After months of media attacks on New Labour, the Tories are now the target of our po-faced and somewhat self-righteous media. There is no need to dwell too much on the latest 'sleaze' allegations.

Much of the media onslaught is driven by a desperate awareness that print circulations are falling. No one has yet worked out how to make sufficient money out of online media to pay the wages in the long run. Scandal and celebrity politics keeps the economic wolf from the door.

The attacks, whether directed at New Labour, the Opposition or anyone else who takes an Editor's panicked fancy, undermine a political class that is probably past its sell-by date in any case.

In the case of the Tories, as Simon Collister has pointed out, some of the worst attacks arise from what you would think was their own side, ideologically pure libertarian right-wing bloggers, a classic case of the (Thatcher) revolution eating its own young.

But, by this stage, given the state of our economic and foreign policy, how much do we really care who is on the take?

A po-faced puritanical incompetent is not going to be a better governor than some louche but competent fixer. The entire political class, including a dead-beat self-referential media, is rapidly flying up its own orifice, fiddling (about expenses) while our little Rome burns.

Our political class and the media are now wholly disconnected from the rest of the working population. Perhaps the expenses stories are a way of relating to a wider disgust at political failure amongst a public that is getting genuinely fearful for the future. 

The New Labour Government remains spectacularly unpopular in its own right and that will not change because of a few headlines about alleged Tory moral turpitude. It is at record levels of low esteem in the polls. This crisis of faith is having effects on both sides of politics.

First, the Conservatives are shedding their attempt to look liberal. Their chief strategist, the reformist Steve Hilton, is moving off to America under circumstances that must suggest that his family's risk/reward analysis lies in favour of the safe haven of a West Coast corporation.

Judged by the right wing idea of a 'boot camp' for the young unemployed from the Party's welfare spokesman, Chris Grayling, the ‘troglodytes’ have re-emerged to grab the bar-room vote in another round of a fruitless populist policy arms race with New Labour.

Second, the revolt against the leadership within New Labour is becoming more determined and more organized, with serious attempts to prepare the ground for a political coup in an alliance of left, centre-left and unions (in which the left will eventually be jettisoned).

This is the so-called Plan A - the use of the crises surrounding the Party's possible insolvency and in its electoral popularity to recapture the Party machine for the trades union and centre-left interest before the Party Conference in September.

Unfortunately, this classic Labour 'one more heave' strategy rather depends on Gordon Brown 'changing his mind' on an awful lot of things dear to his heart and there are no signs that anyone is prepared to do what is necessary - remove the rotten head of the fish.

And, in any case, what will the victors inherit? Members of both the trades unions and the party are not going to be pleased if their donations and assets (including properties purchased locally with local donations) are merely sequestered to cover massive outstanding loans.

The Party has delayed NEC Meetings and failed to make any statements as to its financial status since members first started to become aware of the scale of the crisis at the beginning of the year. This may be legally wise but is politically asinine - revolt feeds on rumour.

Any genuinely centre-left dominated Labour Party, the first since Lansbury, is going to face the electorate after a stinking economic crisis that will hurt Middle Britain more than anyone and with angry Blairites determined that any 'coup' takes the blame for a failure on the day.

But there is always Plan B - this is not a likelihood but it is a possibility. New coalitions of left and centre-left in the Party will have nowhere to go if the leadership stands firm or the party goes bust - except out. But out to where?

For the Labour Party to split may seem unthinkable. Most do not expect any trades union, except the CWU, to follow the RMT and disaffiliate this year, but there are precedents for splits in other social democrat parties that have moved too far to the right, most recently in Germany.

Plan B would say that the politics of populist competition for the authoritarian centre-right's bar room vote which has dominated the last thirty years is not necessary.  Plan B would say that populist competition for the libertarian centre-left is equally possible.

Could the 'genuinely' left wing portion of the Labour Party, the environmentalist and community movement and middle class Liberal Democrats combine into a new coalition committed to electoral reform and pull liberal votes out of the Tory Party?

