovely Miss Great Britain, Gemma Garret, who just happens to be standing. The buxom young sweetie has been the victim of some Nu-Labour dirty tricks, and would probably welcome a vote from you. So pop on over to the Crewe Blog and give her one. . .

Could the UKIP be the dark horse in this race? According to that same poll they are just ahead of the pack with 27% of the votes cast.

Actually, I would not be all that surprised if the UKIP did well. Contrary to what the Nu-Labourites want people to believe, the party is not of the far-right. Its policy of withdrawal from the EU is something that most leftists would agree with - as would many traditional Labour voters. As usual these days, the chancers who have taken control of the Labour Party want us to believe that they still represent, in some small way, a socialist position. They don't, but that doesn't stop them screaming that EU withdrawal is a rightist argument.

The Exile now has its own shop, selling gear that matches the blog and its issues. Click on the link that you can see on the left sidebar and go and have a look at what's on offer.

I've kept the prices as low as possible, and I think that you will find that they are comparable with what you would pay in a High Street shop. On the other hand, you will not find quite the amount of offensive slogans on a High Street T-shirt.

Happy shopping!

The opinion polls, whether they are from the Guardian or the Independent, are showing that Nu-Labour is about as unpopular as it can get and meltdown seems to be on the horizon.

Peter Hain MP has argued that the only road to salvation lies in appealing to both the working class and what he calls the "aspirational voters". On one level he is quite correct, but Nu-Labour has now got to the stage where the circle can no longer be squared.

That is the key to understanding this looming disaster. In the past, Labour could win because it gave just enough economic goodies to the working class, coupled with just enough social ones to the middle class. From 1997 onwards it used the working class as a donkey vote and both its economic and social policies were aimed at the middle class.

Since 1997 more and more working class people have responded to this by disengaging from politics. Now even the most bovine Nu-Labour supporter realises that there are no longer enough donkeys left to win the formerly safe seats that the party took for granted. As for the middle class that the party wooed so assiduously, they are cheesed off by wars and economic failure.

It's like watching a train wreck in slow motion.

Nu-Labour is trailing badly in the Crewe and Nantwitch by-election and it seems unlikely that they can make up the lost ground in time for the vote on Thursday. If that happens then we really are seeing the end of the whole, wretched Nu-Labour project. The party will struggle along for another two years, and will then face extinction at the polls.

What is happening is that across the country the tribal link that connected the urban working class to the Labour Party is being broken. The habit of voting Labour because it is the party of the working man has almost gone: and a bloody good thing that is to be sure.

Out of the wreckage, new parties will emerge, as is already happening in South Wales. Eventually they will come together to form a party or coalition that will represent the core values of that urban working class. Values of social conservatism and economic radicalism, instead of the other way round.

Have a great weekend!

This is why America is winning her war to subjugate Iraqnam. Let the Iranazoids see America's finest in training and then tremble at what awaits them when these brave men, with their state of the art equipment, are deployed to reduce them to submission.

Following on from last night's posting which was concerned with Polish immigration in Crewe, there is a theory kicking around left-wing circles that one of the reasons for Nu-Labour's decision to allow all and sundry into the country is a desire for revenge. Revenge against whom you may wonder? Revenge against the working-class who voted for Thatcher is the answer. I heard this theory articulated on two different occasions in London recently, and I must say that it has a superficial attraction.

The problem with it is that the more you think about it, the less logical it is. The northern working class loathed Thatcher with a passion, and it is the northern working class, in places like Crewe, who are finding themselves left behind as foreign workers take their jobs. By way of contrast, those creatures who were duped into falling for the Tory line are only now coming to realise what a big mistake it all was - and they live in the south, by and large.

My theory is that Nu-Labour is basically following the old Tankie line - the one that said that the party had lost confidence in the working class. Let's face it, Nu-Labour has always loathed us. We smoke, laugh at the likes of Roy "Chubby" Brown and Bernard Manning, and don't give a tinker's cuss about events in various third world shitholes. To make matters worse, we are not interested in lifestyle politics, or we are positively hostile to them.

How much nicer it must be for the Nu-Labourites to only have to deal with the East Europeans. If you think about it, those chancers actually share all those Nu-Labour aspirational values that Blair was always going on about. In other words, they want to get on within the framework of capitalism.

