Reform UK voters are victims of grooming

 When I was on doorsteps campaigning for my partner Owen Lewis in Monmouthshire, one of the things that surprised me most was how much better I got on with people who were planning on voting Reform UK than I thought I would.

I wrote a bit about my views on Reform UK on a previous blog, and how I feel that a major part of their appeal is not based especially concretely on their policies. Nevertheless, I had presumed (perhaps unfairly so) that people with those kinds of views would be types that I would really struggle to talk to, people I'd feel were a bit racist, people whose approach to life would be the complete antithesis of mine. What I found was the opposite - although many of these people did express opinions that I felt a little dodgy, I often found them to be quite interesting people, and their views to be ones that I respected.

My partner's campaign was fundamentally about the rights of the most vulnerable people, and for that reason I felt quite reticent about getting too deep into conversations about immigration or about refugees or asylum seekers with people sympathetic to Reform's message. If these topics did come up, I would normally either divert the subject to people drowning in the channel, the reasons why people make these crossings in the first place, or agreeing that there needs to be a better and more fair system (which is what I believe, even if my idea of what is a fair system might differ quite strongly from theirs). This was not in the interests of trying to avoid the subject, far from it; more that I felt that it would be more conducive to finding something in common with the people I was talking to, and a lot of the time this was a lot more easy than I'd expected.

One man in particular, who'd been planning on voting Reform as a protest vote, stuck in my mind. He told me quite a bit about his life and his frustrations, very much of which I was very sympathetic to. I didn't have the impression that he was especially right-wing or especially anti-woke - more that, just like me, he was absolutely fed up with the Tories and didn't have the slightest bit of faith in the Labour Party to deal with the myriad of problems they'd caused, and that he therefore wanted to send a message. 

The conversation reaffirmed to me something that I've felt for a while - which is that irrespective of the political choices we might make, most of the time the problems we face in the world are exactly the same as everyone else's. It's also true that politicians manipulate this for their own ends. I think a good example of this is to look at how much the matter of the NHS was used by both the Leave and Remain campaigns around the 2016 EU referendum. Some people were led to believe that leaving the EU would benefit the NHS, some were led to believe that remaining in the EU would. The common factor was that pretty much everyone wanted to help the NHS; this ought to have been something the UK public could agree and unite on, but politicians cynically used it to make people fight amongst themselves. The outcome was that we were stuck with a Government that was intent on destroying the NHS, and more importantly this would still have happened had Remain won the referendum. The whole NHS conversation was an absolute scam and was always going to be, right from the very beginning.

Scams are horrible things to experience, and most of us will fall victim to a scam at some point in our lifetime. There are certainly things we can do to protect ourselves from scams, just as there are things we can do to protect ourselves from being raped or from having burglars break into our homes. But the important thing to remember is that none of these protections are infallible, and that if you happen to fall victim to a crime it is absolutely not your fault. I feel this way about people who vote in ways that cause them additional harm. The common perception of people who vote for parties like this are that they're bigoted, racist or just stupid. I'll confess to having expressed myself views to this effect in the past; it's something that is quite a common belief here on the left.

I don't believe that these kinds of people are stupid, but I do think that a lot of the time they aren't as informed about politics as perhaps they should be. This raises the question as to whose responsibility it is to inform oneself about politics. I am fortunate enough to be someone who does have quite a lot of information about what's going on; I've been writing this blog since I was 17 and first got into going to social justice protests, and I've used it to network a lot online with people, educate myself and inform others. But this didn't just come out of nowhere. Even before I started writing about politics, I had lived with people from multiple different countries, been to school with people from all kinds of class backgrounds and had a fairly clear shape of how I viewed the world. My earliest blogs are quite embarrassing for me to look back on now - naturally as I've grown older and matured my perspective on these topics has become a bit less black-and-white - but on the whole my view of the world hasn't particularly shifted since the time I started doing this fourteen years ago. For my opinion to change, I need to see really good reasons that are in line with my understanding of morality.

If you're someone whose experience of the world is radically different to mine, someone who hasn't been as privileged as I have or met the sorts of people that I've met, it is natural that you may have come to different conclusions to mine - or, more likely, not to have come to very thought-out conclusions at all. The way that political discourse is presented in our media is exceptionally convoluted and difficult to follow. I believe that this is done on purpose so that Governments can get away with more things and it's harder to consistently hold them to account for it, but as years pass it makes the population increasingly susceptible to being groomed by the extreme right. This is what I think has happened with the rise of UKIP and now the rise of Reform - people are rightly, rationally and intelligently crying out for a change in the system, but their lack of reliable political information results in cynical politicians like Nigel Farage being able to take advantage of them. I would view anyone who becomes a target of this to be as vulnerable as anyone who is groomed in any other way.

To the man who was considering voting Reform, I told him that our local candidate had failed to turn up to all hustings bar one, so how could he be relied upon to care or know about local issues? I also made clear that these kinds of politicians are not actually anti-establishment - they're just very practiced in the art of appearing so, when in reality they are as wealthy and connected as the two main parties. The man grudgingly admitted that this was probably true, and I left thinking that he might vote for my partner - naturally I don't know if he did in the end. I've had other conversations like this, and some of them went better than others. But the whole experience did affirm to me that dismissing these kinds of voters as racist bigots causes more harm than good. Reform UK relies on the fact that the left is going to do that - we need to prove them wrong, be willing to have these conversations and be prepared to listen to the problems these people are experiencing. Fascism can only thrive in the absence of a valid alternative.

