Yes, we got the Tories out. BUT ….

Five progressives give their take on Labour’s landslide electoral victory of 4 July

Note to those reading via email: This article may exceed the length that can be sent by Substack. In which case, please click on the headline and it will take you directly to the Substack article. [Photo above taken at the 6 July pro-Palestine march in London].

New PM Keir Starmer proclaimed on 5 July that a “sunshine of hope” would sweep across the UK after his party’s landslide victory, won, in large measure, as a result of the UK’s grossly unfair electoral system.

Other than kicking out the hapless and hopeless Tories, Labour winning 100% of the power and 64 % of the seats on a mere 34% of the overall vote did not lead to jubilant “hats off to you” celebration among my mates… or to anyone concerned about issues you perhaps also care about.   

After all, one of Starmer’s first well-wishers was Joe Biden, the leader of a country which is the chief weapons suppliers to the Israeli killing machine. One can be certain that Starmer did NOT say: “hey Joe: why don’t we both end arms sales to Netanyahu and use diplomacy to stop the senseless killing in the Ukraine?”

Within hours, Labour war horse Liz Kendall, now re-cycled as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, was wheeled out to whinge about how much was being spent these days on benefits for disabled and sick people.

Speaking of old Labour war horses, Tony Blair jumped in to advise Starmer that he should “avoid any vulnerability on 'wokeism' " over issues such as immigration. 

And not a single Labour Party figure that we saw expressed even a smidgeon of embarrassment that Labour’s “landslide” was the most dissportionate victory in British electoral history. Hardly a radical, even professorial John Curtice expressed his worries.  

This is the supposed and much trumpeted “change” agenda?

Sounds an awful lot like “business as usual” to THE LEFT LANE (TLL). But then as we argued during the election campaign, Starmer is a typical centrist Labour leader.   

In today’s TLL, we have brought together five progressives to give their responses to 4 July and to point out some ways we really could start to have “a sunshine of hope” in the months and years ahead. [Note: This helpful document gives details of how left indy candidates and small “left” parties fared last week.]

ENJOY and THINK HARD!

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At the 6 July march in London against the Israeli genocide.

‘It’s not the election, stupid…it’s the stupid election…’

Progressive action required - visible, fast and meaningful.

By Julia Moore  

2024 is a global hyper-election year.  India, USA, EU, UK, and France see millions of voters temporarily engaged in their respective electoral systems, systems which are increasingly influenced by digital overload, social media, AI, and are anachronistic.  Low turnout/abstentions prove this and are nothing new. Brexit is a notable exception. Governing with less than 35% of a mandate is not a victory, anywhere. The no-overall result in France is a warning, a deferred threat of what is to come, if the current Left melange fail to work effectively, collectively.

The past 15 years places all of us on the side of loss or gain, materially and environmentally. In the UK civic standard of services - street cleaning, transport, health-adult care, wildly vary across the regions, with £72billion removed from local agencies in the same period. Where do you go to challenge, to change- and who does that, if engagement is rock-bottom to cause record low turnout?

Set against this, a rise in street protests, from Fridays for Future, to Extinction Rebellion and Pro-Palestinian support, globally continue to illustrate that, when a cause has a clear-core focus, active and meaningful action prevails.  Contrast that to ‘systems-voting’, where disengagement (12 million abstentions in the last French elections) is perienniel.Exception:  Brexit. Common denominator in all the above? A one-objective, one-focused outcome. It defined the creation of the trades union and the early years of the Labour Party, the Mandela and Assange campaigns latterly.

Citizens Assemblies, proportional representation and/or local area committees are being piloted in many countries, some already in legal processes. Change is afoot. It needs to be if Reform and the Greens have an almost equal number of seats with quite a different vote share. Top-heavy ideology, even if in power, will achieve nothing if the voting public care not, nor share not, the public spaces where power sits. A visible building of agencies which promote and value persistent, on-going and meaningful engagement in public decision-making apparatus is both cost-effective and not overly complicated to instigate.

A Labour-led era of governance faces a rising wave pushing for electoral reform, Jeremy Corby’s Islington gain heralds this, the Welsh Tory routing and the power-play of the Lib-Dems should, together, lobby for qualified change (PR is not, in itself a panacea). Meaningful Citizen engagement projects, youth centres, and Sure Start provision have proven effective in the past, supporting communities. Support is not radical change, power-sharing is.

The absence of any coherent industrial-economic strategy (by all parties) has created the vulnerable groups who now find solace in a bogus right-wing morality. Public service provision is not only a safety-net for those displaced by economic crises. It impacts and is needed by all citizens; as it recedes, our communities hollow-out. A new era of civic responsibility which can radiate upwards from local-regional activism is possible and imperative. Progressive groups are pioneering model policy infrastructure e.g., the circular economy and non-marketised public services, and have the resources to influence. Sharing skills with those not so confident in the political arena is a duty. So let’s stop prophesising, create the connections and echo the Chartists: ‘Peacefully if we may, forcibly if we must’....

