By Ken Ferguson
AS THE VOICE goes to press, the grumbling volcano of fear and resentment sparked among Labour MPs by the party’s opinion poll plunge to all-time historic lows has begun to break the surface. The first lava flowed from 10 Downing Street and was supposedly originated by the claimed media-savvy hatchet team shoring up the increasingly hapless PM and selling him to the voters.
However, as is often the case, this merry band’s expertise is self-proclaimed and contradicted by events — think the Winter Fuel debacle, comprehensive defeats on welfare cuts, the infamous “land of strangers” racist speech, and a government shadowing Farage. Much of this is based on the oft-repeated but misleading claim that Labour won a landslide victory last year when, in fact, its vote share was at a historic low and its “landslide” a product of the undemocratic first-past-the-post voting system.
This myth lies at the heart of a string of policies which, taken as a whole, amount to a relentless assault on the very voters who turned to Labour for the promised “change”.
Change indeed, Keir — just not as we know it.
So now, around 18 months into a five-year parliament, what is the political landscape facing an increasingly battered and disillusioned population? And, equally important, what should be the priorities for socialists striving to change things?
The media — no friends of the left — present us with a straightforward picture in which the UK, and to a lesser extent Scotland, are turning to the odious Farage and his neo-Thatcherite economics, with their engine fuelled by racism. More importantly, there are growing signs that Farage — who the left dismiss as a fool at their peril — is actively involved in the process of re-composing the contours of the British right.
A major sign of this was the recent move by Farage to ditch promises of massive tax cuts as part of presenting a responsible “ready for government” image in the drive to oust the Tories from that role. Signs that this is making inroads into the right-wing bloc include the news that JCB diggers mogul Lord Bamford has just donated £200,000 to Reform, and such free-market gurus as Pimlico Plumbers’ Charlie Mullins are heaping praise on Farage.
The Tories will not accept demotion to junior partners in the political wing of capitalism lightly, so the composition and shape of that bloc is as yet unresolved. What of the left and its response to the dangerous and burgeoning crisis, and the way it is feeding a far-right populism which, in reality, raises the spectre of another round of long-discredited Thatcherite economics?
First, on the positive side, developments such as the leftward move of the England and Wales Greens, and the large numbers indicating an interest in a new left formation in the shape of Your Party, clearly indicate interest in and support for a left alternative to the failures of both Tory and Labour austerity.
However, politics at the level of media tales, parliamentary debates, social media surges and so forth is, at best, a minority sport, which still leaves largely untouched the sea of problems of poverty, housing, NHS queues and the rest. Still the same problems as they were before the speeches were made. The Voice does not endorse the lazy stereotype of a left split on “People’s Front of Judea” lines, but we do recognise that different elements of the left have reached different conclusions on what the priorities are and how they should be addressed.
Here in Scotland this is further complicated by the hot topic of the national question and where independence figures in any offer for a real break with the soggy centrism currently dominating “official politics” and increasingly rejected by voters.
We have just passed through a summer which has seen the far right growing, including its substantial vote in the Hamilton by-election, a number of stand-offs at asylum-seeker hotels, and flag wars used like dog piss to claim streets for racists.
However, this has not gone unchallenged, with large counter-protests at hotels against racists and, outstandingly, the rebuff of Reform in the Caerphilly by-election, where a victorious Plaid Cymru became the standard-bearers for voters opposing racism. The escalating crisis sweeping Labour is both a rejection of the timid tail-ending of Reform’s bile and a real danger to the interests of the working-class majority, which demands a programmatic response posing a real alternative to the key challenges facing that majority. The Scotland Demands Better march last month in Edinburgh demonstrated the unity and breadth of support for real practical alternatives which can both offer real answers while also defanging the far right.
We need many more such events organised by the labour movement, exposing the racists, posing a real alternative, and building next month’s event in Falkirk should be just a start.
Offering real socialist alternatives to everyday problems will be essential to halting the far right and making the slogan ‘No Pasaran’ a reality.