Thinking out loud about left-wing political efforts

This piece might be read by a few people who are all thinking about how the left can build something from the ashes of 2019-2021. What do we need to do? How do we do it? I'm thinking as I type, so please forgive the lack of structure!

For avoidance of doubt: when I say "the left" or "left-wing" I mean people who supported Jeremy Corbyn. And when I say "socialists" or "socialism", I'm talking about democratic socialism and that doesn't include people who claim to be socialists but in practice seem happy with the current Labour party.

First, what are our problems? Here are my thoughts, in no particular order:

No electoral vehicle; very little parliamentary influence

Whether or not you are inclined to stay within the Labour party and try to drag it back to the left or whether you feel there is no point flogging that dying horse, it can't be argued that right now, Labour are not promoting socialist policies: in fact they are purging the left in ever more blatant ways.

Talking about parliamentary influence could be seen as the same issue. But let's not forget that the political agenda over the last 40 years or more has been mostly set by unelected right-wingers. Most of the main trade unions appear to be operating from the left - although not all of them are - and they still have some influence over Labour policy, even if much of the party wished that weren't the case. So there is a glimmer of hope.

Persuading the electorate against an extremely biased media

Socialist policies are popular - even with Tory voters. Unfortunately the majority of our politicians and the majority of the media have managed to convince a large proportion of the electorate that left-wing policies - and the people who promote them - are radical, or even dangerous. 

Even if we can't convince everyone that the BBC is biased against the left, I don't think many people could deny that our press is massively dominated by the right. 

The fractured left

There are a lot of us out here. There are a number of small parties, loads of campaign groups, there are writers, bloggers, podcasters, youtube broadcasters etc. One of our problems, as I see it, is uniting. To paraphrase Jo Cox (who wasn't on the left!), we have more in common than that which divides us; unfortunately, we are not united. For a while now, many on the left have been inclined to distance themselves from others on the left. Perhaps we don't all share the same perspective on every topic. Maybe some are in a bubble with others who are too similar to them and maybe they sometimes miss the bigger picture. I might have been guilty of this minor criticism myself from time to time and there are one or two personalities who I find myself agreeing with a little less of late. But I try to stay positive about people who I know to be left-wingers even if they occasionally say something on a particular topic that doesn't exactly reflect my own view. 

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So how do we solve these things and what are the hurdles we must overcome? Again, these are just my thoughts based on the issues outlined above:

Electoral vehicle / pursuit of parliamentary influence

This is possibly the most obvious question we have - and one of the most difficult to answer. Many would like to get behind another left-wing party (some are looking for a new one; others are trying to promote small left wing parties that have been around for a long time). Many fear splitting the left vote and think there is still a way to win in the Labour party. My personal view is that the left within Labour are currently like a footballer who can't get into the starting eleven. We have fallen (or rather, been kicked) so far that we don't seem to have any steer on the direction of the party: the leadership, the party structures and all the mainstream media are against us. They didn't see the 'threat' from the left coming (like they didn't see the EU referendum going the way it did). Now they're back in control, I can't see us wrestling it back for a long, long time without us doing something different.

If - and it's a huge if - the left could get together behind a number of respected candidates*, with union support and backing in the 'new' media, we would of course split the left vote. But the way I see it the next election is going to be a disaster for the Labour party anyway so perhaps this is the right time to make a break. And if we were united and successful in winning a couple of seats (perhaps targeting the 'worst' of the PLP), we might have options: more from Labour might join the movement; more voters might decide to switch allegiance; maybe the party would take its finger off the self-destruct button, kick out the wreckers and become a reasonable party again. That last one is a bit fanciful, I admit.

Whatever your view, I think it's true to say that at the moment, the Tories have a healthy majority (and no opposition) and our views are not represented by any Westminster party. So would it make a huge difference right now if we were to split the vote? Or should we lay the foundations for future success while we're on the back foot?

Communicating Socialism with a united left.

As many of us have already been talking about, most voters don't think about right and left, capitalism or socialism etc. But many have been convinced that progressive policies are either out of reach or simply a bad idea. 

One of the good things that came from Corbyn's leadership is how the party grew into one which not only had something positive to campaign on but a lot more people willing to do it. A lot of people around the party have had good about community organising: addressing local concerns and changing minds street by street and town by town (Momentum seem to have fallen over themselves somewhat but they were very effective in 2017). It's really hard with all the media tooling up against a progressive message but 2017 showed it was possible with almost the entire world against us. 

To do this, we need clear messaging on a range of subjects that 'speak' to a range of people. And that messaging needs to be informed by "real" people and their actual real-world issues. Getting the messages out will require a very large and diverse group of people speaking to people, delivering leaflets, communicating via social media, knocking on doors, speaking to local groups. 

The scale of the effort required feeds into my thinking about how we organise: there are many of us across the country but we mustn't shut people out because they support someone who said something we don't agree with on Twitter (provided it's not offensive of course: we don't want those people!). We need to reach out to other groups doing the same things: perhaps what is needed therefore is a coordinated movement with one clear overarching goal that unites the efforts of a number of small parties, campaign groups, charities, media outlets etc. This brings it's own difficulties: getting the numbers in means there might be one or two bad eggs and it's important we don't let one bad character cloud everything else the movement does. I admit I don't know how we handle that.*

So I think that covers it for now. One message - informed by 'the people' - one clear aim into which we can fit messaging on a range of big, real-world issues.