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What does the Labour Party intend to change?

 The Labour Party cruised to electoral success in the 2024 election with a campaign revolving around a single-word slogan: 'Change'. This replaced the slogan 'For the many, not the few' which Labour used for the previous two elections (and which on election night I likened to how when I was 16, our new headteacher changed my school's motto from 'Learn together, achieve together' to 'Achieving excellence' - my opinion of that pretty much mirrors my opinion of this).

Nevertheless, 'Change' is quite a clever slogan because it means different things to different people, which means that no one can exactly argue that change isn't needed. Almost everyone would like to see a change in something. Here's some ideas for things that 'Change' could mean, and my speculation on what Labour intends it to mean.

One way it could be interpreted is as change in our pockets. This could mean one of two things: everyone being wealthier, or a stand against a cashless society. I'd support either of these things. I'd love us all to have a bit more money, whereas the increasing digitisation of our currency and banking is something I've been campaigning against for a long time (I wrote in April about the campaign to save Halifax bank). Now that Labour is in Government, I will definitely pressure them to keep physical cash as a regular part of our lives. However, I doubt this is what 'Change' meant in the context of the Labour slogan, for no other reason that that my local Labour campaigners didn't seem to have thought of this when I suggested it to them!

It may mean a complete change in the system and the reversal of the absolute horrors of Conservative austerity. Again, this is something I'd welcome, as I'm sure most other people would. Conservative austerity has caused substantial damage to the quality of our lives, and it is this that has caused them to be so utterly wiped out across the UK, including to have lost every single MP in Wales which is where I live. Unfortunately, listening to the rhetoric from Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves, such as Reeves' comment that it will be the private sector that takes charge of new housing, makes me doubt this. Still, they're very welcome to surprise me.

It could mean a change to our electoral system. This is the first change I'd wish for that I actually have hope that Labour might achieve. At the hustings, my now MP Catherine Fookes promised that Labour would extend General Elections to sixteen-year-olds, and even hinted at one point that we might replace First Past the Post with a more proportional system. Unfortunately I've learned to become extremely cynical - Keir Starmer has previously declined to make Proportional Representation an actual election pledge, whereas I've got a nasty feeling that this votes for 16-year-olds idea will go the same way as Keir Starmer's leadership pledges. Nevertheless, I am somewhat optimistic; especially given how many minority MPs managed to get into Westminster this time, I think it's possible for there to be enough pressure on the Government to properly change the system within the next Parliament.

It could mean a change to our climate. Naturally, I would NOT support increasing climate change, and I doubt the Labour Party would advertise themselves like that in the first place. Whether their policies will halt climate change or accelerate it remains to be seen - perhaps the Green Party can put the pressure on.

What I suspect 'Change' was meant to mean though, and what I repeatedly said on doorsteps, is a change to the people in Government. I do not believe that Labour had, or has, any intention of changing the status quo, merely of changing the people enacting it. It is a curious truth in politics that much of the time, slogans and titles promise the opposite of what they actually do. In the late 2010s, various MPs resigned from their parties in order to form the short-lived 'Change UK' party, and ironically its main aim seemed to be to keep the status quo exactly as it was. The politicians who made up Change UK generally had the same kinds of politics as the current senior Labour Party officials, and I think that the Labour Party's current understanding of the word 'Change' is probably quite similar.

But this does not mean that I think true change is out of reach. I believe that the outcome of that election, the number of Labour MPs whose vote majorities in their constituencies reduced significantly, and the amount of people now who will demand that their lives and futures improve, have created some great opportunities to hold the powerful to account. The powerful know this and don't want to be held to account so they will undoubtedly throw us a few more cake crumbs that they'd planned to - our job is to strategically determine when to accept them and when to stand up and say that we want more. Watch this space!

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My thoughts on the 2024 UK General Election

For quite a long time, I was told that Labour would win the next General Election by an absolute landslide. The people who told me this (especially if they were people whose political opinions were fairly leftist, progressive and similar to mine) assured me that this would not be because they were actually doing especially well, but just because the Conservatives were doing particularly badly. I always responded by saying that Labour's super-majority was not guaranteed, and that just because another party was doing badly did not automatically mean that Labour would do well. I have said as much on this blog, many times.

My main reasoning for coming to this conclusion was that I felt that you could have said exactly the same thing in 2015. The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition of the early 2010s was supremely unpopular, and the huge wipeout the Liberal Democrats suffered at that election was demonstrative of that. That should have been an extraordinarily easy election for Labour's then-leader Ed Miliband to win - but unfortunately, his iteration of Labour was so abjectly unappealing that the anti-Tory vote was widely split, and the result was that David Cameron's Conservatives managed a full majority by themselves. It wasn't until Jeremy Corbyn took over the party's leadership that it became more of a two-party fight again. Whether you supported Corbyn's policies or whether you didn't, it is inarguable that he galvanised a lot of the people who had strong anti-Tory sentiments, and the 2017 and 2019 elections very clearly became Labour versus the Conservatives again, in a way that 2015 just had not been. Since Keir Starmer has taken over the reins of the Labour Party, I have felt that a lot of the problems that prevented Labour's win in 2015 have re-emerged, in particular the party in opposition failing to take especially strong stances against much of the Conservative Government's ideology. In fact, I think these problems have been worse under Keir Starmer than they were in 2015 under Ed Miliband, and I didn't see why taking such a similar approach to one that had clearly failed in the past was likely to have a different outcome this time.

