In the next three days, I am going to post three things here (this is the first). In some ways, this isn’t the right setting for them, but because they are not my direct work (though they are all connected to it because, as you will see, I am basically convinced that everything is connected to a great extent) I don’t really have anywhere else specific to put them.
Do by all means feel free to share any of them you want to, in pretty much any place (though please do mention my name) and/or share them with people/groups/organisations if you wish (though, ditto).
So as some of you may have noticed, on 12th December 2019, there was an election. It’s pretty fair to say that it was a disaster for Labour (though there are a lot of things related to that that are certainly NOT fair to say, but are being said anyway: we will absolutely address some of those in a minute) and by extension for most of the UK’s Left, and indeed, sadly, for the majority of people in the UK.
Now. It’s worth noting that some people have claimed the election as a ringing endorsement of Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party. Others have claimed it as a signal that the Tories ‘won the debate’.
In fact, neither suggestion is really defensible. First, because the Conservative Party took just 1.2% more of the vote than in 2017 (and on a 1.7% lower turnout), when the election was regarded as a rejection of the Conservative Party. The vast majority of those offered the opportunity to vote for Johnson and his party, refused to do so. More than that, the majority of those who decided to vote for anyone refused to vote for Johnson and his party.
Of course, some people will say ‘ah yes, but the majority of people have almost never voted for the party which wins the election’ and that’s true. But a) the point here is not to question the election result (though there are some reasons to do so: I will leave that to people with greater expertise than mine), simply to counter the idea that the electorate ‘backs Johnson’. It simply does not and b) the statement is in itself an indictment of the entire electoral system in the UK.
Not only does the Tory party have an 80 seat majority having taken just 43.6% of the vote, it has in fact increased its seat share by 48, on an increase in votes of just 1.2%. For comparison, Labour lost 60 seats having lost 7.2% of its vote compared with 2017, the SNP increased its share by 13 seats, despite increasing its vote by just 0.8%, the Lib Dems lost one seat despite increasing their vote by 4.2% while the Green Party increased its vote share by 65% (admittedly from 1.6% to 2.7%) and made absolutely no gain in seats. As has been noted elsewhere, including by me, the Green Party needs 850,000 votes to gain one seat; the Conservatives gain a seat for every 33,000 votes.
Whatever your view of the parties involved, it is a) clear that whatever the election showed, it was not that the country is united behind the Tories, and b) glaringly obvious that the UK election system does not serve democracy, if we accept that to mean government for and/or by the people. I would say there has never been a better case for electoral reform, but in fact almost every election since more than two parties regularly contested seats has been an alarm call. We have just refused to act.
Similarly, the idea that the Tories won the debate is not only fatally undermined by the fact that most people refused to vote for them, but also by the fact that the Tories hardly ever actually engaged in the debate. Whether hiding in a fridge, stealing the telephones of journalists who asked him difficult questions, or simply refusing to take part in interviews and debates, Johnson was more notable for his absence than his rare appearances during the campaign.
One could argue that this is good campaigning – it was after all the exact same approach which won Johnson the leadership of his party. And arguably it IS good campaigning.
But it is not only extraordinarily bad politics, but also extremely damaging to democracy in the UK. By showing that one can win an election by repeating one phrase – and that alone – with only a few (untrue) policy promises added almost as an afterthought, Dominic Cummings and Lee Cain may well have holed UK democracy below the waterline. If one is supposed to vote based on what one knows about the parties and their policies, an approach literally designed to prevent the electorate from making an informed choice is a literal attack on democracy.
Equally, if one claims Blair ‘lied to the public’ (and I believe he did) he at least did so when circumstances changed: he did not campaign for election on the basis of a few poorly-sketched policies and then ditch them within days of being elected, as Johnson has (though in fact, Cameron, rather than Johnson’s little helpers, were the first to take this approach, ditching Building Schools for the Future and several other policies they accused Brown of being a liar during the campaign for saying they would drop).
If the perception that politicians are liars is damaging democracy then a campaign built on one (effectively undeliverable) slogan and a series of lies is, once again, a direct attack on democracy. Johnson gets his five years in power, but at what cost to the system? To the country?
And so let’s mention the other absolute untruth currently being gravely discussed: that the election was a ‘victory for Brexit’.
