By Gary Fraser
The view of a British election from a Scottish perspective does not look good. Most people on the Scottish left seem to be indifferent about this election, although deep down we all hope it’s not the Tories. Nothing could be worse than David Cameron’s sanctimonious face standing on the doorsteps could it? Nothing could be worse than the party of the rich who represent greed, selfishness and privilege, who do not understand, or even care about the needs of ordinary people, returning to power.
Yet as dreadful as the Tories may be, Labour hardly stirs up feelings of hope either.It’s hard to forget these last 13 years. The lesser of two evils argument is starting to wear a bit thin because at the end of the day a lesser evil is still evil. This means the left will stand, indeed should stand, and allow the flag (or flags) to fly providing people with the opportunity to protest against the most right wing Labour Government in history. And rightly so. Yet no one is expecting anything out of the ordinary from the Scottish left and all of the recent electoral evidence leads to the inescapable conclusion that the left vote has shrunk to an insignificant hardcore.
It’s hard to believe that only a few years ago a united Scottish left started to make serious in-roads into the mainstream of Scottish politics, and at the same time was being held up as an example of what a credible left would look like to our friends and colleagues south of the border. The Scottish left had come in from the cold. Then we blew it. But that was then and this is now. Today we are back out in the cold, and if we are honest enough to admit it, if we don’t get our act together soon, we are in danger of freezing to death.
But I’m straying from the purpose of this article. This article is about the need for hope, the need to catch a glimpse of something that offers a promise for the future. It has to be said that there is not much hope around in this election. But there is one exception that stands out. Her name is Salma Yaqoob.
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Salma Yaqoob has been a well known figure on the left for some time now, notably for her work in the Stop the War Coalition and in the political party RESPECT. In 2006, she was elected as a city councillor in Birmingham and has slowly been making a name for herself. Her recent appearance on BBC’s Question Time marked her entry onto the national political stage. |
Yaqoob faced a tough Question Time, perhaps the toughest Question Time anyone on the left has faced in living memory. The venue was Wootton Bassett, the small English town whose local community pay tribute to fallen soldiers being repatriated from Afghanistan The panel, one of the most biased in Question Times history, featured 5 pro-war candidates, and many suspected the audience would also be very pro-war.
Salma Yaqoob was a lone voice on the panel, perhaps stitched up by the BBC to be seen as the ‘outsider’. But within minutes her lone voice became the voice of all those who have believed that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are morally wrong. That night Yaqoob spoke on behalf of everyone who said in 2003, ‘Not in our name’. It didn’t take long for this remarkable woman to win majority of the audience round to her cause.
But forget Question Time, Yaqoob has been at the centre of left politics for almost a decade. Politicised after 9/11, she is one of the few of this generation of activists to have emerged as a serious political figure.
Highly intelligent and always articulate, Yaqoob is getting her message across and if the recent polling evidence in Birmingham is correct, people are listening and starting to take note. That Yaqoob has a chance of victory (now there’s a word you don’t hear much of on the left these days) is in no small part due to the fact that she finds the balance between being pragmatic without losing sight of principles, and sounding radical whilst avoiding the fatal trap of ultra-leftism. She gets it right every time. It may sound simple, or even shallow, but it takes skill to do this, and it requires an intuitive grasp of the challenges that face progressives today.
Yaqoob is at the heart of trying to build a credible alternative to Labour. That project involves trying to create a party that can take on the mantle of the crown of being the party of the vast majority of people in this country; a party of the poor and the aspiring working classes, a party of the middle classes, of small business owners and of public sector workers, a party of Muslim and non-Muslim, young and old, black and white. In short, the type of party that Labour used to be.
If such a party is to emerge it will be done through sheer hard work alone, of the kind Salma Yaqoob does day in day out in her role as a city councillor.
Her critics on the left, and it has to be said that these are usually people on the hard left, accuse Yaqoob of being a single issue campaigner, or a ‘reformist’, or someone without the support from the mainstream working class. Disgracefully there are even those who raise the issue of her identity as a Muslim.
But these hardliners ignore the inroads that Yaqoob is making. In a recent article she says her ‘political stance is for social justice, whatever form that takes, whether it’s about local, national or international issues’. She adds, ‘that involves getting to the roots of questions. Why have we got inequality? Why have we got lack of peace? Just saying that we don’t want war is not enough’.
She goes on to challenge the current state of political debate, ‘we have a consensus, for example, that we have to have cuts in public spending. It’s not the public sector that caused the crisis. It was the neo-liberal capitalist model out of control…there is an urgent need for a radical left wing party that can help shift the political consensus towards an agenda of peace, anti-racism and social justice.’
How very true. If Yaqoob becomes an MP then the prospects for everyone on the left becomes that little bit better. For those of us in Scotland it means a slight rise in temperature, and who knows it might even encourage us to dream again. Salma Yaqoob, MP. It has a nice ring to it. Let’s hope it becomes a reality.