Of course, we've now seen that Labour did get a huge majority of seats at the 2024 election, just as they were predicted to. However, this does not mean I'm going to sit and eat humble pie, because I still don't believe I was wrong. I never claimed to be certain they wouldn't get a super-majority, just that I didn't think it was inevitable. I still don't think it was inevitable. From interacting with people, both across the country via social media and on doorsteps whilst campaigning for my partner (who was standing as an independent in Monmouthshire) I sensed great dissatisfaction from many people not just with the Conservatives, but with the Labour Party as well.

I do not feel that Labour did as well in this election as the amount of seats they won would suggest. They received around 600,000 votes less than they did in 2019, which is generally considered to be Labour's worst result since the Second World War, some of their most prominent MPs such as Jonathan Ashworth and Thangam Debbonaire lost their seats, and many got in on a much reduced vote count in their constituencies (Keir Starmer's majority was reduced by half, which is absolutely unheard of for an incoming Prime Minister, whilst Health Secretary Wes Streeting came within around 500 votes of losing his seat as well). More significant than this is that in both cases an independent candidate came second, which is pretty unusual under our archaic First Past The Post system. The Green Party quadrupled their seat count, and some independents did get in, including former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.

So why, if we're to agree with my basic standpoint that Labour isn't especially popular and that the Tories imploding wouldn't by itself be enough for them to win, did they get such a large seat count compared to elections like 2015? There are many reasons for that, but I've narrowed it down to three key ones: the 2020 pandemic, the rise of Reform UK and the collapse of the SNP in Scotland.

The 2020 pandemic

I don't see this matter discussed very much in the media anymore, and certainly not in reference to the election, but I believe it's vitally important in terms of exactly how much the Tories fell from grace.

Personally, I had quite a nice time during the COVID-19 pandemic, although I know a lot of people didn't. But whether we were happy or whether we weren't, I feel that that pandemic changed us as human beings, and that the impacts of this have not been acknowledged by the establishment class. For the first time since the World War II, we were all in a situation where we felt we had to collectively inconvenience ourselves for the greater good. Some of us were trapped with toxic partners. Some of us missed loved ones' funerals. Some of us were far shorter of money than normal. Some of us (me included) were lucky enough to be generally okay, but if we were we felt obliged to check in from time to time with people who might not be. But that was okay - because we were doing the right thing, and all in it together.

I remember the day the glue snapped - when Dominic Cummings decided to drive to Barnard Castle ostensibly to check his eyesight, and Government ministers tripped over themselves to defend his behaviour. At this point, that community spirit died. People thought, quite rightly, that they'd been taken for absolute mugs - that they'd put themselves to great inconvenience for the safety of everyone, and the people who made these rules couldn't even be bothered to follow them themselves. At that point, we all decided we couldn't be bothered anymore to follow the rules, even in the interests of keeping people safe, and when scandals like Partygate came out we didn't lose any respect for the Government because there was already none left.

The irony is that from the Conservative Government's perspective, this probably didn't feel especially significant because they've always had contempt for the common people and consider themselves to be exempt from the rules. They're so removed from people's daily lives that they probably saw nothing wrong with what they did. And for ordinary people, the Government playing to a different set of rules is what we've come to expect, and in most cases we just shrug and say, 'So what? It's always like that.' But this was different. This was such an extreme situation, where everyone felt that they had to care for each other, that this felt like a gross betrayal in a way that this kind of thing normally does not.

Another feature of the 2020 pandemic is that it gave a lot of people a bit of time to think. Many found new hobbies, or discovered they had talents that they didn't know about themselves. It gave us the time to think about what we wanted to do with our lives, what values we held and what we wanted to do with them, in ways that normally we don't quite have time for. These feelings have stayed with us since, and there are many people now in creative work that they picked up during lockdown. This time taken has, I think, made it more possible to recognise when our elected officials are taking advantage of us.

Of course, this one itself would only result in the Tories doing badly, not necessarily in Labour gaining seats - but I think it does explain a big part of why they were so much more unpopular than normal.

The rise of Reform UK

Reform UK is the new name for the Brexit Party, which advocated for a no-deal Brexit in the late 2010s. Although they are not the same party, it bears a striking resemblance to the UK Independence Party (UKIP), mainly due to the ongoing association both parties have had with the politician Nigel Farage, who is Reform's current leader and serves as the MP for Clacton.

It wouldn't be accurate or fair for me to say that Reform doesn't have any coherent policies, because it clearly does if you take the time to read them, and my local Reform candidate Max Windsor-Peplow gave some quite thought-out and complex answers to questions during the one single hustings he attended, even if I didn't agree with what he said. However, what I can say is that when canvassing on doorsteps and meeting Reform voters, it was quite rare for them to be able to coherently explain what their policies actually were, besides vague comments like, 'It's all the immigrants, isn't it?' Reform may have some policies, but they have not taken the time during their campaign to make clear what these policies actually are, or what the causes are of our societal problems.