It seems unlikely so long as the trades unions remain determined on the 'one more heave' model inside New Labour - 'one more heave' to pull the Party to the centre-left, 'one more heave' to reconnect with its base and win over sufficient Middle Englanders to control the State.

Some unions are angry on single issues, such as railway and post office privatisation. Others are campaigning on specific rights that break New Labour completely from its increasingly moribund business alliances. An increasingly active and young left wing is emerging within the unions.

In a 'perfect storm', much of the the grassroots and the unions (some at least) could effectively remove themselves from an indebted vehicle and reverse themselves into a new Party which is essentially a more centre-left version of Labour.

Plan B is very risky. It assumes loss of office in 2010 in order to rebuild, whereas current efforts are geared to a coup in the Autumn that may permit a recovery in the Party under new leadership. We still tip Alan Johnson as our populist working class hero in this context.

Because Plan B assumes that the ‘wilderness’ is a necessary process of recreation for office much later, it is deeply counter-intuitive. Unions will also fear the increased influence and power of a socialist Left whose political judgement is often deeply flawed.

And even if sufficient members and unions could be persuaded to break free of its own failed leadership, it would leave a disruptive rump with some key assets, a vicious civil war and a minority status which the Liberal Democrats might use to compete rather than collaborate with.

This brings us to the real problem in building a genuine centre-left dominance of British political culture instead of the ersatz one where a centre-right policy platform uses the cover of the Labour Movement - that is, the persistent lack of judgement of the Liberal Democrats. 

From this perspective, Nick Clegg, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, is a great disappointment to ‘dissidents’. He has failed to be noticed by anyone in the country except perhaps when he supported ‘our boys’ in Afghanistan (ho, hum!) in a PR coup for the Government.

Instead of grabbing the libertarian left ground manipulated by Cameron and long since abandoned by New Labour, it is left to the English middle classes to act as revolutionaries in their own self interest with the politicians following on behind.

Dissident senior police officers are making it known that they do not accept the arguments for 42 days, NHS doctors are angry at cost-cutting at the expense of patients who go outside the NHS and a former head of the SAS has resigned on inadequate funding of troops and equipment.

The LIberal Democrat's opportunity to challenge a failing Government was a spectacular chance to displace New Labour completely but that chance was lost last year. Liberal Democracy is making no progress in the polls at all.

The Liberal Democrats have been exceptionally good at adjusting too late to past politics and not anticipating shifts in public mood. Electing Nick Clegg seemed, at the time, the best means of competing with a weak Cameron against New Labour. Conditions have now radically changed.

The most acute politician in the Liberal Democrat stable (Vince Cable) was sidelined and an opportunity to lead the centre-left and create a new alliance with those Labour dissidents who might eventually have ‘split’ from the ‘mainstream’ Blairites was lost.

So, an angry popular vote now leaps over Clegg and goes direct from Labour to Tory. If the Tories falter and Labour sorts itself out, these votes will drift back to Labour again, increasing the strength of the Labour right and positioning national politics back on the centre-right.

Neither ‘real’ Labour nor the Liberal Democrats have worked out that neither can achieve a breakthrough without the other. The former persists in its alliance with opportunists of the neo-liberal Right and the latter refuses to work effectively with anyone.

The Labour Left persists in believing that it can control the Labour Movement through ‘one more heave’ (when all that will happen is that the centre-right in the Party will just walk away if reform goes too far).

The Liberal Democrats, with their chaotic individualist culture, cannot see that they represent an attitude of mind that, at a national level, requires a coalition with other social forces to attain any sort of power.

The final tragedy is that the Liberal Democrats contain some of the brightest and most interesting younger generation (especially female) politicians who may now never see office. The 'hung Parliament' strategy has not worked once since the 1970s and, even then, poorly.

Compare the women especially with some of the older generation authoritarian harridans inside New Labour (who can make their Tory equivalents look paragons of liberalism) and the tragedy becomes positively Shakespearian. 

The British people and the next generation of Liberal Democrats deserve more effective leadership, certainly more than a Liberal Democrat version of ‘one more heave’, sitting like a pudding waiting for a hung Parliament.

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