Now. Labour went to great lengths to claim that this was not a plebiscite on Brexit, and was in effect punished for it (although also for other things). But the person who ‘won’ the election insisted throughout that it was the ‘Brexit election’ and repeated a pro-Brexit message – the sole slogan of the campaign, in effect – ‘Get Brexit Done’.
The problem is, of course, that of those who voted either way, just 46.5% of people voted for pro-Brexit parties, while 53.5% voted against those parties. Almost a third of the electorate – 32.7% – did not vote at all. The electorate spoke, and demanded Brexit must not happen. The UK voting system has effectively handed the Tories an excuse for carrying out a policy that more people voted against on 12th December 2019 than voted for on 23rd June 2016.
Which brings us to Labour, not least because one of the party’s leadership candidates, Kier Starmer, has now stated – entirely incorrectly – that the election has ‘proved’ that people do not want a second vote on Brexit.
In fact, if it proved anything at all (and I can accept there is an argument that it did not) it was that a second vote was the absolute least the majority of the country wanted.
Now, Brexit is an important issue for Labour. Because in fact, it could have afforded to have lost the few votes it lost to the Lib Dems, in places it was unlikely to take seats (sadly, Southport in Merseyside excepted) and even to the Greens (again, Stroud must be noted here as an exception). But the votes it lost which hit it hardest were those lost in the North and North East to the Brexit Party. The earliest results of the night showed that while the Tories had made hardly any real vote-share increases, Labour had lost heavily, and heavily to the Brexit Party.
Frankly, there is no excuse whatsoever for any former Labour voter who switched to the Brexit Party. First of all, because the latter is not, by any sensible definition, a political party. Second, because the party was a transparent attempt to break the Labour vote in some parts of the country (and only those parts) in an attempt to hand seats to the Tories (as indeed happened).
Third, because Labour promised everyone a second vote: if you voted against a second vote, you never again get to pretend you are interested in the ‘will of the people’ or ‘democracy’. You were (as indeed are the Tory Party and Brexit Party) interested only in dragging the UK out of the EU, stripping its citizens of their rights, regardless of the fact that as you fear, and the election showed, the majority of people don’t actually want that to happen. And fourth, because the Brexit Party’s policies – in as far as such things existed – were basically exactly the same as the Tories’.
But it is hard to conclude that those who voted for the Brexit Party were not motivated to do so because of Brexit.
Except… in fact, it isn’t really. Why? Because in fact most former Labour voters didn’t express a great deal of dissatisfaction with Labour on Brexit: at least, very few of them listed that as their main reason for not voting Labour (though many listed it as a secondary reason, effectively ‘we voted against Labour for reason one and/or reason two, and voted for the Brexit Party instead because like us, it wanted Brexit’).
In fact, the most common refrain from former Labour voters was that they couldn’t vote Labour for several reasons which really should cause Labour and the wider Left far more concern than people’s opinions on Brexit: that Corbyn was ‘unelectable’; that he was a racist; that he was a supporter of terrorism and/or that Labour ‘couldn’t deliver’ what it promised.
And this must be worrying to the Labour Party – and indeed the wider Left. Because let’s not fool about, Labour was absolutely hammered in the 2019 general election. In fact, had the Tory Party substantially increased its vote-share, it may have been slightly easier to take (though hardly less worrying). But this was not a Tory win as much as a Labour loss.
But why? First of all, we may as well address the major attacks on Corbyn – that he is an anti-Semite and/or a terrorist sympathiser. So, we should start by saying that there is zero evidence for the former, and almost zero for the latter. Equally, since the election we have heard basically zero about anti-Semitism, while during the election campaign Johnson took time out to attend the unveiling – by his actual predecessor as Tory PM – of a statue of the UK’s most virulent anti-Semite.
At best, those who claim to believe Corbyn was an anti-Semite seem not to have much actual interest in anti-Semitism.
The terrorism allegation is slightly more complex – though only if you have not thought very much about it. Because Corbyn has certainly backed the political aims of some terrorist groups, even as he has publicly and openly opposed their actual terrorist activities. It is worth also noting two vital but seemingly-ignored points: one, that absolutely ALL of the most cited pieces of ‘evidence’ that Corbyn supports terrorism were either absolutely false or wild misrepresentations of reality.
