- Re: Why did Labour lose? Charlie Kimber 2 Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on April 20, 2020, 1:41 pm, in reply to "Why did Labour lose? Charlie Kimber 1"
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Most of Labour’s right, motivated by the concerns of business, had relentlessly put forward an argument for overturning the Brexit vote via a second referendum. Dragging Labour closer to this position was achieved through pressurising Corbyn—and through his compromises. At the 2018 party conference, it was overwhelmingly agreed that a fresh public vote had to be kept “on the table”. By July last year, following a shadow cabinet meeting, Corbyn wrote to party members to say Labour would campaign for Remain “against either no-deal or a Tory deal”. And he called on the next government to hold a second referendum before exiting the EU. The “left exit” (Lexit) position of fighting for a workers’ Brexit was derided by many in Labour, but it was the correct position. It meant a radical critique of the EU from the left, based on internationalism, anti-racism, anti-capitalism and a fight for real democracy. Instead of attacking the EU for allowing in too many migrants as the right did, socialists should have pointed to its lethal “Fortress Europe” policy that led to drowned migrants and refugees. Lexit supporters said the true nature of the EU was revealed by its financial squeeze on Greece after the election of Syriza in 2012.16 Labour also allowed Brexit to be separated from all the other class issues—the NHS, housing, Universal Credit, jobs, education, climate chaos and so on. Instead, the impoverished imagination of far too many union leaders and Labour MPs led to Brexit being hived off into a wholly divisive area abstracted from all those where the Tories were weak. In a perceptive article written two months before the election, Sadie Robinson noted in Socialist Worker: People had many reasons for voting Leave. But one of them was a deep dissatisfaction with mainstream politics and a desire to give the establishment a kicking. Three years on political leaders, bosses and others are still putting barriers in the way of leaving the EU. Many people have had enough. “I’m fed up of hearing about it,” said Joan, who works in a pawnbrokers in Doncaster, South Yorkshire. “It’s gone on too long now. I just want it to be sorted.” In Doncaster some 69 percent of those who voted in the EU referendum voted to Leave. Many now feel betrayed and let down by British “democracy”.17 A blog by Eyal Clyne, a Labour canvasser who campaigned in eight marginal constituencies in the north west of England, says: Leave voters are sometimes seen as ignorant, brainwashed or racist, images that did not correspond with my impressions overall. However, for Leave voters, Brexit now symbolises the way in which their voices were being ignored, repeatedly and undemocratically, by the losing Remainers, who are also associated with other classes and more privileged groups… As far as they are concerned, Labour (and others) did not fully respect the will of the working class, and a democratic result. They feel betrayed.18 It is not just that many voters felt that Labour had betrayed them. The Brexit issue bled into other areas of policy. If Labour could not be trusted to implement the Brexit vote, how could they be trusted to carry though the raft of promises they were making now? Not credible on Brexit became not credible on everything. Analysing and understanding why workers were pulled to vote Tory or the Brexit Party is not to justify such a move or celebrate it. But it is no good simply denouncing them as ignorant dupes. These were people who could and should have voted against ruling class warrior Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. In 2016, people who are generally forgotten, ignored or sneered at delivered a stunning blow against the people at the top of society. In 2019 Labour spurned them. Of course, some people did vote Leave (and for Johnson or for Nigel Farage) for racist reasons.19 There is a serious problem of racist myths being widely accepted in society, including in parts of the working class. All the main political parties (including Labour until 2015) have spent years telling anyone who would listen that there are “too many” migrants coming to Britain and that they cause problems in terms of housing, jobs, wages and public services. Even Corbyn and his followers, such as Len McCluskey of the Unite union, repeated the idea that migrants force down pay in some sectors. Such ideas have to be confronted, not pandered to, but this cannot be done by simultaneously telling people their votes will be set aside or chortling at their alleged gullibility. You do it by showing how it is in their class interest to reject racism. It can only be done by linking anti-racism with a ferocious determination to wage the class war. This is one reason why the Socialist Workers Party rejected the idea that the way for Labour to regain the voters it lost was to become more racist and more nationalist. We must reject the idea that workers are a reactionary bloc. As Keenan Malik wrote: The working class, runs the argument, is rooted in communities and cherishes values of family, nation and tradition. Labour now faces a choice: either accept that its traditional working class voters are gone forever or abandon liberal social policies. The trouble with this argument is that the key feature of Britain over the past half century has been not social conservatism but an extraordinary liberalisation. On a host of issues, from gender roles to gay marriage, from premarital sex to interracial relationships, Britain has liberalised. It’s not just metropolitan liberals but society as a whole, including the working class, which has embraced this change.20 What about Remainers? Some inside Labour now say that had Labour not adopted a second referendum policy they would have suffered an even greater drubbing. They also claim that Labour lost more Remainers than Leavers. The biggest single shift from Labour was to abstention from voting. Overall Labour lost five Leave voters to every four Remain voters (figure 3). Of course, we cannot know precisely what would have happened if Labour had stuck to its “respect the vote” position. The analysis above suggests Labour would have retained many of the seats it lost in the north of England and the Midlands. Perhaps it would have lost