View from the Sidelines

Dorothy Margot writes

I am no academic, and I have made no study of the Politics of my country. Nevertheless, I have been a keen observer of the political scene since I first proudly walked into a polling booth, to vote for the first time, thanks to the  Representation of the People Act, 1969, which gave me the vote at 18 years old. 

 I voted Liberal. Frankly, it was to hack off my RAF father, and all he believed in, but I also thought Jeremy Thorpe was more convincing than the sexually ambiguous, Edward Heath. (Oh the irony). I doubt if I could have told you a single policy, from any party. I voted for the man who seemed most sincere.

If you Google Ed Miliband, you will note the second most popular search is 'Ed Miliband bacon sandwich'; if you Google David Cameron, the next most popular search is 'David Cameron, Twitter'. People actually want to know what Cameron is saying, whereas Miliband is good for a laugh.

In the days when the Labour party could field a man of the calibre of the late Labour Leader, John Smith, they stood a chance of sweeping the Tory party away. Who, amongst the ranks of the faithful, consider the unprepossessing and uninspiring Miliband any threat to Cameron? Cameron acts out the part of the statesman and family man to good effect, irrespective of what he is actually saying.

Political pundits rather downplay the influence that mere personality exerts on the voters' minds. That might be a simplistic summation, but Arnold Schwarzenegger garnered 4,206,384 Republican votes in 2003 on the back of having a good physique and a few quotable one-liners. It would be wrong to imagine the British voter has more savvy and is not swayed by celebrity and charisma, witness the Farage Effect!  My father was persuaded by the personable Blair to vote Labour after a lifetime of Daily Mail-informed conservatism, but during recent local elections, he voted UKIP, because he admires Nigel Farage, for 'talking sense'.

To quote Chesterton: ''The first effect of not believing in God is to believe in anything".

Have you read your papers recently?:

Comedian Al Murray has announced he plans to stand against Nigel Farage in the seat of South Thanet in May’s general election.

He will stand as his comedy alter ego “the Pub Landlord” for the Free United Kingdom Party, or FUKP. In a video posted to YouTube launching his bid for parliament, he says: “It seems to me that the UK is ready for a bloke waving a pint around offering common sense solutions.” 

The first of his pledges is to make pints of beer cost 1p and to brick up the channel tunnel"

Frances Perraudin, The Guardian January 14, 2015

Politics is dying on its feet, when a stand-up comedian, mocking UKIP, warrants column inches in all the press. The next election seems set to fragment politics even further, to devalue it and to fail to offer the country a radical leader/thinker of the likes of Greece's Alexis Tsipras, who ensured he was always seen, without a tie! Political stagecraft, and it got International press coverage of the 'this man means business' variety.

In June 2013 the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire Labour Party, had the opportunity to adopt an outstanding female Labour councillor, Jenny Lynn as their next election candidate. She has worked tirelessly for the party and her community and much more besides; she was the first woman to represent her ward in over 30 years.

 She is an openly practicing Christian, and I have witnessed the great respect she gets from the local Muslim community, (no mean feat), by her leadership of the Halifax Friends of Palestine and her support of asylum seekers. She is eloquent, her voice is easy on the ear, she has a 'common touch' and a good sense of humour, and she is passionate about her politics. So whom did her party choose, when she was proposed as a candidate, and stood against 3 other hopefuls? A fresh faced, anodyne London-based 'local' lad who has yet to serve his community, Josh Fenton-Glynn.  Yes, let's not select a fiery, single, middle aged woman, let's have a safe smiley Mili - Bland clone. Well, good luck with that choice.

Josh twittered on 7 Feb 2015:

"We are 'likes' away from 500 on the 'Josh For Calder Valley' Facebook page, let's see if we can get there by Monday". Inspiring, isn't it?

 So, finally, to answer the question. By choosing, post-Kinnock, yet another albatross leader to hang around their necks, the Labour party is indeed already dying, by slow suicide

 

Well, must it still die?