But second, the problem is that many of the most vocal critics of Corbyn on this issue seem to have wildly misunderstood how politics works. Many Thatcherites, for example, as almost all current Tories are and/or proclaim themselves to be, appear to have remembered Thatcher saying she ‘will not negotiate with terrorists’ and forgotten that she simultaneously and repeatedly made clear in private that she would meet representatives of the IRA whenever they wanted to begin talks.
Corbyn was in a position where he could conduct meetings more openly, and did so. While Mo Mowlam (deservedly) takes the majority of praise for the Good Friday agreement, almost everyone from all sides involved in the negotiations cites Corbyn’s work as having helped lay the foundations.
Now, there is absolutely no doubt whatsoever that the media focussed concerted attacks on Corbyn and that these most often dealt with him as a person far more than any single Labour party policy. And there is a reason for this: people actually liked Labour’s policies.
Now, as a Green, I will take one line here to note that Labour had literally no policies in 2019 which had not already been included in the Green party’s manifestoes of 2015 and/or 2017. But the fact is that in every single pre-election poll, Labour’s policies were extraordinarily popular.
But there was a problem. By focussing on Corbyn, the media and Tory party ensured there was in fact very little serious discussion of Labour policies (the same applied, as always, to Green policies, though for a different reason). Effectively, discussion of Labour policy came when Tory politicians deigned to discuss them, and at that point they only did so to claim – demonstrably falsely – that they could not be afforded or delivered.
This would not be a serious problem, except that many many people cited this – way before they mentioned Brexit – when explaining why they had not voted Labour: in effect, they didn’t vote Labour because they refused to believe that Labour could deliver on its promises.
And that’s a problem because it means that people seem to believe that nationalising the railways and power system – something already done – is actively impossible. And that providing free broadband, which several states already provide – is a wild, insane dream that can never be delivered. That making sure people earn a decent wage for their work, or assistance if or when they cannot, so they don’t have to rely on charity food hand-outs in the world’s fifth-richest country, is a far-Left fantasy.
In effect, this has been the result of the more than 40 years of the failed neo-liberal experiment: that even in the depths of their misery, with all of UK post-war history to draw on, people literally cannot believe that it is even possible for their lives to improve via the means this has already demonstrably been achieved in the UK and in other states all over the world.
And the cost to the country of this Tory charlatanry – its pretence that Labour, rather than it, are somehow economic fantasists even while the gap between rich and poor increases, child poverty has sky-rocketed in the world’s fifth-richest nation and the Tories have borrowed twice as much in the last nine years as Labour has in every single period in government combined – is another five years of the same, provenly false and disastrous policies, alongside the racism which defines the party and the economically illiterate, racist, isolationist folly of Brexit which will hammer all but the UK’s absolute richest for the next 25 years.
In fact, it’s worse than that. We could realistically have been building a better future for everyone for the last 40 years. Instead, even if we began tomorrow (and we now cannot) we would need at least 30 to undo the damage done by the failed experiment. With Brexit, we can add another quarter century. We are literally moving backwards, as a nation and to some extent as a species, because those with most money have no desire to change things, and have convinced many of the rest of us that change is in fact not even possible.
Now, this is a disaster. For many of us, it consigns us to spending the rest of our lives not progressing, but getting us back to a position from which we can build.
The problem is that the only way we can do so, the only way not only Labour but the Left in general can even begin to think about moving towards this, is by being organised, right away.
And that requires us to act sensibly, and together, very quickly indeed.
I will be as fair as possible. It’s hard to be in opposition. It’s even harder if virtually every media outlet, from a BBC whose top management have been directly selected by the Tory Party and whose highest-ranking journalists have been directly selected by those management staff, but of course also including the Murdoch-run S*n, Sky and Times, as well as the Daily Mail, a newspaper literally thriving on hatred and fear, and even the Liberal (and Liberal Democrat-supporting) Guardian, are basically opposed to you. It’s harder still if many within your own party are dedicated to sniping at you, and I will be completely fair, if you also happen to show roughly the same human warmth as an angry porcupine.
But it’s a difficult job. The problem is that even after we have taken all those things into account, Labour seems to be bad at it. First, because in opposition Labour achieved basically nothing. It failed to dislodge a minority Tory government, but perhaps more importantly, given nine solid years of Tory failure, it failed to build any momentum (pun noted, but not fully intended). Even the Green Party, which is ridiculously portrayed as a pressure group rather than a political party (including, sadly, by Labour) managed to change the shape of the political debate a little.