*This is a particularly thorny subject. There are a few bad characters who claim to be on the left and we need to keep those out. For the most part, however, the issue the left has had over the last five-six years has been with the smearing of good people: their words made in impassioned speeches, for example, taken out of context. I think it's a very thorny subject because those people shouldn't be excluded - indeed some are very valuable comrades - however, great harm could come to a growing movement by association with someone viewed as problematic. Again, I don't know how to get around that one.

We can't go back

Sorry to have to point this out again but centrists/moderates/grown-ups or whatever they want to call themselves seem a little hard of hearing.

Centrists want to return to the third way politics of the Blair era and talk about New Labour’s three successive election victories. They choose to ignore the way the UK political landscape has changed and the effect that has had on Labour’s success.

Of course what matters in reality is the number of seats you win but demographics change over time as populations age and move (indeed COVID-19 could be a factor in the next shift especially if it stays with us for a while and if other pandemics in the UK follow close behind). Also, constituency boundaries change over time so when looking at electoral success over a long period, it makes sense to look at vote share rather than the number of seats: it is possible to consider this a more accurate way to compare a party’s success while acknowledging that they must also win enough seats to get into power.

Here are UK's popular vote share figures for the last 42 years:

Year	UK
1979	36.9% ↓
1983	27.6% ↓
1987	30.8% ↑
1992	34.4% ↑
1997	43.2% ↑
2001	40.7% ↓
2005	35.2% ↓
2010	29.0% ↓
2015	30.4% ↑
2017	40.0% ↑
2019	32.2% ↓

The Labour victories in 1997 and 2001 unsurprisingly show the biggest UK-wide vote share to Labour in the last four decades, with the 2017 result coming third less than 1% behind the 2001 result.

Left-wingers will rightfully point out that whilst there may have been one or two Labour backbenchers who weren’t keen on New Labour’s direction, Blair and Brown didn’t face the internal sabotage that we know plagued the 2017 and 2019 elections. And then there’s Brexit: all but two of the seats Labour lost in 2019 were leave-voting constituencies which, we can assume, weren’t impressed by Labour’s decision to back a second EU referendum.

But let’s park those two potential factors and just break down those popular vote figures a little.

Year	UK	Scotland
1979	36.9% ↓	41.5% ↑
1983	27.6% ↓	35.1% ↓
1987	30.8% ↑	42.4% ↑
1992	34.4% ↑	39.0% ↓
1997	43.2% ↑	45.6% ↑
2001	40.7% ↓	43.9% ↓
2005	35.2% ↓	39.5% ↓
2010	29.0% ↓	42.0% ↑
2015	30.4% ↑	24.3% ↓
2017	40.0% ↑	27.1% ↑
2019	32.2% ↓	18.6% ↓

As you can see, Labour always did well in Scotland until 2015 when the SNP destroyed the centrist Labour party led by Miliband and Balls. Corbyn managed a tiny positive swing in 2017 before the downward trend continued in 2019.

If that doesn’t underline the importance of the Scottish vote, then perhaps this will:

Year	England
1979	36.7% ↓
1983	26.8% ↓
1987	29.5% ↑
1992	33.9% ↑
1997	43.5% ↑
2001	41.4% ↓
2005	35.4% ↓
2010	28.1% ↓
2015	31.6% ↑
2017	41.9% ↑
2019	34.0% ↓

Only the landslide 1997 victory was a better result in England than the result under Corbyn in 2017. Again, even if we ignore what we know about the huge divisions in the Labour party between 2015 and 2019, that result is astonishing given that Blair had the backing of the Murdoch press and Corbyn didn’t really have any mainstream support whatsoever. 

The arguments for a return to the centre ground really hold no water when you look at the election results since 1997. The 2019 result, which Labour centrists will tell you was the greatest disaster since Thatcher died (joke), was a far better result than the centrist Labour results in 2010 and 2015. And in Blair’s last election, the Tories actually won the English popular vote by 0.3% - under Michael bloody Howard!

To somehow conclude that going back to centrism is the right move, not only do we have to ignore the SNP’s total dominance since 2015 (and the possibility that Scotland might not be part of the UK for very much longer), and the internal sabotage wreaked on the Labour party by the anti-socialist factions, and the fact that Blair was backed by the kind of press no progressive would ever want to associate with, we also have to remember the financial crash.

New Labour embraced the deregulation of the Reagan/Thatcher era and let the city look after itself. The 2007/08 crash happened on their watch and the Tories pinned it on them to put Cameron and Osborne into Downing St and a hell of a lot of cash into the pockets of the already wealthy. 13 years later, we are living with the Tories’ disastrous handling of the pandemic. That and the hard Brexit we’re stuck with could potentially combine to create an even bigger financial crash in the UK. The UK is a very different place to the one that elected New Labour in the 1990s and we have gone so far down one track that the kind of managerial tinkering around the edges that you can expect from self-proclaimed 'moderates' just isn't going to fix our problems.

People seem to like sports analogies, so I’ll end with one.

If we were to take the 1997 Premier League-winning Manchester United team and drop them into 2024, would they win? You could argue that side, which went on to win the treble two years later, was as good as any in the Premier League today. But the game has changed. Players are generally a lot more skilful today than they were 22 years ago and today’s tactics would make Ferguson’s 4-4-2 look like a League One side. Also the rules are far more strict: Roy Keane and Nicky Butt would spend half the season suspended and today’s forwards would win a hatful of penalties against Gary Pallister, David May and the Nevilles.

The opposite is also true: put van Dijk up against Alan Shearer or Dominic Raab against Robin Cook and they wouldn’t know what hit them. But, no matter how many people seem to really want to, we can’t turn back time.

Do you hear that, centrists? WE CAN’T GO BACK.