What UKIP, the Brexit Party and Reform all have in common, and what Nigel Farage in particular is exceptionally good at, is that they purport to be the main anti-establishment option for voters. This is demonstrated by the fact that they received the third highest vote share nationwide. People were sick of both the Tories and Labour, Reform UK recognised this and presented themselves as being a credible alternative. Just as a personal anecdote, I found that potential Reform voters were some of the most easy to talk to about my partner Owen's campaign, even though his actual politics are radically different from theirs and Nigel Farage's. This is because a lot of the time, this wasn't actually about anyone's policies; it was about wanting to send a message that people want to be listened to a bit more, and voting for a really good independent does that just as much as voting for a party like Reform.

In reality, Reform UK is not anti-establishment - its organisers have just learned how to appear to be, when in reality they care very little about ordinary folk and are connected to exactly the same kind of powerful individuals as the Conservatives are. This can be seen by how much they are featured in the mainstream media - Nigel Farage is one of the most frequently-featured faces on Question Time in spite of the fact that until last Thursday he'd never been an MP, whereas someone like Caroline Lucas of the Green Party has appeared far less often despite having been in Westminster for fourteen years. With the complete lack of impartiality from the UK's media, a truly anti-establishment politician could never hope to receive this amount of prominent coverage. The aim is to purport to be anti-establishment whilst driving the UK's domestic and foreign policies increasingly to the extreme right.

However, there are some major differences between UKIP and Reform UK. The most important one for this election is the fact that UKIP's aim was not really to gain seats - it was more to spook the Conservative Party into adopting more of their policies, in particular to pressure David Cameron into ordering a referendum into the UK's continued membership of the European Union. Reform UK isn't so interested in this, perhaps because it could see that at this point the Conservative Party was dead in the water. Its aim is more ambitious than this - it's to take advantage of the complete drop in support for establishment politics generally, and for this they do need seats.

In my constituency of Monmouthshire, the newly elected Labour MP Catherine Fookes unseated incumbent Tory David TC Davies, who had held the seat since 2005. Her majority is roughly the same amount of votes that Reform got. I will not say that this is fundamentally the reason why Labour won that seat, as I don't believe Reform's voters would necessarily have otherwise voted Conservative (I actually think my partner Owen could have got more votes as an anti-establishment candidate in the absence of Reform). Nevertheless, the fact that Reform was more interested in taking votes from the Conservatives than UKIP were has overall benefitted Labour.

Although I'm concerned by the rise in Reform, I do really hope that by sitting as an MP it will become apparent to the populace how devoid of practical measures to improve our lives Nigel Farage actually is. In the meantime, I'm confident in the left's role in presenting decent principles as an alternative. But these will not come from the Labour Party, they'll come from people who are truly anti-establishment and not just purporting to be.

The collapse of the SNP

I believe that the performance of the SNP is the most crucial reason why Labour did so much better in this election than they did in 2015.

In 2015, pretty much all the other parties were wiped out across Scotland as the SNP dominated, winning 56 out of a total 59 Scottish seats. This was embarrassing for all the other parties, but particularly for Labour, as Labour has traditionally dominated Scottish politics. The reason for the SNP's success is not because Scottish voters have fundamentally different values to voters across the rest of the UK; it's merely that they happened to be presented with a valid alternative to neoliberalism when the rest of the UK was not.

Fast forward to 2024, and the SNP has lost huge numbers of seats. There is no one single main reason for this, and I don't know enough about Scottish politics to feel comfortable speculating. I feel that there were just too many small things that made the SNP far less appealing than they were ten years ago, including having constant changes of leader since the departure of Nicola Sturgeon. It is this, to me, that has caused the Labour Party to get so much more success at this election, as Scotland is the nation where the Labour vote has increased the most (in England it remained fairly static, and in Wales where I live it actually fell). Again, I don't believe that this was because of radical differences of value between Scottish voters and the rest of the UK; merely that the Scots had become accustomed to having a decent alternative to the main parties, and without one fell back towards supporting Labour as they traditionally would have.

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For me, I'm very optimistic about the new Westminster make-up, in spite of the fact that I really did not think Labour deserved to win an election. The fact that they won such a landslide in terms of seat numbers but dropped so much in terms of actual votes is something bizarre that has never happened before. The Government knows that seats they thought were safe are now perhaps not so safe, and for this reason I feel the time is ripe to put pressure on them to really stand up for the things that matter to us.

But we must not be complacent. If we are, our NHS will be privatised, our civil rights to protest will be stripped from us, and our general quality of life will be radically reduced before we can say, 'We shall not be moved'.

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The avoidance of being seen as 'political'

 As I've mentioned a fair few times on this blog in recent weeks, my partner Owen is standing for Parliament, as an independent candidate for the constituency of Monmouthshire. I encouraged him to do this because of his extremely popular disability rights campaigns in the area, and to support the ongoing campaign to stand left-wing independent candidates more generally (since my last blog, I've learned of a few more who are doing this in Wales).

I'm really enjoying this campaign - I've never done anything like this before and I have no idea of Owen's chances of winning, but I am meeting a lot of people on doorsteps who say he's a breath of fresh air when compared to the establishment politicians. We're going out canvassing pretty much every day, interacting and swapping ideas with various other independent candidates who are standing around the UK and there's a really enjoyable vibe of just doing something and trying to get something achieved. But it's also forced me to confront something else, something I've been aware of for a little while - the idea of being 'political' is quite often avoided in polite society.

