So many different things are going up in smoke right now – from government and military installations in Iran to high-end hotels, US consulates and oil wells in the Gulf – and, here in Britain, our ruling Labour Party.
In the classic 1974 film Towering Inferno, a group of plucky guests race down the elevator shaft to escape the flame-engulfed high-rise as it collapses in a molten heap of lava. A version of that famous disaster movie seems to be taking place within the Labour Party, as a political firestorm rages – sparked in part by a recent Manchester by-election – prompting some nervous MPs to contemplate racing in the direction of an exit door marked “Green”.
To recap, a once rock-solid Labour seat, exactly the kind of place where voters used to say they’d “vote for a dog if it was the Labour candidate”, fell by a landslide to the insurgent left-populist Green Party. Labour didn’t just lose this much-watched bellwether vote; it slumped, humiliatingly, into third place, after the far-right Reform Party.
All eyes are on an all-but-inevitable wipeout in the local elections in May, which will see both Greens and Reform making huge strides, likely prompting a leadership challenge to Prime Minister Kier Starmer. Will a last-minute coup d’etat inside the strife-torn party avert its collapse? It’s unclear.
While political civil war consumes the Left, rage and frustration consume the Right. Reform had been quietly confident of winning the recent by-election – until Muslim second-generation voters, mostly of Pakistani descent, wrecked that plan by voting en bloc for the Greens.
Now, Reform faces a nightmare scenario of Muslim voters of migrant descent voting together with so-called “urban progressives” under the Green banner in both the local elections and the next general election mainly to keep Reform out.
Right-wing tabloids have exploded with fury, blaming the by-election defeat on election fraud involving “family voting” (essentially, men illegally escorting their wives into voting booths) and “foreign voters” – which seems to mean Muslims, basically. Reform leader Nigel Farage has demanded a ban on these “foreign” voters, a call eagerly taken up by supportive media such as the Mail.