And, Mr Melenchon et al, a word from Thiers (1830): ‘The King reins, but the people govern’....

Julia Moore is a member of the Co-ordinating Collective of Diem25. Diem25 is a transnational progressive movement, co-founded by Screcko Horvat and Yanis Varofakis. Think globally, act locally. Join us at www.diem25.org.

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Ever decreasing circles. In an election of huge turmoil, the socialist left failed to make its mark. 

By Phil Pope

A huge Labour majority is what was predicted eighteen months ago, the surprises being the breakthroughs by smaller parties and independents. The highlight for the left was Corbyn’s victory, but it is unclear whether this will embolden him to build something outside Labour or to return to his former party as Ken Livingstone did after becoming Mayor of London.  

Support for Labour was about the same magnitude as it got in 2019 under Corbyn. That Labour won so many more seats is partly down to appealing more to centrist voters outside major cities, but mostly down to the First-Past-The-Post voting system favouring the leading party. 

The lack of enthusiasm for Labour did not translate into support for the left, but instead went to Greens and independents whose victories showed it is possible to compete with the main parties. It also highlights that the socialist left (with the exception of the Scottish Socialist Party for a period 20 years ago) has failed to make a similar breakthrough. This was not the first election for Trade Union and Socialist Coalition, the Socialist Labour Party, or the Communist Party of Britain. Results around the 1% mark show something is deeply wrong with their approach.

The Workers Party of Britain did better, but not well. A handful came second, twenty-five saved deposits, and the rest did poorly. Good results for independents were based upon Muslim pro-Gaza votes with some reformist economic policies thrown in. However, building a left party from the anti-war movement did not work with Respect 20 years ago and is less likely to succeed now. Sooner or later the conflict will fall in intensity and the protest-vote will dissolve. Even if the left were short-sighted enough to try, it is unlikely that the Muslim candidates would see any advantage in forging an alliance with socialists. Anti-war candidates seem to do better when not associated with the socialist left. More likely we might see the emergence of a ‘party for Muslims’ with soft-left politics, possibly linked to ‘The Moslem Vote’ group. 

The Greens may make further advances at next elections. They came second to Labour in many urban constituencies and will be considered an anti-government vote next time. Lib Dem fortunes depend largely on whether the Conservatives continue to try to out-do Reform or return to the centre-ground. 

 Future elections under First-Past-The-Post with five significant national parties will become increasingly volatile and there is a risk that the Conservatives or Reform win large numbers of seats on a modest vote as Labour has just done in 2024. Most of the public see a need for proportional representation (PR)  and the left should try to lead as much of that public sentiment as possible. We cannot let Reform be seen as the anti-establishment party fighting for democracy.  Moreover, we must get PR for the Commons rather than being diverted and fobbed-off with essentially meaningless Lords reform.

Apart from electoral reform, there is a huge political vacuum caused by the lack of serious opposition to Labour and the liberal consensus. Either the left can fill it or Reform will continue to expand into it, increasingly attracting young and working class voters, whilst other people either don’t vote, give their vote to the Greens, or continue to hope for a left-turn by Labour. But now that the special circumstances of Corbyn’s leadership are gone, Labour has returned to what it was: a machine for turning radical activists into reformists.

There is a need for a new party, but there needs to be a break from the practice and rhetoric of Marxism and Trotskyism on the one hand, and of liberal identity-politics on the other. The left needs to engage with issues facing the country and not adopt extreme and unpopular positions as a reaction against the rhetoric of the right ; that leads the left into culture-wars fought on terrain of the opposition's choosing. Many of those who do admit the need for a new party talk up the need for the trade unions to lead any initiative making them reluctant to do so themselves. But the unions will only move when others have shown it is viable to do so. Now that Labour is in power hopefully the excuses for hesitation will be discarded.

Phil Pope is a member of the Social Justice Party and former chair of Bristol Labour LCF. He wrote an article titled “The Socialist Alliance: An early failure to build a left party over six years” for THE LEFT LANE in April 2024.

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The Labour Left is down, but not out.

By Ted Bevan*

Keir Starmer talks about his “changed Labour Party”, but he was unable to purge most of Labour’s left-wing MPs.

Before the election, tight control of candidate selection by the right- wing faction which backs Starmer stopped new candidates from the left and the unions from standing for Labour.

But most left-wing Labour MPs survived attempts at deselection. As a proportion of the parliamentary Labour Party, the left is now smaller even if it is mostly intact. The left will be more willing to be critical of the leadership, taking positions in advance of the party’s timid manifesto commitments. This opens up space in the mainstream of the parliamentary party for dissent.