'Don't talk religion or politics' is something you're told whenever you're in polite company. When I was at University, if I was ever invited out with someone, it would often be followed with, 'But please will you not spend all evening going on about politics?' Talking in too much detail about politics is, for some reason, considered to be quite rude. Social media has thankfully broken down that boundary a little, and made it more possible to leave comments on things. I think this is partly because online it's easier to back your statements up with facts - if you feel you don't know in much detail what you're talking about, it's possible to do a quick Google search and check before returning to the conversation, in a way that in person you just can't do. I know that I personally feel a lot more informed about the world as a result of my social media activity, and I know a lot of other people do too. I also think that this is a big part of the reason people feel uncomfortable talking politics in the first place - that they're worried about looking stupid in front of someone they perceive as knowing more than them.

But it's more than that. Campaign groups that very specifically exist to create some kind of societal change take pride in advertising themselves as 'apolitical'. The chef Jamie Oliver described himself as not being political in campaigning for children to get better-quality food in state schools. The film Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story features a scene in which conservative activist Mary Whitehouse (played by Julie Walters) insists that her Clean Up TV campaign at the BBC is 'not political (I have no idea if the real Whitehouse ever said this, but even if she didn't the scene is still indicative of what people understand 'political' to mean). And as the partner of someone standing for Parliament, I've found that people I work on campaign groups with are slightly hesitant to talk about this. For example, I'm quite heavily involved in anti-war, pro-Palestine activism, and although many of my fellow members have been excited and supportive of Owen's Parliamentary campaign, it's been suggested that it's probably not a good idea to talk about it officially through the group, even though Owen is one of the very small number of candidates who is unequivocally calling for the state of Palestine to be recognised by the UK. This is again, in the interests of not wanting to be 'political'.

I should make clear that I don't say this to criticise anyone who tries to avoid looking too political. If they believe that their campaign is better-served by not giving any politicians any kind of support, I respect that decision. However, I think it does raise the question of why that is? I believe that any action that tries to change anything is, by its very nature, political. I would say that every single example I've given is of people who were trying to change the political status quo, something I regularly try to do myself. I think if you're doing something political, I don't see why it's a dirty thing to be upfront about that.

We talk about politics as if what happens in Westminster, in Holyrood, in Brussels or in the White House is completely separated from our own day-to-day lives. But in reality, they're completely inextricable. We get to exercise a vote every few years that in reality means almost nothing in the grand scheme of things, and then the politicians take it upon themselves to act in whatever way they see fit, irrespective of what general people actually want. The only way to make any kind of impact on that is to behave in ways that are unashamedly, uncompromisingly political - if people don't act in political ways, politicians with great power will never take action that people want or need.

Just on a personal level, I view nearly every conversation I have as being somewhat political. This is why I struggle if I'm ever asked not to talk politics, because the way I live my life every day is a reflection of my views on the world. A conversation about the weather becomes a conversation about the climate, which becomes what we're doing to our planet and the ecological emergency. A conversation about what I had for breakfast becomes a conversation about my diet, which is built around the views I hold regarding food production. This is why I tend to say, 'If you don't want me to talk politics, it's probably better if I don't come at all', because this is the person I am and I don't feel I can make that commitment, or that anyone would be better off if I did.

Particularly when canvassing, the nature of who people are planning to vote for inevitably comes up. I don't probe if someone doesn't want to talk about it, but I find it fascinating the number of people who invariably consider their voting choice to be as confidential as their bank PIN. I would understand this if we were living in a police state where you could be harassed or arrested for voting in the wrong way - but we are not. I actually believe that were we able to have more of a conversation about who we're all going to vote for, we'd be able to discuss these matters more openly, come to understand what people feel and and why. I think that very few people, even if I fundamentally disagree with their opinions, have views that I actually would not understand. If we could share that with each other, I believe we'd be a more politically healthy society, and that this would be a good thing.

There's another thing that makes people disapprove of constant political discussion, and that is that people find it boring. My question to that is: why? Why does a discussion about the way we live and function bore you? The answer is quite simple: because it's been made boring. Everything about the way politics is conducted in the UK is designed to be really dull. When we watch politics on the television, we see boring men in boring suits, sitting in boring rooms and using boring words that a lay person might not understand, and more often than not they're contravening people's human rights. There are some states where the force of the military keeps people from engaging in politics. In the UK, they don't bother to do that, because the subject is made to sound so dull that not enough people try to engage in it in the first place. Although, I do think this is changing. The tightening of laws regarding protests, the introduction of photo ID at polling stations and various other things, are all designed to suppress political engagement, and the reason it's being done right now is that people's living standards have got too low. Simply making it boring doesn't work so well as it used to, because people are actually looking to have these conversations.

I'm very torn as to whether to be optimistic or pessimistic at these developments. There's valid reasons to be both, but I am on the whole an optimist, and although I disagree with the suppression of political action, I think it's a good thing that people's increasing willingness to engage is frightening the establishment powers enough that they're taking these measures in the first place. I really hope that by the time they start suppressing people, the genie is already far enough out of the bottle that it will stay out, and people will continually want to engage. It's just a real shame that it takes things getting so much worse in the world for that to happen.

At hustings, Owen typically attends wearing a jumper and his signature hand-knitted beanie hat. He stands out amongst the establishment politicians he sits next to - but I've heard a lot of people talking about how refreshing it is that one of the candidates actually looks and acts like a human being. Let's see how it goes.