Now as far as we are concerned, work is that place where we go to get our money. Employer's place, employer's profits and employer's problems - that's always been our attitude. That's not to say that we don't want to get on as well - we do, but by making the boss pay us more money for less work.

So, the theory goes, the Eastern Europeans are allowed in as the new working class. We increasingly become the unmentionables, the helots, to be hated and feared. To be corralled on our estates, thus to provide an income for that new colonial caste of social workers, council managers and teachers that I have previously discussed.

It's just a theory of mine, and we are never going to get any Nu-Labourite to confirm its veracity. However, it has a certain internal consistency and simplicity that makes me think that it is closer to the truth of what is actually going on in Britain than anything else that I have heard up to now.

Even if the theory itself is flawed, and government policy was not in any way based on ideas like that, then the effects of that policy are such as to ensure that the outcome is the same as if it had been the intention all along: we are the new helots and there is no escaping that fact.

Labour has tried to diffuse the row over the 10p tax rate with benefits all round, obviously in the hope that this will be enough to bolster the party's showing in next week's Crewe by-election. However, there is one factor that all the benefits in the world won't alter, and that is the number of Polish workers who now live in Crewe and who compete with the locals for jobs.

At least 6,000 Poles now live in the town out of a total population of less than 50,000, and the unpublicised effects of this will probably be yet another factor that sticks the boot into Nu-Labour's hopes of holding the seat.

A few websites do discuss the issue, and there the reaction is mixed. However, as this Crewe blogger makes plain, most people sit around in the pubs and complain, rather than make their views clear on-line. That said, reading the comments that the posting elicited, it seems clear to me that Polish immigration is going to be a major negative factor for Nu-Labour next week.

It could have been so very different, couldn't it? When Britain had an influx of Commonwealth immigrants in the post-war years the Labour government headed by Harold Wilson pushed the first Race Relations Acts through parliament to prevent management scum from paying immigrant workers less than their British counterparts.

Today, Nu-Labour has pretty much left all the old anti working class legislation that the Tories passed in place. The result of this is that wage rates in places like Crewe are reduced across the board. That might not be a problem for a Polish worker who just wants to make a few bob before he heads off back home, but it will probably turn out to be yet another nail in the coffin of Nu-Labour, as the locals in Crewe refuse to turn out to vote for the party that has so signally failed to represent their interests.

Are you a cat fight fan? If you are then get on over to The Money Blog and sit back and watch the antics of at least one participant in in an electronic fight to the finish between God knows how many harridans.

I am still not quite sure what is going on, and to be honest I don't care all that much. This is the posting that got the girls a-trembling and my take on the situation over there has just this minute been posted.

Heaven only knows if they'll come back today, but even if they don't I still urge all aficionados of the battling fishwife genre to pay a visit to The Money Blog and sit back, jaws open, at the total and complete lunacy of it all.

Just over two years ago I argued that a smoking ban might just be a good thing in the long run. It would act to remind ordinary working class of just how much the middle class vermin wanted to control them, and just how little their opinions counted for these days. Back in March of this year I predicted that Labour will lose the next General Election. The only thing that I want to add to that now is that the smoking ban looks set to be a rather bigger issue than I thought when I made the prediction.

Across the country more and more working class people are uniting around a growing banner of opposition to the smoking ban. The ban effects us every single day because we are the ones who still smoke. As I said in that March 2006 posting, the ban is galvanising people into action. I just didn't expect that it would happen so quickly, nor that the opposition would manage to organise itself so well.

Luton is not a place that you think of when it comes to working class militancy, but that town is one of the places where the two Labour MPs face defeat at the hands of working class activists who are outraged at the smoking ban.

The pubs themselves look set to become Tory campaigning offices, with their walls plastered with anti-Labour propaganda, in much the same way as they were a century ago when faced with the threat of the temperance backed Liberals.

This is an issue that is still under the political radar, but it is rapidly becoming a very big issue on the council estates that Labour needs to win if it is to remain in government. As I have said elsewhere, in a world in which the two main parties are in pretty total agreement on economic matters, then social issues are what divides them and how people vote on those social issues will decide the outcome of the next election.

Smoking looks set to become one of the very big issues. If David Cameron wants to win as much as he seems to, then he should offer repeal of the anti-smoking legislation as part of his Tory Party programme.

I'm having a lazy night here at The Exile, but don't let that trouble you because the postings are a-hopping over at The Money Blog.