some votes in the most pro-Remain areas. However, in the three constituencies in the most pro-Remain area in Britain—Lambeth in south London—the Labour majorities in 2019 were 27,310 (Dulwich and West Norwood), 19,612 (Vauxhall) and 17,690 (Streatham). Even if Labour had lost a few thousand more votes, it would not have imperilled its majorities. There is, of course, an even stronger argument: respecting the referendum and not lining up with the neoliberal EU was the right thing to do. The polls show that lots of people said they did not vote Labour because of the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. It is also true that millions of people voted for Labour because of Jeremy Corbyn. It was his promise of change that rescued Labour in 2017. So at first sight the feeling against Corbyn is strange—some who rejected him are people who had voted for him two years earlier on a similar manifesto. What did people in 2019 mean when they said they did not like Corbyn? Certainly the Labour right encouraged voters to see him as extreme and outrageous. In Barrow and Furness, former Labour MP John Woodcock claimed that Corbyn “would pose a clear risk to UK national security as prime minister”. In Bassetlaw, John Mann—before resigning from the party and being made a baron—repeatedly called on Corbyn to step down. The outgoing MP for Dudley North, Ian Austin, called for a vote for the Tories. These three seats were all lost to the Tories. And of course the media waged the most brutal character assassination of Corbyn in particular and Labour in general. However, that does not explain the depth of the feeling. The Labour blogger, Clyne, writes: Surprisingly, only a relative few resonated the vilifications that they were fed through the media (like that he is a terrorist sympathiser, an extremist or an antisemite). It was more common to encounter a vague emotional negative hunch, a discomfort from the way they “felt” about him. For whatever reasons that they struggled to verbalise when asked, many explicitly “didn’t like him”, regardless of their strong rational agreement with his social policies. The media contributed to this image, sure, but if I may guess, I think that the voters did not want a “nice old man” who “never did any wrong”, almost inhumanely, who always engages in calm discussions, but would favour a more relatable and animated person, who gets angry sometimes (after all, we have much to be angry about), and whom is perhaps more dominant in conversations and offers simple messages, like Johnson or, better yet, Bernie Sanders. Remember that people vote more emotionally than rationally, as an expression of their identities and wishes, and, sadly, our leader, whose policies and personality were my own reasons for joining the canvassing, wasn’t popular with the masses.21 Corbyn could not escape the dither and slide of Labour’s Brexit position. Indeed his excruciating efforts to hold Labour’s position together but, in the end, swallowing a second referendum linked him to the feeling of betrayal over Brexit. This is not the whole story. There were elements of Labour’s campaign that could have been better. It should have centred on mass rallies and major public events open to all—as it did to a far greater extent in 2017. Instead there was a drive towards trying to implement a more “professional” approach, centred on canvassing. It was a much less insurgent and angry campaign than in 2017. It was more defensive, with Labour seeking to appear as a government in waiting, rather than any sort of movement for fundamental change. Corbyn himself should have been more confrontational with Johnson in the two televised debates, pinning the responsibility for the Grenfell fire, 130,000 deaths from austerity and Johnson’s foul racist and homophobic statements directly and personally on him. Labour could have had billboards across Britain and Facebook adverts recalling Johnson’s vile utterances—that the queen was routinely welcomed abroad by “cheering crowds of flag-waving piccaninnies”, that during a visit by Tony Blair to the Congo, the African warriors would all “stop their hacking of human flesh” and would welcome him with their “watermelon smiles”. More recently he claimed that the burka made the women wearing it look like “bank robbers” or “letterboxes”. Such assaults on Johnson would have forced him into a response. Either he would have had to retreat or to seek to justify what he had said. It would have heated up the atmosphere—and it would have been right to do it. As Gary Younge put it, “Time and again he had chances to nail Boris Johnson for his lies and duplicity, but he refused to do so. He’d say it’s not his style. But his style wasn’t working”.22 Instead Corbyn broadly stuck to the conventions of mainstream politics. In a terrible reversal of the truth, he often seemed closer than Johnson to an establishment position. When Johnson prorogued parliament in order to avoid scrutiny of his Brexit bill, Labour lined up with the mainstream acclamation of the Supreme Court and the veneration of its president Lady Hale. The judges’ finding, that Johnson had acted unlawfully, was celebrated by Labour. The Supreme Court’s role was not such an obviously good thing to lots of the voters who would later abandon Labour. A few months later judges said that the 97 percent vote by Royal Mail workers for a strike on a 76 percent turnout was not valid. One north London postal worker responded: “Judges! First they try to stop Brexit, then they stop our strike”.23 The two cases are not exactly the same, but it is easy to see that Labour did not gain with many Leave voters by lining up with the courts. This sense of Labour looking like the political establishment was intensified by Labour-led councils meekly imposing austerity for a decade. The Tories have savaged local budgets. The Institute for Fiscal Studies claims spending on services in England fell by 21 percent between 2009-10 and 2017-18. The cut in their core funding from government is over 40 percent. The result has been horrendous attacks on key services. Yet Labour councils have not offered any serious response—and in many cases have made working class people pay the price of austerity. If you are in Durham, an area where Labour lost out at the election, one of the strongest memories for tens of thousands of people was the Labour county council slashing the pay of nearly 3,000 teaching assistants. Ctd.... |