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It is an embarrassment to see who is standing against the Labour Party

 This evening, along with my partner Owen Lewis (independent candidate for Monmouthshire), I attended an online talk by the Transform Party regarding the various independent candidates standing against establishment politicians at the coming UK General Election. The meeting was really just to bounce ideas for campaigning, fundraising and getting decent media coverage. I think it's probably better if I don't say who else was there as I don't know if every attendee would be happy with that being on record, but I will say that it was a really interesting meeting and actually reassured me about a lot of the things we're doing in Owen's campaign.

Shortly afterwards, I caught the end of the televised debate between the various political parties, around about the time the representatives were giving their closing statements. Deputy Labour Leader Angela Rayner asserted the oft-repeated line that 'Keir Starmer has changed the Labour Party' (they never seem to want to go into detail about exactly how, do they?) Green Party co-leader Carla Denyer aptly responded, 'Angela's right, he has. He's changed it into the Conservative Party.' I've worked with Carla on political campaigns in the past, I have a lot of respect for her and I think she's right - this is exactly what Keir Starmer has done (I wrote in my previous blog about how similar the Labour Party's campaign feels to the Conservative one from 2017.)

This is why there are so many left-wing independents planning to stand at this election, and why they're all keen to link up and support one another. It was acknowledged at the meeting that because of the First-Past-The-Post system we aren't particularly expecting that many to win, although we are cautiously optimistic that at least some will, and hopefully that will lead to more coming in at the following election. But something has occurred to me about these independents that I think is significant in a way that is separate to their likelihood of getting the seat. For the Labour Party, the specific kinds of people who are challenging it as independents should be one of the greatest embarrassments they've ever seen.

Here are some examples of who is standing.

Jody McIntyre in Birmingham Yardley, challenging Labour's Jess Phillips

I'm starting with this one because it really excited me when I found out about it. Jody McIntyre was one of my earliest political inspirations - I remember, from back in the early days of the Con-Dem coalition, the way that Ben Brown on the BBC tried to humiliate him when a police officer violently pulled him out of his wheelchair at an anti-austerity demonstration. During the interview, Jody conducted himself with great decorum, revealed that he actually wasn't capable of moving the wheelchair by himself, and asked quite reasonably how in those circumstances he could possibly have been believed by the police to be a threat.

Since then, I've often wondered what happened to Jody McIntyre and what he went on to do, as I hadn't seen his name mentioned anywhere - until now. Jess Phillips is a member of Labour Friends of Israel, although she's quite good at talking the talk about Palestine and appealing to the significant number of Muslim voters in her constituency. Personally, I've always found her to be quite problematic as a politician - I will always remember how, on the night of the 2019 General Election, she appeared on TV laughing and joking and clearly delighted with the result, before realising the cameras were on her and quickly shifting her facial expression into one of sadness.

The fact that a severely disabled human rights activist, someone who has been abused for his disability in the past, and someone who has campaigned for the human rights of Palestinians for fifteen years, is standing against one of the most well-known Labour MPs, should shame the party.

Andrew Feinstein in Holborn and St Pancras, challenging Labour leader Keir Starmer

Andrew Feinstein is from South Africa, and is from a Jewish background - he's actually the son of a Holocaust survivor.

Having been persecuted for his anti-apartheid politics throughout the 1980s, Andrew served as a member of the South African National Assembly from 1997-2001, under President Nelson Mandela. In 2001, he resigned in protest against corruption from within his party, moved to the UK and has since fought corruption in various areas from the heart of London.

I've written a fair bit about Andrew's campaign on this blog, because it's been one of the few things that I've really felt motivated by in politics over the last few years. I'm not the only one either - I think his decision to challenge Keir Starmer for his seat is one of the main things that has prompted other independents to stand. I've also met Andrew personally - he came to do a talk near where I live in Abergavenny earlier this year, I found him so inspirational and he was one of the earliest people who encouraged Owen to stand.

I said earlier that Labour never wants to go into detail about how it has changed - but if pressed on the matter, politicians will trot out that they've done an amazing job dealing with anti-Semitism. I don't think this is true at all. On the contrary, I think Labour has made anti-Semitism far worse. Labour's attitude makes anti-Semitism inextricable from opposition to the state of Israel - and when the state of Israel is committing war crimes on the scale that it is, that has serious consequences for any and all Jewish people. Jewish people have also regularly been suspended and expelled from the Labour Party on the grounds of anti-Semitism. To be clear, I don't believe it's impossible for Jews to be anti-Semitic, just as I don't believe it's impossible for women to be misogynistic, gay people to be homophobic or black people to support white supremacy. These are offensive and unacceptable views, and should be called out irrespective of who expresses them. But if people in these groups were regularly and consistently accused of these things, that would concern me greatly, and it concerns me greatly how hard it is to be a Jewish socialist in the Labour Party - far harder, from what I've seen, than being a non-Jewish socialist.

I don't know how well the campaign for Andrew is going, although I've been advised by friends working on it that there are a lot of people in the constituency who are very interested, and that the kind of voter Keir Starmer is trying to target with Labour aren't the types of people who generally live in Holborn and St Pancras. But in some ways, I think that isn't really the point. For the son of a Holocaust survivor, and a personal friend of Nelson Mandela, to be challenging the Leader of the Labour Party for his seat - a leader who has built a major part of his campaign on tackling anti-Semitism - is probably the greatest humiliation the Labour Party could experience right now. This is the case irrespective of how well Andrew Feinstein actually does.

