The light at the end of the long COVID-19 tunnel is in sight with the news that we might soon have a vaccine but it will be a long time before we are completely rid of it. Furthermore, the conditions that brought us this virus* are worsening and unless we see a dramatic shift in how we treat our planet, this will just be the first in a series of global pandemics that we have to deal with.
Children are going hungry, homelessness keeps rising, racism is becoming mainstream and wealthy nations are letting desperate people drown in their hundreds.
These issues have not occurred in the last four or five years: as a species we’ve been creating these disasters for far longer than that and we’ve known about them for decades. So what is the solution? What do we actually need to do to face up to the challenges of our present and our future?
In the last couple of decades, we have heard leading UK and US politicians talk about these issues but nothing has actually changed, in fact many of these things are getting worse: we’re still making poor people poorer; there are still scared people dying while trying to get to safety; and climate disaster is upon us. Is the solution, then, more of the same? Should we elect more leaders who are on the side of capitalism provided they say the right words about these things? If political campaigns are funded by the same kinds of organisations who will be most inconvenienced by actual progressive politics, can we trust them to act in the interests of the many?
Early analysis of the US election shows that in industrial areas in long-term decline, more people voted for Trump in 2020 than they did in 2016. If this sounds familiar to people in the UK, it’s because Brexit has followed the same pattern.
Trump, like Nigel Farage and to a slightly lesser extent Boris Johnson, is seen as anti-establishment. We could point out that people like Trump, Johnson and Farage are clearly part of the establishment: they have always been wealthy, had expensive educations, are closely connected to the world of hedge funds and property speculation; but they are seen as something else. They tap into the rhetoric espoused by the right-wing media outlets who back them and they flaunt their renegade credentials against an unseen political hierarchy.
We can’t say we weren’t warned. Until right-wing populists saw their opportunity and worked out how to win, the public’s active engagement with politics was very low and the common view was that “they’re all the same” and “they don’t care about people like us.” On the one hand, this was a damning verdict on leading politicians of all colours but on the other, it made it easier for the political establishment to carry out their own agenda.
To counter the hate from the right, we need hope from the left. Sadly, centrists on both sides of the Atlantic are busy picking fights with progressives while our right-wing leaders are exacerbating all of these issues with divisive social policies and destructive neoliberal economic policies. Now that Biden has won, we have US and UK centrists ramming this fact down the throats of progressives, as though Biden's campaign didn't attempt to ride the waves of recent progressive campaigns on racial, environmental and health issues.
In the UK, Labour’s leadership has engaged in civil war by ignoring the pledges it was elected on and making an example of left-wing MPs, most recently and most dramatically Jeremy Corbyn. Whatever your opinion of Corbyn, whether or not you believe that this MP who has fought against racism his entire life is actually guilty of it himself, not only is Starmer’s treatment of him anti-democratic, it flies in the face of the EHRC view which states that leaders should not interfere in internal party investigations (something that Labour centrists repeatedly urged Corbyn to do). Furthermore, the Labour party are now banning Labour members from getting together to discuss the issue. And they said Corbyn was a Stalinist.
Blair, Brown, Clinton and Obama tinkered around the edges and after a huge financial crash, we’re standing on a burning planet amidst a global pandemic that has so far claimed well over a million lives. I debate (as calmly as I can) with centrists on an almost daily basis trying to get them to see that their way provides no actual solutions and that left-wing policies are not only what we desperately need, they’re also popular and economically sensible. Whether they’ve been brainwashed by dominant establishment ‘journalism’ or they just don’t want things to get better, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
Blair, Brown, Clinton and Obama tinkered around the edges and after a huge financial crash, we’re standing on a burning planet amidst a global pandemic that has so far claimed well over a million lives. I debate (as calmly as I can) with centrists on an almost daily basis trying to get them to see that their way provides no actual solutions and that left-wing policies are not only what we desperately need, they’re also popular and economically sensible. Whether they’ve been brainwashed by dominant establishment ‘journalism’ or they just don’t want things to get better, it’s like talking to a brick wall.
On the left, we are smeared as naive and extreme while being expected to believe that the politics that got us into this mess will now get us out. We've opened the window for them but they're still flying repeatedly into the glass^. We've shown them the other side of the see-saw but they're sitting on the fulcrum and refusing to budge. They're tackling their own players, refusing to pass the ball and blaming the left-winger for losing the game. I admire the dogged determination of progressives in parties that want their brand of politics eliminated but at the moment I can't see how we win like this.
* Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency by Andreas Malm. Currently reading this fantastic book about the links and the parallels between our destruction of the natural world and COVID-19.
^ Fly against the window is an analogy partially borrowed from Ed Poole!
