UK elections

Labour’s strategy: don’t oppose

New Labour, UK elections, UK politics
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Lenny riffs on Dan Hind’s observations on the need to break the ConDem coalition before the next election, and Labour’s role in this:

I would guess he rightly judges Labour’s position, which is that the last thing they want at this point is political power. The Blairites are convinced that they would have to implement the same cuts as the Tories are doing, (ex-chairman Peter Watts has even bizarrely claimed that opposing cuts is hurting Labour), and that it would be much easier to allow them to get on with it. The Labour soft left doesn’t yet have a coherent alternative, or at least not one they’re able to articulate or willing to fight for. Neither side really wants to re-open an old civil war, though the Right are better placed to wage it if it comes. So, they are sitting it out, passively awaiting the Tory meltdown and their dream ticket in 2015. Their strategy would involve striking the correct poses in the face of catastrophe, while nonetheless doing little to prevent it. (Dan does not say, but we should note, that this has significant consequences for the conduct of the labour movement’s resistance to austerity. If the trade union leadership subordinates its actions to the objective of getting ‘their’ party in government, then that most certainly entails an attempt to keep the lid on militancy).

If that sounds familiar it’s because it’s the exact same strategy as the Democratic Party followed during the Bush era. Over the years I’ve explained that the failure of the Democrats to meaningfully oppose Bush was a feature, not a bug. The party leadership knew that sooner or later the voters would return to them as the only real alternative, once they were sick to death of Republican mismanagement. At the same time the leadership wasn’t too unhappy with what Bush and co were doing anyway, even if their base was. And once the disgust with the Republicans was large enough and the Democrats did have a charismatic presidential candidate their strategy was validated – they got their cake and ate it too. And in the meantime they dissipated a lot of the grassroots militancy that sprung up in the wake of the War on Iraq and the like.

Whether or not Labour is consciously following the same strategy, or is just too divided at the moment to meaningfully oppose the coalition doesn’t really matter. The fact of the matter is that Labour too has shown itself not to be trusted when in power, to no longer be a meaningful leftwing party, if perhaps still slightly better than the LibDems are now. Bringing them back into government won’t solve anything, unless Labour is returned to its roots as a true socialist party.

Your Happening World (20)

Kittens!, Linky Linky, UK elections, UK politics, Video
Published on 1 Comment on Your Happening World (20)

The perfect Daily Express cover.

“Labour is facing a deep crisis that threatens its survival as a party of power, Ed Milibandwill be warned, on Wednesday as he is told to avoid the “politics of protest” and to focus on establishing political credibility.” Better not rock the boat Ed, or your masters might get upset. Play the game using the proper rules and don’t get so uncouth as to actually take it seriously.

The humilation of the Yes campaign: an analysis of why the AV Yes campaign failed, from a supporter: “From the outset, the YES campaign was all about the tiny coterie of people who feel strongly about electoral reform. The emphasis was on these people “having fun” and being invited to comedy evenings. In email after email from the YES campaign, the quirky behaviour of this “producer set” was celebrated and the “consumer set” ignored. So, some bunch of local activists who had written the letters Y, E and S in big letters on a beach were hailed as creative geniuses. Others were highlighted for running a particularly successful street stall. From the point of view of any observer, it was all about “them”(the micro-percentage of constitutional reform obsessives) never about “us” (the people). None of this self-indulgent madness won a single vote for the YES side, but it probably lost thousands.” OUCH!

One example of why any political activist should stay away from Facebook. It has been very good at conning people into thinking Facebook is just like the Internet, but you’re at the mercy of an unsympathetic commercial entity that’d rather you’d Farmvilled. Real activists get their own servers.

Clearing out the weeks old tabs on my browser, here are two articles on the Bristol Stoke Croft riots from OpenDemocracy: an eyewitness account and an analysis of how the police and media spun it.

Read all your links? Then have a kitten as a treat:



Yet Clegg does speak Dutch…

UK elections, UK politics
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Daniel Davies analyses the LibDem’s failings:

This is, to a large extent, why the vote share has collapsed. The median LibDem voter between about 2002 and 2010 was quite likely someone who believed (sensibly, a respectable case could certainly be made for this) that they were to the Left of Labour. Their signature policy was a hypothecated income tax increase for education, along with did-they-or-didn’t-they opposition to the Iraq War. Now, their electoral support consists of electoral reform trainspotters, about a dozen people who read the Orange Book and daydream about being Gerhard Schroeder, plus that part of the West Country that doesn’t get regular newspapers and believes that it is still voting for Gladstone. They have lost precisely that set of voters who they have spent the last year more or less intentionally losing.

Had Clegg made use of his Dutch heritage other than flattering Dutch newsmedia by talking to them in their own language, he could’ve boned up on the example of D66, like the LibDems a centrist party in some aspects to the left of the (Dutch) Labour Party. in the Dutch system coalition governments are of course the standard rather than the exception and D66 has had long experience with the opportunities and perils they offer.

D66 always has troubles in government because while usually the centre of a coalition, it’s also the smallest party, caught between two bigger ones with more opportunities to let their own voice be heard. So you’d have the CDA or VVD on the right fighting their corner, the PvdA on the left doing the same and D66 being crushed in the middle. As a rule of thumb, government participation leads to losing the next election. D66 knows this and therefore is careful to get something back for it; when they don’t and let the desire to be in government overrule their principles, they get punished even harder for it. Luckily for them the Dutch voter is more forgiving than the British and they have usually been able to quickly rebuild their following once back in opposition. Even so the party has been careful in getting concrete results in return for their support.

Something the LibDems forgot. If the best you can do is to get a referendum on a voting system you don’t actually want yourself, you haven’t really bargained all that well. Had I been Nick Clegg my two set in stone demands would’ve been getting the ministery of finance and getting a vote in parliament for proportional representation. It was the Tories who needed the LibDems, not the other way around. Instead Clegg traded everything for a chance to feel important and is now paying the price. Had he paid attention to Holland, he would’ve known better.

No to AV: cake now rather than cake later

UK elections, UK politics
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Or, any benefits of getting AV are speculative, but destroying Clegg’s career is an immediate payoff:

It seems to me that the AV system itself is highly unattractive, that all the possible benefits which might accrue as a result of it are really quite speculative and far-future things, with very considerable potential to go wrong (after all, the implementation of AV in Australia 93 years ago does not seem to have generated much momentum toward a more proportional system).

The benefit of destroying Nick Clegg’s political career, however, seems reasonably immediate and certain, and the possibility of putting an end to the Liberal Democrats as a party looks achievable enough to be worth a try. I don’t actually think it’s necessarily irrational at all to vote No out of Clegg-hate.

March 26

Life under Capitalism, Socialism, Tories, UK elections, Unions
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Lenny gets to the heart of things with what conclusion should be drawn from the march:

It was something that I haven’t really seen en masse before. It was something that some people had written off. They said was a bit old hat, doomed to a slow, dwindling death, if it even really existed. It was the working class. Not the working class in the shitty, nostalgic, culturally regressive sense that people invoke, not the deus ex machina mobilised to berate black people and gays for being too assertive of their legitimate rights. It was the working class as an agent of its own interests; it was a class for itself. It was the labour movement, every bit the multicultural entity that Cameron reviles. And that movement, comprising several millions of people, having lain dormant for years, is now looking decidedly up for a fight. If you’re a socialist in one of those workplaces on Monday morning, you should have an easier job arguing for militant strike action now, because people now know what they could not be sure of before: that we are many, and they are few.

Jamie puts the violence and necklace clutching about it in perspective:

sign reads: for every cut I will teabag a Tory

I suppose there’ll be a lot of angst about the violence from fringe elements. There already seems to be an attempt to conflate it with UK Uncut’s various political comedy stunts off the line of march. I don’t think it will make much difference to public opinion on the issue itself. The Poll tax demo back in 1990 was the Gordon Riots in comparison to anything that happened today, but that didn’t change anyone’s mind; if anything it helped convince the government that Thatcher’s time was up, so one up there for the Great British street fighting man. And opposition to the government’s education polcies actually increased after that young fool threw a fire extinguisher off the roof of Tory Party hq and the Duchess of Cornwall endured a light goosing.