Compared to 1997, Labour’s left has a better case that its policy agenda is an asset to the incoming government and could help it be re-elected. Such MPs are not afraid to level with the electorate about the choices which confront a government serious about reducing poverty and pollution.

To give just one example: In the 2024 election campaign, the concept of GB Energy as a publicly-owned energy company was a clear echo of Labour’s 2017 and 2019 manifestos, with their break from New Labour’s aversion to reversing the privatisation.

The left will be calling for this policy to go much further. Moreover, since the right wing of Labour has few fixed beliefs beyond Atlanticism and a deference to Britain’s ruling class, it may make concessions across a range of policy areas. Labour’s right will, however, always be worried that such concessions may be an electoral threat and / or pose an existential threat to the faction’s post-parliament career opportunities as lobbyists for big business.

The Labour left is also much more conscious of the need to address Britain’s broken voting system. It has overwhelming support for proportional representation, but it remains to be seen how urgent electoral reform will be for newly-elected MPs. An immediate priority is the New Deal for Working People, which although watered down, promises to make it easier for workers to organise.

If the Labour government sticks to its austere fiscal rules, cuts to public services and slow growth, it could demoralise and divide its base of support. That might trigger a leadership crisis. In that event, the votes of left-wing MPs would be crucial to changing course if Labour’s deputy leader Angela Rayner attempted to become both party leader and the next prime minister.

*Ted Bevan is the assumed name of a long-time Labour Party activist who lives in the north of England.

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The radical left should have done much better than it did.

By Gregor Gall 

As much has already been said about Labour’s share of the vote and its total number of votes, the lower turnout, the influence of Reform in splitting the right-wing vote to help Labour and the like, I shall offer some thoughts on why the radical left still did far less well than it should have done.

Starmer and Labour offered ‘change’ in a project of patriotic ‘national renewal’. Aside from the renamed ‘New Deal for Working People’, this means little immediate or significant material change for the working-class with no increases in taxation to provide more funding for public services. It’s pretty much an incredulous case of cost-less ‘change’ then with many of the ‘Ming vase’ matters avoided before 4 July.

All this means the radical left should have done much better than it did. Starmer lowered expectations, and hopes of him were and are not high. Many have said it was yet another case of an incumbent government losing an election rather more than the main opposition party winning it.

Aside from the impact of the Palestinian genocide, the evidence of the radical left making progress is once again dispiriting and cannot be ignored or wished away. Even those independent pro-Palestinian MPs elected are not necessarily of the radical left on other issues.

Gerry Caroll ran for People Before Profit in West Belfast… and did quite well.

Let’s just detail this. The open Trotskyist and Communist candidates (including the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition) with just one the exception of Gerry Caroll, People Before Profit MLA in West Belfast (5,000 votes, 13%), received pitiful scores. Just one was north of 1,000 and most were around 500 at best. Notwithstanding some of its reactionary politics, without Galloway’s return, the Workers’ Party of Britain is now a busted flush, and Corbyn’s breakthrough is but an isolated example of an independent social democratic being elected. Though the likes of Michael Lavelette (Preston, 8,715/21.8%) and Maxine Bowler (Sheffield Brightside and Hillsborough, 2,537/8.0%) did well, they did not stand as the Trotskyists which they are.

No amount of genuflecting to the ‘the real struggle will now take place on the streets’ can make up for this poor showing. Indeed, the now necessary ‘struggle on the streets’ will be all the weaker for the lack of radical left parliamentary tribunes to help lead it and give it credibility. The standout non-parliamentary critical voice of the election, Matt Wrack, FBU union general secretary and current TUC president, all the more highlights this paucity. 

The radical left must ask itself this: If Starmer and Labour are so bad and the radical left is so correct, then why did it do so poorly? Here, the answer cannot be just that people voted Labour to get rid of the Tories. Indeed, in many places with a Labour landslide on the cards, there was never a better time to safely vote left of Labour.

This all comes back to the inability of the radical left in England especially – and unlike Ireland - to unite on a common programme in order to help make the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And to have done so many years in advance of 2024 so that it had a good prior track record to take to people. Gerry Carroll shows that work years before is needed to get as far as he did – a local councillor (2014-2016) and a Member of the Legislative Assembly (2016- ). But even he got less votes and a lower percentage than when he stood in the 2019 general election.

What of Scotland given its different dynamics? This was only nation in which Labour made a significant advance in the share of the vote (35.3%, up 16.7% - England: 33.7%, up 1.6%, Wales – 37%, down 3.9%) and this was at the expense of the SNP which, while losing 39 of its 48 seats, only gained 5% less votes than Labour. The radical left, such as the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP), did no better here than elsewhere and there were no pro-Palestinian candidates standing. Though support for independence remains consistent – with just under half supporting it – this support has become increasingly detached from support for the SNP.