Nine years ago I wrote a piece called 'Labour Must Die!' which made a minor splash in various places, most oddly on the website of the 'liberal-interventionist' Euston Manifesto, where it can still be found as well as here. My Gramscian critique of New Labour sat rather uncomfortably alongside arguments for extending 'western democracy' to ever more remote and dusty parts of a generally unreceptive world. A lot's happened in the meantime: the 2008 crash and subsequent slump, the decay of the Blair/Brown project and the electoral defeat of New Labour in 2010, the neo-Thatcherite induced austerity  of the Con/Lib coalition, the Eurozone crisis etcetera. On a personal level I finished the PhD of which my article was a snapshot, and got it published as a book 'The Politics of New Labour' (2011) which has sold moderately well and played some small part in the post-mortem. My first novel 'Gramsci in Love', which offers an account of my intellectual hero's tortured love-life, is about to be published. I am even less engaged in the sterile routines of party politics than back then.

So, nine years on, must Labour still die? Well, on a simply existential basis, the Labour Party survives to fight yet more elections and chase more headlines, so obviously it hasn't quite died yet. But on any objective measure it's not exactly thriving either. Membership briefly rose post-Blair/Brown but has since levelled off. Most local Labour organisations are 'hollowed-out' or moribund, and heavily reliant on elected councillors or paid officials with a vested financial interest in their 'political' activity. Joining the Labour Party is now a pretty strange thing to do, even in the conditions of opposition when indignant leftists historically 'return to the fold'. Performance in elections, by-elections and opinion polls is pretty lacklustre, to the extent that 'the Labour vote' is less responsive to the pull and push of the party machine than at any time in its 100 year-plus history. The ideology of Labourism, with its experiential base in the manual work which hardly anyone in this country does any more, and its organisational basis in the trades unionism which is now largely confined to the public services, looks increasingly shallow and ineffectual. It lives on in the ghostly 'cultural' forms of football, light entertainment and xenophobia, but struggles for clear political expression. The subaltern heartlands of northern England are palpably depressed and taciturn.

 But, to pose the question with which Labour has always stymied any challenge to its hold over class and electoral allegiance, what else is there? Personally I wish I could vote for Syriza, which is exactly the kind of 'broad democratic alliance' we Euro-communists yearned for in the 1970s, and whose Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis is right now the coolest man on the planet, but our archaic electoral system won't allow anything of the sort. For most of us in England the choice this May is between the traditional 'hold your nose and vote Labour' or the rather less unsavoury but arguably more destructive 'vote Green'. I've had extensive dealings with the Green Party over the last ten years, and I can't say I'm hugely impressed. It's a strange amalgam of political geeks, with an obsessive focus on the electoral mechanics of 'getting out the vote' to match anything in Labour, and angry hippie dreamers who will gladly embrace any wacky cause that can't find a political home elsewhere. Their politics and organisation are simply not up to the historic opportunity presented by climate change and the decay of traditional party politics. The real Green 'breakthrough' was in 1989, with 15% of the vote in the European elections for a genuinely popular environmentalism, and they blew it. The current 'green surge' is causing a minor media flurry, with party membership over 50,000, but it will not translate into a double-figure vote-percentage let alone Westminster seats. Even Caroline Lucas in Brighton Pavilion looks vulnerable to a focussed and very nasty Labour push. After May I would expect the Green Party to fall away as quickly as it did in the early '90s, when the 'anti-austerity' activists of the 'Green Left' take their pale Labour leftism elsewhere.

As for actual Labour, quite frankly I don't really care one way or another. It simply continues to slide into historical irrelevance, and  I don't see what the career prospects of a bunch of blustering, boring Oxford PPE graduates and ex-special advisers, led by a strange man who is both old before his time and stuck in perpetual adolescence, have to do with me and my life or even my country. If they want to spend their lives shouting at Tories and conspiring in corridors, that's up to them, but I cannot see what possible benefit the rest of us derive from such shenanigans. Labour makes even less of an impact on daily life out here in the real world than it ever did; increasingly what they do feels like make-believe. To sum up – it seems to me that my question of nine years ago has expanded way beyond its original focus. Any prospect of social transformation or even sustained economic recovery in Britain now requires the death of not just Labour but the whole of what constitutes 'politics' in our debased, exhausted, post-pretty-much-everything age. Quite what form the politics of post-politics will take is wholly unclear, and I don't think we should get too carried away with 'social media' and all the other techno-fixes of late capitalism, but one way or another it will always be about people getting together and taking action to improve their lives and prospects; something the Labour Party has signally and consistently failed to do.