The main item on the agenda is a report on revenge. . . That is to say how to get it when you need it. Just pop over there and read it for yourself, it's well worth it.

Heading the night's entertainment is a TV advert from about 1982. How to lose weight by getting AIDS, or Ayds, or something. Anyway, for some reason the advertising campaign failed - I can't think why.

See you at The Money Blog!

Labour looks set to lose the Crewe by-election on the 22nd May. That governments lose seats in by-elections isn't news, but this loss may very well be due to Labour's misreading of working class attitudes towards the upper class.

As you can see from this report, Labour is trying to present the Tory candidate as a son of privilege, a toff, in other words. The problem is that working class people tend not to object all that much to the toffs - it's the middle-class that they despise.

If that is hard to grasp, then consider the fact that Boris Johnson has just been elected as mayor of London. Consider also all those working class people who once voted for Churchill, MacMillan, Eden and then Home in the 1950s and 60s. It may be argued that Home lost the 1964 election, but it was by the narrowest of margins, and that was in spite of Harold Wilson's constant jibes in the Commons about Home's aristocratic origins.

The simple truth is that ordinary people do not particularly dislike the upper class, partly because they are removed from working class lives, but mainly because quite often those same toffs are willing to vote for measures that working class people support. The Tories in the 1950s used to gloat that they had built more council houses than Labour, and at the same time they went out of their way to appease the unions.

Compare working class attitudes to those earlier Tories with the atavistic loathing that was directed at the likes of Thatcher and Tebbit. That loathing was only partly due to actual policies: a big chunk of it came from the knowledge that those creatures were close enough to us to be recognisable as being akin to the foremen and under managers at work.

So Labour is on course to lose Crewe. One of the reasons is that it is attacking the type of person that Labour voters are indifferent too. The targets they should go for are the children of those foremen and under managers: the social work scum, teaching trade and local government jobsworths.

Labour will not do that because those chancers are the new party activists, councillors and client voters. Labour can have them or it can have its traditional voters, but it can't have both. All their whining about toffs won't change that.

The French and Americans have argued that their respective military forces should just charge into Burma and start dishing out aid to the victims of Cyclone Nargis. The Exile can see two problems with this wheeze.

The first is that large chunks of Burma are controlled by regional warlords, who are former ethnic guerrilla fighters who have been co-opted onto the government team. They get a Burmese army rank, but run their fiefdoms pretty much as they wish. It may very well be that one of the reasons why Rangoon has delayed giving permission for the aid industry to get involved is that the generals who ostensibly run the country cannot get all the regional rulers to agree.

The problem here is that if the Franco-Americans do decide to be silly, then getting their forces into Burma may be the least of their worries. Getting them out again could be the problem. They could find that they are trying to distribute aid whilst various ethnic militias are taking pot shots at them. Obviously they will stop doing the former and start defending themselves against the attacks, all the while blaming the central government for the unfolding shooting war. The fact that Rangoon will probably not be to blame is something that will get overlooked as Fox News starts screaming that something needs to be done...

The second factor that needs to be considered is the fact that China is Burma's closest diplomatic backer, and that the cornerstone of Chinese diplomacy rests on a firm respect for national sovereignty. Has anyone considered China's reaction? The thought of what Peking may order its army to do is enough to give anyone nightmares.

What we are looking at here is the law of unintended consequences writ large. Paris and Washington really do seem to believe that we are all post-modernists under the skin, and that all the old divisions can be consigned to the history books.

Or maybe they just don't care? Maybe hubris has got to them and they think that they can do as they please, courtesy of their armed forces? One would have thought that Iraq would have taught the Americans a lesson, but seemingly that is not the case.

As for Burma and her agony, invading the place is hardly likely to make it any better, is it?

Good news is coming out of Iraq as the resistance seems to have developed a new type of mine that can destroy the inaptly named Mine Resistant Ambush Protective vehicle. (MRAP) These MRAPs were developed as a replacement for the unarmoured Hummer, and their use did help to reduce the cull for a time, but now that the Iraqis have got their measure we can expect to see casualties amongst the occupation forces start to climb again.

To make matters worse for the Americans their military commanders in Afghanistan are screaming for more troops to help subjugate that country and have been told by the Pentagon that the only way they are going to get them is when troop numbers are cut in Iraq. Given Iraqi innovation in weapons development and the way that they always seem to be one step ahead of the Americans strategically, that doesn't seem likely any time soon.

