Democratic Green Socialist

Every generation experiences a General Election that stands out as a turning point in history, marking a qualitative shift in the politics of an era. The elections of 1945, 1964, 1979 and 1997 are all remembered as defining moments in British political history. The hung parliament of 2010 is another decisive Election which will go down in history as the moment that New Labour’s dominance in British politics came to an end. A theme of betrayal, of a generational opportunity for progressive social change lost, will be the lasting legacy of New Labour. The politics of betrayal was also evident in the way in which the New Labour elite conceded power to David Cameron earlier this week.

In the last editorial of the DGS, written only a week before the most important General Election in recent memory, the DGS said the following:

‘We must not forget that there is the real prospect of the Tories being returned to power, something no socialist or progressive would welcome. The natural party of the rich and the powerful, of the greedy and the selfish, would be a complete disaster for this country if they were returned to Government’.

Well now it’s happened. The Nasty Party are back. Sure, we can take some comfort in the fact that it didn’t happen in the way that Cameron would have wanted, namely winning an outright majority, before walking into Downing Street hailed as a hero by the British establishment and their cheerleaders in the corporate media.

Things have not gone to plan because the electorate did not play their part in the Tory script and deliver the Tories with a proper mandate for power. Cameron now finds himself bereft of an outright majority whilst having to share power with someone who surely qualifies as one of the most odious and disingenuous political figures to have emerged in British public life for quite some time.

The reason that Cameron did not win the election is because there are still enough people who remember the dark days of the 1980s and what the Tories did to this country.

Yet, less than a year ago self-styled political experts appeared on television every night predicting a Tory victory and a consequent Labour wipe out. That it didn’t happen says more about the values of the majority of the people’s of the constituent countries of the UK than it does anything about the modern Labour Party.

That there could have been a progressive consensus in the House of Commons had only the progressives sought to work together represents a betrayal of the worst kind. Instead of trying to lead that consensus, the apparatchiks in New Labour chose to throw in the towel and stick the knife into the Labour leader by repudiating his offer to the Lib-Dems to offer immediate introduction of the Alternative Vote system with a full referendum on proportional representation.

In so doing, they abandoned the centre left majority in this country at a time when we needed them most. It seems that there are some in the Labour Party who think that working with Scottish and Welsh nationalists is a far worse prospect than subjecting Britain to a Tory Government.

That Labour is capable of such a betrayal comes to no surprise to the Democratic Green Socialist, because ‘betrayal’ is the word that best sums up the last 13 years of Labour in office.

In 1997, Tony Blair built a progressive consensus which had the potential to reverse the tide of Thatcherism. Instead both he and Gordon Brown wasted their huge majorities in betraying one Labour principle after another. And now here we are thirteen years later with the real Tories back in power again. It’s enough to make you weep.

But perhaps the chance of building a progressive consensus or rainbow coalition was always going to be a chimera because it was always dependent on those strange political creatures known as the Liberal Democrats playing ball.

Who exactly are the Liberal Democrats, are they left, right or centre? The truth of the matter is they will be anything you want them to be so long as they get power. The hypocritical Nick Clegg has revealed himself to be what this magazine always thought he was, namely a closet Tory.

His deal with the Devil will ensure that his party is severely punished the next time they face an electorate whom they have betrayed. This punishment will be all the worst in Scotland where the Lib Dem’s have tried to pose as a left leaning alternative to Labour.

And this leads us to the question of Scotland; neither David Cameron nor Nick Clegg possesses a democratic mandate from the Scottish people.

This means that the question of Scottish independence is now firmly back on the political agenda. It’s not a question of internationalism versus nationalism, as it is crudely framed by some on the hard left who have never really understood the issue, but a question of democracy. It cannot be just that a right wing party with only one MP in Scotland has the right to rule over a small nation whose political compass has been social democratic since the mid 1950’s, and – on an issues basis at least – left leaning social democratic since the eighties. The nation that led the charge against Thatcher’s Poll Tax is unlikely to mutely submit to semi-colonial rule from London by a party it has decisively rejected for two generations, particularly one propped up by quislings who – on the Scottish hustings at least – portrayed themselves as a centre progressive anti-Tory vote.

Once again the question of Scottish autonomy and what academics call ‘the democratic deficit’ will come to the fore. Whether this means devolving more power to the Scottish Parliament in the short to medium term, or outright independence, remains to be seen, but at the very least Scottish constitutional reform must be discussed. With the Tories back in power the status quo cannot be an option for genuine progressives.

