Alan Simpson has posted another insightful and witty skewering of British political elites–this time in the Labour Party. As a former Labour MP himself, his essay is as much a cri de coeur from one of their own as a warning to the party’s leadership that they might well fall into the trap set for them by the Tories and become locked into a policy straight jacket.
Simpson’s title is a play on a sonnet by Percy Bysshe Shelley that warns against the inevitable decline of leaders and their empires by their hubris.
. . .Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things. . .
After Ozymandias: Will Britain’s Labour Party Miss the Energy Revolution?