Any warmonger reading this posting is cordially invited to leave a comment telling us how the cakewalk is coming along.

One of the problems with living abroad is that a lot of events back home tend to get missed. Last night I argued that a realignment of British politics was under way - I just didn't realise quite how far advanced that realignment was. My thanks to the anonymous commentator at that posting for the heads-up.

In Wales certainly the realignment seems to be very advanced indeed. People's Voice is a new movement that is based in the south Wales' valleys and advocates just the kind of solid, old-Labour policies that are needed to ensure that Nu-Labour's journey to the cemetery is not long delayed. It was registered as a political party last year, so hopefully it will soon start to spread beyond its original home.

The movement's origins date back to the General Election of 2005 when the Labour Party decided that what the constituency of Blaenau Gwent needed was an all-female short-list for the Labour nomination. This was the straw that broke the camel's back for Peter Law, who up to then had sat in the Welsh Assembly under the Labour banner. He ran for election as an independent and overturned a 19,000 Labour majority to take the seat.

Labour was forced to apologise for this nonsense, but that didn't stop them trying it on again the following year, after Peter Law's sudden death in 2006. Labour ran one of their smooth, nice and neat candidates, who had previously worked in the media and then as a PR man.

People's Voice supported Trish Law, Peter's widow, for the Assembly seat, and a local electrician named Dai Davies for the Parliamentary one. Both proceeded to romp home to victory in the two by-elections. Since then the party has seen other victories at council level.

The fact that South Wales has a new party that seems to be enjoying a great deal of success does not mean that the realignment of British politics is over, far from it. Furthermore, People's Voice is still only one small voice, but as it and other small, local parties embed themselves into the popular culture that voice will get louder and louder.

Slowly but surely, the British working class is finally beginning to get its act together.

A realignment is taking place in British politics, and it is now just possible to see the outlines of how that reshaped political landscape will look. That a realignment is taking place is beyond doubt; the Nu-Labour strategy of treating the working class with contempt because they have nowhere else to go, whilst competing with the Tories for the votes of the aspiring lower-middle-class, was always doomed to fail in the long run because it was based upon two flawed premises.

The first was that the new voters that Labour attracted would become party identifiers, and thus many would stick with the party come what may. This was always a forlorn hope, but the brutal truth that Blair's new voters were always mere political consumers who could be tempted away by other brands only became clear on the 1st May when Labour finished third in the polls.

The second flawed premise was that the working class would remain loyal to the party because they had no other political home. Nobody seemed to have considered seriously the idea that the working class could start to treat the Labour Party with the same contempt that the party had shown to them. Working class turnout at elections has declined steadily since 1997 and the recent local elections have only accelerated that trend.

The point here is that Labour has now broken its tribal link to the working class voter. People who were never particularly interested in politics, but who voted Labour because they identified with it as being the party of their interests, no longer do so. That link cannot be repaired, and that vote is now but a memory.

A decline in voter turnout is often a sign that a realignment is on the way, but these recent elections also saw the beginnings of a new working class party's formation, especially in South Wales.

In places like Merthyr Tydfil, where the Labour vote used to be weighed and not counted, the party suffered a crushing defeat at the hands of so-called independents. Of course these independents are nothing of the kind: they are the old, South Wales Labour Party regulars who can no longer stomach New Labour and its agenda. It is to be expected that those figures will sooner rather than later give themselves a name and constitute themselves as a party. When that happens, other groups and individuals in the major cities of Northern England and Scotland can be expected to sign up.

The final shape of politics would probably see the Tories remaining as the voice of the middle class, employed in the private sector. The rump of the Labour Party can be expected to join the Liberal-Democrats to form a centre left party that draws its support from the public sector Polyocracy.

The new working class party can be expected to draw on the support of the 5.3 million people in Britain who earn less than $6.67 an hour. These are the people who do the shit jobs, for the shit wages, for the shit gaffers - the people who are boycotting Labour because it no longer even pretends to care about their interests. If we add to that the couple of million who are either unemployed, long term sick or bringing up children on state handouts, then we have a natural constituency for this party of over nine million people - and that is before the party starts offering economic security policies to other groups.

The key to this new party's success would lie in sane and sensible policies that appeal to the working class. It is time to start ignoring the lifestyle issues that have so dominated debate over the past decade. The party needs policies that will put economic security for it people first, second and third on the agenda. Everything else is mere hogwash.