Nonetheless, the election result was far worse for the SNP than anyone expected, including the SNP. It’s hard to see any recovery for it in the short-term because of the SNP is already engaging in an internal undignified ‘blame game’, there is wind in the sails of Scottish Labour, the SNP is still the government in Scotland where it’s not a ‘land of milk and honey’, and Starmer has made clear limited change will take time.

Whether all this will hold true long enough to mean that Scottish Labour is still popular enough to win enough seats in the Scottish Parliament to form a Labour Scottish Government in May 2026 remains to be seen. This is especially so as not only are 43% of seats (‘list seats’) in the Scottish Parliament elected via proportional representation but doing well in the 57% seats elected by first-past-the post dictates that parties do this are unable to repeat that strength in the ‘list seats’. This could very much help the SNP if it retains a significant minority of votes.

Gregor Gall is author of Mick Lynch: The making of a working-class hero (Manchester University Press, 2024 https://manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk/9781526173096/) In April, Gregor wrote an article for THE LEFT LANE titled: “Socialism in Scotland: Lessons from the rise and fall of the Scottish Socialist Party (SSP)”.

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Bright spots in the darkness

By Lorna Finlayson

What we have just witnessed is better described as a coronation than an election, since those who wield real power - in corporate and media circles - decided long ago (and quite openly) on the outcome. Any pleasure that might have been taken in finally seeing the back of the Conservatives after fourteen years of unbridled social violence is seriously soured by the manner of their departure and the nature of what has replaced them. Even on the dubious assumption that the Labour Party under Starmer will be substantially better than the Conservatives (and it is saying something that Labour have managed to give even this particularly grotesque incarnation of Toryism a run for its money in terms of odiousness), the move to Labour does not signal a raise in the consciousness or conscience of the nation. Labour’s vote share - and on a historically low turnout - was less than 2% higher than in 2019.

Their victory is no more than the defeat of the Conservative Party. And the Conservatives have been defeated in large part because many voters have deserted it for a party even more repugnant: Reform UK. The combined vote share of the Conservatives and Reform (38%) is bigger than Labour's 34%.

And yet in another way the result was about the best that could have been expected. The danger of a resounding victory for Labour was that all the shenanigans that we have had the misfortune of witnessing over the past few years - all the lying, purging and sabotage - would be rewarded, the mantra that elections can only be won from the “centre” officially vindicated, leaving us with no meaningful opposition to the racist, neoliberal right (i.e. back to business as usual). In this context it is some small consolation that Labour’s “loveless landslide” (as it has been aptly dubbed) was so lacklustre in every respect except - thanks to the vagaries of our electoral system - the number of seats. The number one reason given for voting Labour, according to polls, was “to get the Tories out”.

And in all the darkness, a few bright spots: four pro-Palestine independent candidates won seats from Labour. The infinitely oleaginous Wes Streeting very narrowly escaped losing his, scraping in by just over 500 votes against another pro-Palestine (and British-Palestinian) independent, Leanne Mohamad. Another independent, the Jewish anti-Zionist and veteran of Mandela’s ANC Andrew Feinstein came second with 19% of the vote in Starmer’s own constituency of Holborn and St Pancras, helping to cut his majority in half. And of course, there was Corbyn’s decisive win as an independent against a private healthcare nepo baby, Labour’s Praful Nargund.

There will be little mileage in trying to influence this Labour Party in a progressive direction. It is no good trying to appeal to the better nature of those who have none. It is instead a very good way to sink energy. Setting hearts on electoral reform may not be much more promising, if only because there is no very plausible mechanism by which it could be achieved (any party that wins a majority under first-past-the-post will not be eager to change that system). There is a place for direct action, as always - although the place it may land us, increasingly, is in court or jail (Starmer, of all people, is not about to reverse the criminalisation of protest). Other than that, little remains to us other than to try to look a bleak situation in the eye and to resist falling into one or another variety of comforting delusion.

Lorna Finlayson is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Essex. She writes regularly for publications including The London Review of Books and New Left Review. In June, THE LEFT LANE published an article titled “Can’t we do better than lesser-evilism?” derived from Lorna’s January 2024 piece for New Left Review.  

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If there are three other lessons to learn from 4 July, it is these:

1) There is A LOT more to progressive politics than running in elections.

2) The left can no longer rely on old “home truths” and our supposed wise leaders. Progress will be made as a result of considered collective action and serious political debate. Please jump in with your comments below.

3) Remember two sayings from the Chinese revolution: "let one hundred flowers bloom…” and “a single spark can start a prairie fire.”

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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber:  http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe

You can reach us at: theleftlanepolitics@gmail.com

You can read all previous columns of THE LEFT LANE here: