Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has called the election. It's to be on July 4th, US Independence Day, my partner Owen's mother's birthday (he's standing for Parliament, so nice birthday surprise if he wins) and our first July election since 1945. It's a bit of an earlier election than expected, and a strange choice for a deeply unpopular Government who had the chance of waiting another six months - this article in the Guardian is quite an interesting one, speculating on the various reasons why this decision may have been made just now. Perhaps he knows of something that's about to collapse, something that he'd rather Labour was left to deal with. Perhaps he's hoping to cling to power more effectively if all the other parties have to scramble to get a campaign together. Perhaps he just thinks the Tories are doomed and wants the pain over with. But whatever the reason, that's happening.
The media, political activists and even Tory MPs seem absolutely convinced that Labour under Keir Starmer is destined to win this election. Personally I'm not so sure - I can't remember the last time the pundits were correct in their predictions for a General Election so I'm not holding my breath for any particular outcome. But having said that, they do all seem even more confident than normal, so perhaps they will turn out to be right this time. We won't know until it happens.
The Tories are horrifically unpopular at the moment, and rightly so. They're in the unenviable position of not being able to point to anything that has actually improved in the lives of regular people since they came to power in coalition fourteen years ago. This by itself is a major advantage that Labour has. Whether it will be enough to push them over the line remains to be seen. Labour isn't especially inspiring in its own right, particularly since Keir Starmer seemed to think collective punishment is permissible under international law despite being a human rights lawyer, but as normal there's a lot of talk about 'they aren't perfect, but we have to vote Labour because getting the Tories out is the number one priority.' I am here to talk about why this is incredibly naive.
Voting Labour will not get the Tories out
There are two measures by which this is true. Firstly, if you look at the reasons for wanting to get the Tories out, presumably this is in relation to the destructive policies that the Tories operate under - constant cuts to public services, hawkish politicians serving weapons manufacturers more than citizens, families going hungry and having to use food banks, more homeless people on the streets than ever before... the list goes on, and I shan't depress myself by going through all of it. These are huge problems, systemic problems, and they need huge and systemic solutions. There is almost nothing that Labour is offering that will deal with these matters effectively. And truthfully, even if they did offer something bigger within the coming weeks, I wouldn't at this point believe them. If you look at the ten pledges that Keir Starmer proposed when he was standing for Labour leader in 2020, pretty much all of them have been abandoned. (The Labour Party will scramble to find justifications for abandoning them, with their excuses encompassing everything from the pandemic to Liz Truss's premiership - but none of this is true. The pandemic was already happening at the time Keir Starmer was standing for the party leadership so they would have known about that back then. As for Liz Truss, she may have been awful, but so was the Second World War, and in the aftermath of that a Labour Government made more progress than any other at building public services. Unless we're suggesting that six weeks under Liz Truss, including a fair bit where Parliament was shut down to mourn the death of the Queen, damaged the UK economy more irrevocably than the whole of the Second World War, we can see that these excuses are only that - excuses.) Keir Starmer and Labour never had any intention of reversing the damage the Tories have inflicted on the UK, and their commitments to doing so were untruths right from the start. Getting the Tories out does not mean just getting them out - it means undoing the disastrous decisions that they have made, and Labour simply will not do that.
There's another way in which voting Labour will not get the Tories out, and that is that we have to think beyond this one election. Often when I make these points about how Labour won't undo Tory austerity, the response I get is, 'Yeah, but they'll be at least a bit better, right?' And sure - it's fair to think there'll be some areas in which they'll be at least marginally better than what we have at the moment. But as a party that claims to be for the people, Labour is quite rightly held to a higher moral standard than the Tories. So if and when people's lives don't get substantially better (which they won't), what will the Tories do then? My prediction is that they'll do what they did when Tony Blair came to power - move back a little bit, wait until everyone has forgotten how toxic they are, and come back with a vengeance. And I think that will be sooner than it was last time - I'm not a fan of Blair's Labour, but they at least did some good things; they had a good six years of popularity before the Iraq War, and even then they managed to scrape through one more election. But the world has changed now, Labour isn't proposing anything inspiring or radical at all, and I can imagine the Tories managing to get back in at the very next election - or at the very least, the one after that. The Labour Party exists to temporarily hold the reins when the Tories are even more unpopular than normal, on the condition that they don't do anything to fundamentally change the political system. They keep the seat warm for when the Tories are ready again. This is not democracy, and we can and should demand better than this.
As a socialist blogger I can't quite believe I'm saying this, but truthfully I actually believe that the Tories getting back in would be a less worse option than Labour getting in in its present form. The Tories getting back in would be catastrophic, no doubt - but only in the same way we've lived with for the past fourteen years. And meanwhile, Labour would be forced to acknowledge that its approach isn't working, and there'd be significant pressure on it to improve before the next election. But if Labour gets in, especially if it's with a big majority, they will never, ever change. Listen to any Labour politician talk and you'll get the impression that since Margaret Thatcher came to power in 1979, there have only been three elections - 1983 where Labour lost under Michael Foot, 1997 where they won under Tony Blair, and 2019 where they lost under Jeremy Corbyn. There have been seven other elections in that time which are almost never mentioned, because the results do not back up the pre-ordained conclusion that Labour is trying to create - that decent socialist policies don't win elections, and weak neoliberalism does. In reality, the opposite is true - this is demonstrated by Neil Kinnock's two disastrous election losses, the fact that Blair's Labour lost seats in every subsequent election, the electoral failures of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband and how, in 2017, Theresa May called a snap election when she didn't need to because she was miles ahead in the polls, and an incarnation of the Labour Party that was being vilified by all angles (including from within) managed to deny her a majority by creating a sense of hope amongst its voter base. These election results paint an extremely different picture from what Labour is currently doing.
And of course, nothing is comprehensive in politics. In a selection of ten elections spanning forty years, it's normal to suppose that there'll be the odd one which is an anomaly - where, for whatever reason, the outcome goes in a different direction to the way it normally does. Ask yourself: when there are seven results suggesting one thing and three suggesting something else, which is most likely to be the rule and which the exception? The official Labour line is that 1983, 1997 and 2019 were the ones to learn from, and that all seven others can be safely ignored. I don't believe this makes any sense. I think it was in fact those three that were the anomalies,
Any election has the potential to be an anomaly, and at the moment, the sociopolitical circumstances are there to make 2024 another one. If it is, and Labour wins in its present form (which is the worst form it's ever been in since its founding) it will be pretty much impossible to ever change anything from the inside. No matter what good arguments are made, no matter what changes in the world, the response will always be 'This is what we did, and this is what wins elections'. If Labour gets in, we have less chance of practically changing the state of politics in the UK long-term than if the Tories do. The truth is that in this election, we have almost nothing to hope for or to look forward to. Our choice is more of the same with the Tories, or to permanently remove all opposition. There is nothing we can do right now to improve this choice.
Except for one thing. The thing about politics is that in spite of everyone's best efforts to pretend it is, it is not a binary either/or choice between red and blue. The 2017 election is a great recent example of this, where the Conservative Party remained the largest party and Theresa May continued to be the Prime Minister, yet had fewer seats than they'd had before the election and Labour had more. There wasn't a binary winner - the Conservatives won in the sense that they were the largest party, Labour won in the sense that they made the most seat gains, and no one won in the sense that no one had more than 51% of the seats in the Commons. The final outcome of an election is not determined just by who the Prime Minister is - it matters how many seats they win nationwide, which specific MPs have been elected to Parliament and what kind of majority they all have.
For the last year or so, I have been working with OCISA, a grassroots campaign to elect independent candidates to the seats of establishment politicians. The seat OCISA is most primarily focussing on in Holborn St Pancras, the seat of Labour leader Keir Starmer, and the independent candidate standing against him is Andrew Feinstein, a Jewish anti-corruption campaigner and former member of the South African Government in the 1990s under Nelson Mandela. I've met Andrew, and he's an absolute delight to listen to - if you haven't heard him speak yet I'm slightly jealous of you because you're in for such a treat. Do look him up on the Internet if you haven't already, he is amazing. I have no idea of his likelihood of winning, I don't know enough about the constituency to know how popular Keir Starmer is as a local MP, but I'm really excited to see where Andrew's campaign goes.
Another instance of a great independent MP standing, and one who I have a lot more faith in to win, is Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North. Jeremy has been the MP there since 1983, up until now always for the Labour Party, until he was unceremoniously kicked out a couple of years ago ostensibly on anti-Semitism charges (if you're in any doubt about this, merely reading the social media post he was indefinitely suspended for should be enough to affirm that this was actually a political decision). Jeremy Corbyn is one of the most popular local MPs in the country, and knows many of his constituents personally - I think Labour, or indeed any other party, will really struggle to campaign against him.
The last independent candidate I want to talk about, purely for personal reasons, is in my own constituency of Monmouthshire, where my partner Owen Lewis is standing to unseat the Conservative Secretary of State for Wales David TC Davies. Owen is well-known in the area as an incredible disability rights campaigner, working tirelessly for the needs of vulnerable adults and the importance of providing services for them. He has been involved with setting up an extremely popular community group called The Gathering, which is run by a collective of dedicated volunteers and aims to replace some of the services that have been cut by successive Tory Governments. We're still in the process of fine-tuning the literature on exactly what Owen stands for, but a big part of the campaign will aim to make elections more accessible for adults with disabilities, learning difficulties and mental health struggles. As someone who's had mental health difficulties in the past, I can attest to the fact that I haven't ever felt elections have respected that - they've been aggressive, confrontational and inaccessible.
This will be the fourth election since I've been old enough to vote, and so far it's the one that has caused me the least emotional anxiety. This would be a positive thing, except for the fact that I strongly suspect the reason for that is that this is the one I'm least hopeful about. I believe that whatever the outcome nationwide, very little is going to improve over the next few years. This is quite a depressing thought, but strangely I don't feel depressed. I feel motivated, and I think that's because sometimes when you don't have much hope on a wider scale, you find yourself more able to concentrate on the things you can do. And electing left-wing independents is something we can all focus on. The best outcome at this election would be for Labour to be the largest party, but without an overall majority similar to the outcome Theresa May's Tories faced in 2017 (this would be fitting, because Keir Starmer's campaign has some striking similarities to Theresa May's, in that they're both establishment politicians with the entire media behind them who seem intent on ruining what advantages they do have by being abjectly unappealing. Starmer has even repeated some of May's rhetoric, like that of the magic money tree.) Were this the case, Starmer (or whoever the leader is, if Andrew Feinstein manages to unseat him) would have to look for support from other parties and independents. To do this, he'll be forced to bring Labour more in line with their way of thinking. This is the only way anything in Government policy could improve.
I've heard some interesting rumours about great independents standing in a few constituencies other than the ones I've mentioned. So if you have a fantastic independent in your constituency, vote for them! If you don't, encourage popular and politically-minded people to stand (the deadline is 7th June). Even if they're not an independent, if you have a really interesting Green Party or SNP or Plaid Cymru candidate standing, they're a better choice than Labour or Conservative. I don't know yet if there's a decent directory of independent candidates anywhere, but if anyone knows of one do send it to me and I'll talk about it in a future blog.
We could make 4th July Independents' Day.