Owen Lewis in Monmouthshire, challenging Conservative Secretary of State for Wales David TC Davies (marginal constituency, Labour putting a lot of resources into it)

This last example I've shamelessly chosen just because Owen Lewis is my partner, and I therefore know the details of this one inside out. Owen is a popular local campaigner, particularly on disability rights. Before I knew Owen, he worked for many years at Tudor Street Day Centre, helping adults with learning difficulties and mental health problems get the best out of life and achieve as much independence as possible.

The campaigns started when Owen learned that after closing its doors in 2020 due to the pandemic, Tudor Street Day Centre had not re-opened, leaving the local disabled community without their much-needed services. This campaign is still ongoing; it's been hugely successful so far, with great support from the local community (I think the Day Centre would have been knocked down for housing by now were it not for Owen's efforts). Nevertheless, it has still not re-opened. Owen set up a local community group, run by volunteers, to replace the services Tudor Street Day Centre used to offer - this project has proven to be a real lifeline for some of the most vulnerable people in town. Nevertheless, it could be better. The building it runs from, whilst good in some respects, is not equipped for people with some of the most severe disabilities. The continuing goal, which keeps getting kicked down the road, is to get Tudor Street Day Centre re-opened.

On this campaign, Owen has dealt with MPs, prospective MPs and councillors of all descriptions and political persuasions. Some have been more helpful than others, but the end result is the same - Tudor Street Day Centre has still not re-opened, and the message is sent out to the local disabled community that their needs are not the priority for local politicians. Owen has therefore built his election campaign around the rights of people who are disabled, elderly, unwell or vulnerable in some other way. Sometimes people interpret this as being a single issue campaign, but it is not. In every political decision that is made, some people are affected more than others, and those who are affected more tend to be in more vulnerable groups. Owen's work is aimed at redressing this balance - making sure that on every policy the next Government enacts, from climate policies to addressing the ongoing situation in Palestine, the rights of every single person are considered, right down to those with the quietest voices.

This one is slightly different from the other examples I've given because it's a Conservative MP Owen is challenging, rather than a Labour one. Nevertheless, the local council is Labour-run and it's a seat the Labour Party is particularly keen to get. Owen (and I) would love to be able to support Labour in this election. But we don't feel that their values will cause the most vulnerable people in the community to get their building back. To be fair to the local Labour candidate Catherine Fookes, she was actually very kind and encouraging when Owen told her he was planning on standing against her. We have nothing against her personally as a candidate. But we do have a lot of things against the Labour Party's position on disability rights - not just because of the Tudor Street Day Centre campaign, but because of Labour's track record, how in the past people who couldn't work due to disability or illness were vilified, how when she was Secretary of State for Work and Pensions Yvette Cooper (now the Shadow Home Secretary) decided that disabled people were fit to work if on a single day they could lift an empty cardboard box and put it back down again.

As Owen's partner, I can testify to the fact that he has no personal political ambitions. He is doing this purely for the local community, because he does not believe that disabled people will be safe under any of the other candidates. For a party that is meant to be for the people to have one of its most marginal seats challenged by someone who does not trust that they'll protect the most vulnerable people in our societies is an absolute disgrace.

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The candidates I've mentioned aren't the only independents standing. But it points to a general point about how Labour doesn't know what it actually stands for. It doesn't have any concrete ideology that is different from the Tory one. I wish it did - I wish we didn't need all these independents standing and had a party we could trust to get behind. Nothing summarises this more than the party's current slogan. In 2017 and 2019, the slogan was 'For the many, not the few' - this was something we could actually get behind, a recognition that for too long politics had only served the super-rich. This has now been replaced with the single word 'Change'. To be clear, this does not mean a change in anything to do with the current political status quo. It only means a change in the people doing it. The Labour Party motto may as well be 'It's our turn now' - it would mean exactly the same thing.

These independents, whether or not they win any seats, are the opposition now. We have to recognise that, because Reform and Nigel Farage are out to position themselves as the opposition. They are not the opposition. They are merely capable of framing themselves in anti-establishment rhetoric. In reality, they come from elitist backgrounds and in power would behave in exactly the same way as the Conservative Party, and unfortunately now, the Labour Party.

One interesting thing I have observed is that of the independents that I'm aware of, Owen is the only one standing for a constituency that isn't in England (if anyone knows of any others, please do tell me!) Naturally, left-wing voters in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland tend to have their own parties to support - but these parties still have flaws, and I'm very interested to see how this movement will extend to the devolved nations. Hopefully, Owen will play a part in that.

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Keir Starmer's election campaign feels almost identical to Theresa May's

 In 2017, then Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap General Election, in spite of the fact that in the year she'd been in Downing Street she had repeatedly insisted she wouldn't. She claimed that the reason was because she felt that she'd be more able to negotiate a good Brexit deal with the EU with a bigger Parliamentary majority - but it's generally agreed that the real reason for her decision is that she was miles ahead in the polls at the time. The UK media had given her a ten-month-long honeymoon period, the Leader of the Opposition Jeremy Corbyn was generally seen as being unelectable and having just triggered Article 50, she was expecting to absorb all the people who'd voted UKIP in the 2015 election.