Then there is the question of the left outside of Labour. As anticipated it was not a good night. George Galloway, the man many consider to be the leader of the anti-war movement, lost his seat in perhaps the left’s most disappointing result of the election. Galloway’s vote was always going to be squeezed, but rightly or wrongly he has always been regarded as a single issue campaigner, only now the war is no longer the issue it once was.

It is also regrettable that Salma Yaqoob did not get elected. Yaqoob is one of the few leftists of the post 9/11 generation to have emerged as a serious political contender, and no one could dispute that she would have been a breath of fresh air in the murky corridors of power in Westminster.

Meanwhile in Scotland, theTrade Unionist and Socialist Coalition and the SSP stood on a hard left ticket – and despite some good honest campaigning around the question of the looming cuts in public services – found that even that limited vote was squeezed almost to non-existence by a desire, however misplaced and manufactured, to vote Labour to keep the Tories out. Between them they registered less than a twentieth of the vote the united SSP received on the second ballot in the Holyrood elections of 2003. The Greens in Scotland fared marginally better, but then they had some UK media wind behind them from Caroline Lucas’s campaign in Brighton.

We should, of course, congratulate Labour’s Margaret Hodge and her team for taking the air out of BNP windbag Nick Griffin, and for the defeat of all 12 BNP councillors in Barking, but in terms of positive results for the left on May 6th the only consolation was the Green’s Caroline Lucas getting elected.

Lucas has emerged as a serious force on the progressive left and there is much that socialists can learn from the refreshing way that Lucas presents traditional left goals in a way that is accessible to a modern and heterogeneous electorate. Speaking during the election campaign, Caroline Lucas stood out from the crowd by making the connection between the need for urgent action on the environment and the economic programme of the radical left. She was in no way ashamed to be described as a socialist and would seem to share much common ground with many supporters of this magazine.

In Scotland, the SSP and Solidarity are in danger of becoming permanent fringe parties. It’s hard to believe that in the 2001 general election a united Scottish left won over 70 thousand votes standing in every single seat. But that was at the flood tide of trying to build a new and genuinely broad socialist party in Scotland. In 2010, the disparate forces of the post – split left could only muster standing in twenty seats walking away with a tiny three thousand votes each.

The Scottish left has become like a football team that gets gubbed five nil every week yet never once considers changing tactics. Perhaps its time we learned how to play the game differently, or at least entertained a discussion about changing strategy. Maybe we need fresh ideas from our management team, or better still some new players, who are younger, more dynamic and not weighed down by the baggage of recent years. Then again, if wishes were fishes…

Nevertheless, the truth of the matter cannot be escaped. Support for the Scottish left has shrunk to a dedicated but electorally insignificant hardcore. Some have suggested that the way forward for the left as a whole, in Scotland and the rest of the UK, is now to immerse itself in building a genuinely broad campaign against the forthcoming public sector cuts (see Steve Arnott and John Wight’s article in this issue of the DGS, for instance). We agree. But that doesn’t mean to say we shouldn’t have a new and open sky discussion about our electoral approach.

We need to engage in some hard thinking about ourselves, but it is something we always seem to find difficult. The left often seeks to blame its fortunes on ‘external factors’ such as the ‘squeeze’, or the ‘lack of consciousness’, or any other of the ‘objective conditions’. Whilst there are big degrees of truth in this analysis, it must also be said that such an approach conveniently prevents the left from taking a long hard look at itself in the mirror.

Socialists are not the only ones refusing to confront reality, however. Much as the capitalist class might desire it, the ‘Greek contagion’ will not simply dissipate through borrowing another £650 billion from the international financiers – effectively another bailout which will have to be paid for down the line by even deeper austerity. We are now entering a new phase in politics which will be characterised by social turmoil. If the public school boys who now run this country get their way ordinary people will be forced to pay for a crisis they did not cause.

The dual challenge is to organise resistance to those cuts and to unite the progressive majority that exists in defence of the public sector while learning to present to the electorate, in both image and in substance, a prospectus that goes beyond the old hard left core and once again appeals to that bigger milieu that was attracted to the SSP in Scotland at its height.

As a first step, we need to build on the small informal understandings that meant the left at least didn’t stand against one another in most Scottish seats. Secondly, we need to find ways of putting aside differences arising from past events that are of interest to no one but ourselves (and perhaps some sworn enemies of progressive politics). At the very least we need to recognise that in the coming social and political storm such sideshows will be irrelevant to the wider working class, and continue to be electorally toxic to all of the left.

The alternative may be years in the wilderness precisely when working class people in Scotland need the ideas of socialism the most.

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