The following was first put out on my Facebook page at about midnight on Friday 13th December.
It’s another long one I’m afraid (and because I’m tired it’s littered
with parenthesis and very long sentences broken up with funny commas all
over the place, although I have managed to avoid the dreaded ellipses…
so that’s something!) – but I hope it provides some optimism (or at
least direction) and sanity in a political landscape that we perhaps
view as having changed overnight.
Firstly – there are those on the
left who would have us not point fingers at this time, and there are yet
more what want to loudly shout whilst pointing fingers at anyone but
themselves. Both groups are deluded and wrong, now is the time to point
fingers, if we want to have a chance at gaining power at the next
election we have to regroup and move as one, and to do that we have to
understand what we did wrong, we have communicate where we think others
have fallen short, and we absolutely have to reflect on our own choices
and mistakes – because no group is without some responsibility.
The
big headline from Labour’s perspective is of course the revolt in the
“Red Wall”, I dare say there’ll be a lot of very public discussion, and
some even more public blaming over who is responsible, but here’s my
take. There are a number of short term issues which which the electorate
had with Labour and which Labour failed to address, but there are more
long term structural issues. After the 2010 result my dad and I had a
good long chat about the future of Labour (he left the party in 2003 as a
result of the Iraq war, I canvassed for the Greens in 2010). We both
concluded that the New Labour project had run its course - Iraq, attacks
of civil liberties we both agreed on, but dad picked up on something
which I did not- the places most gutted by Thatcherism were reeling,
even before the financial crisis they were increasingly left behind, and
by 2010 they were starting to hurt and as a result were flirting with
openly fascistic and racist parties (UKIP, the BNP and the English
Democrats won 10% of the vote between them in Blyth Valley in 2010).
Brexit and Corbyn are both short term issues which definitely had a big
impact last night, but the communities that switched this time have been
royally fucked over by both parties for a very long time. Farage and
Brexit have offered desperate people the promise of systematic change -
Johnson tapped into that hope and lied in ways that were hard to
counter.
In 2015 Corbyn's campaign highlighted the left behinds,
but they were talking about communities they'd never really claimed to
represent, places like Falmouth and North Devon where rural poverty were
biting, I think they gambled that their previously safe northern seats
would remember Thatcher and what the labour movement achieved on a local
scale during the collapse of British heavy industry, and forget Blair’s
indifference to them, which is an irrelevance when Johnson says they
should remember both and remember that he is "different". Labour badly
misjudged how to handle Brexit, and the left have absolutely failed to
communicate their policies - particularly how to handle communities in
the North East where far right thinking has become the norm, but this
has been a long time coming.
People, particularly those on the right
of the Labour party are making comparisons to 1983 and 1992 but I don't
think that's right, I think this is more like the 1930s (take for
example the Ashton-under-Lyne by-election of 1931 where Mosley’s far
right “New Party” split the anti-tory vote and delivered a Conservative
on 44.6% of the vote). The Labour movement in the ‘30s was faced with
serious issues – feelings of betrayal over McDonald’s coalition with the
Conservatives, populist movements across Europe gaining power, and
threats from overseas to British jobs to name but a few. A notable case
study in defeating the fascist threat that filled the voids caused by
these crises is found in the east end of London, traditional Labour
party territory filled with working class people leading very hard lives
in often terrible deprivation. London’s east end, with its docks and
insatiable appetite for cheap labour was a magnet for new immigrant
communities, and against this backdrop it was easy for the British Union
of Fascists to start making inroads, much as modern day populist
parties have done across white working class communities over the past
40 years.
I don't think the right option is to steer a course for a
shiny new centrist Blair in an attempt to recreate 1997, but to do as
was done in the ‘30s to take down Mosley and the BUF and counter
inequality head on, actually doing work in these communities to make
them better despite the government.
Momentum (for all its many
faults) has mobilised and engaged people in numbers that really haven't
been seen in the post-war era, but to almost no useful end. If a
proportion of these people can be put to action actually tackling
inequality, as activists did during the 1930s, perhaps there'll be a
hope of redirecting the righteous anger felt in the communities that
swung last night towards the people actually holding them back, rather
than raging against bogeymen like immigration and the EU.
This is my
personal view of where we need to start in the communities who’ve told
us at the ballot box we’ve lost their trust, not just to make the labour
movement relevant and electable, but to reduce the horrific effects a
Johnson lead Conservative government could unleash – the specifics of
how we organise to achieve it I do not know, though I would urge
everyone reading this to join a trade union.