Labour, however – a party which is supposed to aspire to government – has failed even in that. Instead, where its councillors and party activists should have been working together, they have squabbled. Where its parliamentary party and membership should have been making a case for it to take power in place of a failing, incoherent, slavering, racist mess of a Tory party, it instead decided to basically refuse to support one leader and then take turns – as one current leadership candidate put it – stabbing the other in the front.
And here’s the thing: Corbyn had and has problems. He isn’t and wasn’t the ‘perfect man’. But his main problem was not the Tories, or even the media, but Labour. The party attacked him relentlessly, even as its own parts attacked one another. It is little wonder after four solid years of his own MPs briefing against him to the media that the media – and therefore the public – came to believe he was ‘unelectable’, even as they literally had the power to elect him.
But here’s the other thing. Labour’s popular policies – the ones which were more popular than anything any other party offered – were his (well, technically the Green Party’s, but who’s counting? Me, clearly). The reason Labour lost in 2019 was Corbyn’s unpopularity. He contributed to that, but so did his own party.
In 2016, immediately after the Brexit referendum, as the Tory Party fell to pieces, Labour parliamentarians launched an all-out attack on Corbyn. I noted at the time that, having been handed an open goal, the party instead chose to burst the ball and take turns trying it on as a crown.
It must not do this again.
We need a government which is not led by a racist clown and steered by a man who believes Bismarck – the creator of a nation which was within a generation overrun by fascism and within two annihilated in two world wars – is history’s greatest hero. Until we fix the electoral system, that’s a Labour government – hopefully with strong Green and probably SNP input.
But the party has set itself yet another schedule of argument. The next four months, in which we needed Labour at national and local level to be leading social resistance and rebuilding (I daresay some of you who I know are Labour at local level, will certainly be doing this already, but we need your help at ALL levels) will see candidates lining up to say that the others’ brand of ‘Labourism’ is evil, or ‘failed’.
I do get it. I realise that for some of Labour, the Blair years were years of sunshine and success. Blair was a neo-liberal, though. Although to his credit, he tried hard to make corporatism work for society, failing mainly because corporations are better at business deals than politicians are.
I also absolutely see that there are strong arguments for Jess Phillips (who is honest, forthright, and determined) and Kier Starmer (who is polished, urbane and knowledgeable: both, like their opponents are of course also articulate) even as Starmer has talked himself into being wrong – in fact, denying reality – over Brexit.
But let’s not ignore the fact that Labour received fewer votes with Brown or Miliband as leader than it did with Corbyn. It received fewer than it did with Corbyn as leader in all elections but one under Blair. Labour’s policies – if not its permanently attacked (and again, to be fair, semi-permanently spiky) leader – were far more popular than the Tory alternatives.
There is no guarantee. In fact there is no evidence whatsoever, that a centrist/right-of-centre leader will suddenly make people vote Labour again.
The point is that Corbyn, in joining the Greens on many issues, managed to drag the UK a little way back to the Left: to replant the seed of social cohesion and of global environmental responsibility.
Those policies were and are popular. To use a saying we seem to have forgotten, we must not throw the baby out with the bathwater. Choose the person who recognises the neo-liberal experiment for what it is and always was – a hyper-capitalist experiment designed to make a very few already wealthy people very much wealthier.
Let’s engage with reality, and with the rest of the world – environmentally, socially and politically.
We can do this, but you are as vital as everyone else. We need a healthy Labour party, and we need it functioning at local, regional and national level. Leading the response, the resistance, and the regrowth we need already and will need even more after another five grim, bitter, racist and frankly wasted years for the UK.
I don’t write this as a Green, but as a left-winger who happens to be Green.
This is no longer about ‘supporting a team’ – if it ever was. The country needs Labour to get a grip, and to remember what makes it good.
We’ll be there with you, making things happen, helping to rescue those who are already being targeted by this shocking excuse for a government.
But to be there with you, we need you to be there.
This isn’t the moment for squabbling. It’s also not the moment for you to lurch Right once more. It’s the time to build and stand together. Please, get it done fast and properly, and then let’s organise ourselves like we should have done in 2010.
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