I remember very clearly the day I learned of the 2017 General Election, and I almost had a full-blown panic attack. Everyone was saying that the Tories were primed for an absolute super-majority, and I believed them. I believed that Theresa May would be in power for a very long time, that Jeremy Corbyn would be removed from the Labour Party and we'd lose any hope of ever going forward. But it didn't work, for two reasons: 1) Jeremy Corbyn did a much better campaign than anyone was expecting, and 2) Theresa May proved herself to be robotic, dull and quite embarrassing to watch. In the end, although the Conservatives were still the largest party, they lost seats whilst Labour gained them and this was generally considered to be the Waterloo for Theresa May. (Of course, in 2019, my fears about 2017 did come true, albeit with Boris Johnson rather than Theresa May - this was the worst day of my life.)

One of the things that always strikes me about 2017 is how quickly Theresa May managed to dive-bomb in popularity. At the beginning of the campaign, the belief that the British public would adore her was to such an extent that their campaign materials had 'Theresa's Team' written on them instead of 'Conservative Party'. Her rhetoric was all about her as an individual rather than about the party - the phrases 'If I win/lose seats' and 'We need to strengthen my hand' were heard constantly. But within a few short weeks, suddenly she was a public laughing stock, and even staunch Tories were talking about how unrelatable she came across. Having spent several years perfecting her image as a professional and reliable head-teacherly-like figure, when she had the spotlight on her it became apparent that she was hideously out of her depth.

The reason I'm talking about this now is that when I watch Keir Starmer campaigning for Labour, I can't help but get déja vu. Like May, he's cultivated his career more about looking like a safe pair of hands than what he actually stands for. His appearance is designed to look authoritative, but not in a way that's too scary. But it's more than that. Much of Theresa May's rhetoric is now being repeated by Keir Starmer almost verbatim. On the 'missions' section of the Labour Party website, the first subheading is 'Strong, stable and secure foundations'. In 2017, one of Theresa May's greatest embarrassments was the constant repetition of the phrase 'Strong and stable' whenever she was asked a difficult question. This isn't the only time Starmer has repeated May's own phrases - a few months ago, Starmer told local councils that there was 'no magic money tree', again echoing May's words in 2017. This is not only repetitive, but it is also nonsense - as we saw in 2017, Theresa May managed to find £1bn within a single day to bribe the DUP into supporting her in Parliament, and I have no doubt that Keir Starmer would do exactly the same if he was in that position. The proverbial magic money tree exists, and politicians shake it constantly whenever it benefits their own careers.

Earlier this week, Keir Starmer came to my hometown of Abergavenny. Whilst he was here, a group of Palestine campaigners confronted him about his lack of enthusiasm for an immediate ceasefire. Keir Starmer ignored them and wouldn't stop to talk - his priority was purely to talk to Labour groups who already supported him. This is much the same as what Theresa May did - May even went as far as arriving by helicopter to remove the remotest possibility that she may be confronted by anyone who didn't support her. May also attracted controversy by refusing to debate Jeremy Corbyn on television, instead sending various colleagues to represent her. Starmer isn't going quite as far as that, but this excellent video explains how he's refusing to debate anyone but Rishi Sunak, meaning the smaller parties are likely to be locked out of TV debates. This is effectively the same thing as when Theresa May refused to debate Jeremy Corbyn - Jeremy Corbyn would have given her a tough ride and proven himself to be a more effective orator, whereas Rishi Sunak is not going to fundamentally challenge Keir Starmer's mission statement because they both essentially believe in free-market capitalism. Like May, Starmer is refusing to debate anyone that he's worried might say something he can't easily come back from.

There's a reason why Starmer and May are so similar to each other. It's because neither of them are particularly interesting politicians, they are both extremely weak at thinking on their feet and the entirety of the mainstream media is behind their campaigns. Behind the scenes, each of them has had conversations with their senior advisors where they've been told, 'This election is yours to lose, you'll be promoted as the safe pair of hands, so in the meantime just stick to the people who already like you and don't do anything embarrassing.' If you try to say anything interesting in an election campaign, you run the risk of being called out by someone - so the solution is to do nothing of note whatsoever and wait for the other side to screw up.

But, as similar as Starmer and May are to each other, there is one major difference. Theresa May was a sitting Prime Minister campaigning against a Leader of the Opposition who had a great amount of empathy, and was capable of relating to ordinary people on their level. Keir Starmer is a Leader of the Opposition campaigning against a sitting Prime Minister who has been abjectly awful and expects to lose. Theresa May had someone giving her a decent fight, and made it easy for them. Keir Starmer has no one like that, and therefore has an advantage that Theresa May didn't have. For that reason, I really have no idea how this is going to turn out for Keir Starmer and Labour - I don't believe that their success in this election is guaranteed at all, but on this occasion that also raises the question: 'If it's not them, then who?'

At this election, unless you happen to have an unusually good Labour MP like Zarah Sultana, I urge all voters to veer away from the major parties. Neither of them will offer anything in the way of positive change. My partner Owen Lewis is standing in the Monmouthshire constituency as an independent candidate, and most of my campaigning will be for him to win this seat. Ideally go for an independent, but if you don't have a good independent standing, a good idea is to go for the Green Party, or Plaid Cymru if you're in Wales or the SNP if you're in Scotland. Remember - in 2017 Theresa May did a deal with the DUP when she lost her majority. The only way to get decent change is to control the options Keir Starmer may have to do a deal with.

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July 4th is Independence Day in the USA. It could be Independents' Day in the UK

 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.

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