Zero Seats: The Labour 600

Currently the regime is in a bad place, but things are especially bad in Britain. A few weeks ago, I started pushing the idea on twitter that the Tories should attain Zero Seats in the election, which quickly spawned memes and this particularly-excellent fan-made spoof campaign video which currently has over 30,000 views on YouTube and over 250,000 on Twitter. I have been stunned by just how quickly this has taken off and gone viral, including live enactments on Lotus Eaters and yours truly saying the phrase directly to Jacob Rees-Mogg on GB News. In fact, so successful has been this organic campaign that Telegraph journalists are now retweeting conspiracy theories that I’m an MI5 agent working on behalf of Labour (and this in the same week as a scurrilous and libelous hit piece by discredited far-left activists). As things stand, with the hapless Rishi Sunak leading the Tories into oblivion, they are projected to be on 98 seats against 498 for Labour. This is not good enough. It needs to be Zero Seats versus The Labour 600. Recently, during a stimulating conversation, two buddies of mine worried about the prospects of what might happen in a genuinely zero seat scenario. Let us put aside the fact, for a moment, that I believe the Tory party will come to their senses and not go into the election with Sunak and imagine for a moment that they do, that the election will be Starmer vs. Sunak. In this article, I will outline why, in this scenario, which is currently real, we should learn not to worry and love The Labour 600.

Liberal democracy is built on the illusion of opposition with the Tories and Labour locked in a mortal struggle for supremacy and power. However, the truth is closer to a pro-wrestling match. Hulk Hogan and Andre the Giant were presented as mortal enemies at WrestleMania 3, but they were good friends who were cooperating in a match with a pre-determined outcome. This is the difference between kayfabe and reality. The political kayfabe in British politics is something like evil pro-capitalist Tories versus good pro-worker socialist Labour, but by now everyone knows this to be a fiction. The truth is that MPs are members of a permanent political class who are united in their contempt for the British people, and who both agree with the central tenets of globalist technocracy, social liberalism (aka ‘woke’), and unlimited immigration. In 2003, the Conservative MP, Michael Gove, wrote an hilariously embarrassing article in The Times which declared in its headline: ‘I can’t fight my feelings anymore: I love Tony’. He was, of course, talking about the then-Labour leader and Prime Minister, Tony Blair, in a rare moment of breaking the political fourth wall. But you know all this, that’s why you support the idea of Zero Seats for the Tories.

So why is The Labour 600 good for us and bad for them? First and most obviously, it would obliterate the illusion of liberal democracy. In Shakespeare’s Richard II, there is a scene in which the deposed king forces his usurper, Bolingbroke (Henry IV), to watch the spectacle of the king ‘uncrowning’ himself. During this devastating scene, Richard asks for a mirror and then smashes it on the floor and looks at his face in the shattered glass. The illusion of the political formula of the period, which gave any king legitimacy – the Great Chain of Being – was now totally broken. Henry IV becomes king not through the Mandate of Heaven but by mundane Machiavellian facts such as having a bigger army and greater support among the nobility. From the point of view of the believer in The Great Chain of Being, the scene is unbearably tragic, and, indeed, in Shakespeare’s own time, it was omitted from public performance because it was considered dangerous to Tudor power. The Labour 600 would essentially be the same as Richard II smashing the mirror. For many people, this would be as traumatic because it would destroy the legitimating myth of our system. The Dark Lord, Tony Blair, himself understands this. In A Journey, he writes about his memories of the night of his historical 1997 election win:

Pretty soon, the scale of the victory became clear. This was not a win. It was a landslide. After about two hours, for a time I actually become worried. The moving line at the  bottom was showing over a hundred Labour seats. The Tories had just six. I began to think I had done something unconstitutional. I had meant to defeat the Tories and do so handsomely; but what if we had wiped them out? (p. 6)

This remarkable passage shows us Blair worrying that he’d, in effect, ‘broken’ politics. He understands that the dialectical relationship between Labour and Tory is a necessary condition of our system. We can see, then, that the Labour 600 is not Blair’s dream, but his nightmare. He was relieved to see his opponents get some seats in 1997. He wanted a big victory, but not a wipeout. What we want, however, is a wipeout.

Let us imagine, for a moment, a Keir Starmer Labour Party with 600 seats and no opposition. First, they would have to try to justify this. They might argue, for example, that the strength of this mandate is so big that shows that the nation has thoroughly rejected populism on the left and the right heralding a brave new return to the progressive moderate centrist consensus of the Blair years. It seems like the obvious conclusion to draw from such a result, but it would be a lie, and everyone – left, right, centre – would know it as a lie. The Tories are set to lose this election not because the country has lurched to the left, but because The Tories are widely and correctly perceived to be traitors who live to appease the left while showing open contempt for their own voter base. Zero Seats is not gaining support because anyone likes Labour, but because everyone hates the Tories. The by-election result in Wellingborough held on 16^th February 2024 is instructive on this:

🌹 Labour: 13,844 (+107)

🔵 Tories: 7,408 (-24,869)

🟣 Reform: 3,919 (+3,919)

🔶 Lib Dems: 1,422 (-2,656)

🟢 Green: 1,020 (-801)

Notice that the huge drop in Tory votes did not translate into votes for Labour or Lib Dems (who lost votes). This is disillusionment of the political class as a whole and not an endorsement of Labour. If something like this is replicated nationwide, Labour would struggle to run the above narrative and, more to the point, almost no one would be listening in any case. The government, in effect, would be ever less legitimate. If Labour become more activist, interventionist, woke, ‘in your face’ and so on, they’d seriously risk widespread non-compliance, which in regime terms is endgame territory. I suspect that Starmer, guided by Blair, would not be like this, but rather voice platitudes such as ‘we are a government for everyone, the British people, not only Labour supporters’ – which is what Joe Biden should have done in America but didn’t.

The practical reality of running the nation with 600 seats, in real terms a virtual dictatorship, would also bring home the stark realities of power to Labour. Without the theatre and distraction of Tories there to provide false opposition, they’d have sole responsibility for governance. I do not mean pretending to govern, kicking the can down the road, or symbolic acts in the culture wars. I mean the raw realities, responsibilities and obligations of holding power. Picture Stella Creasy and Jess Phillips like rabbits in headlights faced with the prospect that the fortunes of this country will now rest on decisions they make, with no one else to blame. Both parties have habitually sought to avoid facing this reality, by blaming each other, by blaming Brexit, by blaming the EU, by blaming almost everything on ‘external forces’. The Labour 600 would remove many of these crutches, and the first Starmer ministry would simply have to own the whole piece. If they start trying to blame the permanent civil service, ‘deep state’, bureaucracy or whatever else, that would be a win. If genuine leftists, Corbyn supporters, Owen Jones types and so on, become so disillusioned they too no longer believe in liberal democracy, that would be a win. If establishment right types – the backbone of any system and any regime – check out from the system completely, that would be a win. The existence of the Tory party and its false and weak token opposition is the only thing stopping this dream become a reality. Blair’s nightmare is my dream. We can make our dreams a reality.