 

Andrew Pearmain is a historian and author of 'The Politics of New Labour' (2011) and 'Gramsci in Love' (2015)   

 

Trevor Fisher says No: It’s Labour or the Fourth Republic

Before the 2010 election, there was some discussion in the Chartist collective on whether Britain was taking the same route as the Weimar Republic in the twenties. The Blair-Brown years had seen the rise of the Far Right with street fighters like the EDL emerging and a serious electoral challenge from the BNP. Its leader Nick Griffin became an MEP and with the BNP winning council seats, the risk of a British Front Nationale succeeding was real.

Five years later the good news is the Fascist Right is retreating though not defeated. The bad news is it has been replaced by UKIP, and while this has split the Tory right, xenophobia also appeals to Labour voters.  In Scotland, the Nationalists threaten to deny Labour the seats it needs for government. Electorally the Lib Dems are taking a hammering across the UK and the Greens are providing an appeal for progressive Labour voters. With 7 parties in the TV debates, the election is beyond quick fixes. If Britain today looks less like Weimar before the Nazis, it increasingly looks like the French Fourth Republic – a Poujadist Party in UKIP, fragmentation and a future of coalition governments and instability.

Immediately there is an overwhelming case for a Tactical Voting campaign to stop the Green surge taking Labour seats. The threat of Farage in government should concentrate minds. A UKIP-Tory coalition could be the election outcome, with Cameron is ousted as Tory leader for a pro-UKIP leader. An alternative scenario, if Miliband does badly, is a threat to his position and a Grand Coalition of Tory and Labour for the still sizeable number of pro-European Tories. For Balls the chance to become Chancellor in a Grand Coalition, backed by the Blairite M Ps, cannot be underestimated. It is possibly the only way to save a career blighted by his embrace of austerity. A pro -Austerity, pro- Europe coalition would have appeal to the Orange Book Lib Dems, though whether Clegg holds his seat is problematical. If he loses and the Liberals split, then a Labour-Left Liberal alliance is possible. The Oakshott grant to the Labour-Liberal candidates he favours is a big straw in the wind,

The Greens would probably not win enough seats to hold a balance, but could stop Labour victories, while the SNP is a real beast in this jungle. As the Nats have picked up the social democratic/pro welfare state cloak that New Labour threw away, it would have an appeal to many Labour voters. It’s a poisoned chalice however, and in Scotland Labour supporters might prefer an alliance with Left Lib Dems. With no major party having a clear alternative to policies of fiscal orthodoxy, austerity and more cuts save the fringe parties, the possibility of unstable short term coalitions would be considerable - just like the French Fourth Republic – making a Grand Coalition more attractive, but hard to achieve, hence the French Fourth Republic could be the reality and if fixed parliaments are kept, changes might happen without any electoral mandate at all.

While YouGov polling at the end of January suggests support for radical policies amongst Labour and Swing voters, the message will be blanked by Labour. John Reid's comment on the Left Futures website to the news -”We tried this in 1983 and it failed” - shows the anachronism of New Labour. However Blairites remain in action, actively hostile to even Miliband's limited gestures.

In the last month both Blair himself and Alan Milburn have attacked Miliband, to the applause of the Tory press. It is possible a Miliband defeat would put them back on the political stage. Labour is internally divided and has spent the coalition period being studiously vague. It is unlikely this will change as Labour fears a 1992 repeat, though this is not 1992 and with the Greens attracting young Leftish voters, its present course is risky.

The immediate priority is to secure a Miliband premiership via tactical voting. This would also lay the basis for an Anti Austerity Alliance. While the People's Assembly is marginal. It could be strengthened by a strong tactical voting network for May 8^th. In the immediate post-election period, repealing the fixed parliament Act would be an essential first step. A coalition may be the outcome if there is no majority, but not for another 5 years. It has to be brought to an end when circumstances change, for another election to seek a majority. Otherwise we really will have the French Fourth Republic in the UK, with disastrous consequences.

The Chartist website is http://www.chartist.org.uk/about-chartist/