Surely we can do better than this.
This is the closest General Election race since 1992 and it could go either way. 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 all the countries of the UK if they were returned to Government.
Yet we should also remember that whoever wins the election the result will be an unprecedented attack on the living standards of ordinary people not seen in a generation.
When it comes to cuts all three parties are united in the view that the public sector will pay for a crisis caused by rich bankers.
Knowing this to be the case there was something slightly sinister about the so-called ‘leadership’ debate on our television screens the other evening.
Whilst the media seem to be getting excited about Clegg, the DGS is of the view that he was as bland and uninspiring as Cameron and Brown. In local Government Clegg’s party have been all too happy to vote for cuts in essential public services. Make no mistake about it the Lib Dems are no friends of working people.
The truth of the matter is that people are only talking about Clegg, a career politician by nature, because dislike of the other two parties runs very deep in British society.
Self styled ‘political experts’ appear in the media to say that today politics is driven by ‘personality. Politics is reduced to sound-bites, gimmicks and opinion polls.
The way that politics is reported ignores the real issues and turns politics into a competitive sport. ‘Who won the debate’ becomes more important than the debate itself. But even this is an inaccurate question to ask because judging by last week’s ‘leadership’ performances there is no debate.
There is a dangerous side to the politics of personality that we should not ignore. If the Chilcot Enquiry into the Iraq War has taught us anything, it is the danger of what can happen when one ‘personality’ ends up with too much power.
This country was led into a war that many consider to be illegal because a deluded religious figure with a messianic certainty of what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ believed it was the ‘right thing to do’.
Blair liked to talk about a ‘sofa Government’. In reality he ran New Labour like it was a hard-line Leninist front.
The bitter cynicism that exists in Britain today is a product of the Blair years; Blair more than any other figure is responsible for the destruction of social democracy, the natural political home of most people on this island.
The abandonment of social democracy has left a gaping wound in the body politic and allowed official politics, of the kind we get spoon fed to us by the media, to be hijacked by the marketing men, the media pundits and the pollsters, the modern day equivalent of astrologers.
Most people look the other way. The only ‘ism’ that appears to have triumphed is ‘cynicism’. This is Labour’s fault. Thirteen years ago they came to power promising New Labour, New Britain. Instead we got the same old Tory policies window dressed in progressive jargon.
‘Modernisation’, the mantra of the Blairites, was in reality a code name for being more Tory than the Tories. The ‘modernisers’ waged illegal wars like 19th century colonialists, and continued unabated with Thatcher’s agenda of privatisation and attacks on the welfare state. They pursued with a vengeance an anti-civil liberties agenda, and shored up hostility to refugees and asylum seekers, so much so that is has given racist thugs the confidence to march on Britain’s streets for the first time in a generation.
At the core of the ‘modernisers’ agenda was an abandonment of the politics of ‘class’. Sure the social composition of the working class has been transformed, but working people are still there and for too long now Labour has taken them for granted.
Labour has done nothing for the poor elderly living in council estates, or for the low paid, or the unemployed, or for the homeless. They have done nothing because most of these groups tend to have the misfortune of living in ‘safe seats’. If you live in a safe seat you can be safely ignored, so long as you remember to return the Labour candidate on Election Day.
The seats that really matter to Labour are the marginals. The people who live here, the so called ‘swing voters’ – shallow types whose only interest is ‘what’s in it for me’ – have the power to decide which grey man walks through the doors of Number 10 after the votes have been cast.
The working class in the safe seats tend to look the other way. Sure many of them can still be relied upon to vote Labour but they do so with gritted teeth or out of a sense of duty. They do so because the Tories are worse. Many will not even vote. Before 1987, working class people were just as likely to vote as the middle class. Not anymore. Two decades of Labour drifting to the right has resulted in widespread disengagement from the political system.
Surely we can do better than this?
Engaging with the people who feel let down by the mainstream, who intuitively reject the banality and conformity of the three parties should be the task of all socialists and progressives.
It is must become more than a matter of regret that in Scotland and in the other countries that currently make up the UK, there is no nation-wide left alternative to New Labour.
Across the UK there is a multitude of left parties standing in this election-Respect, the Greens, the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalitions, Socialist Labour, the Scottish Socialists, Solidarity and so on. We hope they all do well, and in particular our colleagues who have a fighting chance of winning, Salma Yaqoob and George Galloway for RESPECT and Caroline Lucas for the Greens.
Every left candidate in this election is giving people an opportunity to protest at the corrupt three party, single ideology, state we currently live in.
On election night they will show up on our television screens as the ‘others’. But who are they ‘others’? Scratch beneath the surface and you will realise that they are talking about the types of issues we used to associate with Labour. They are flying the flags that no one else dares to fly in the mainstream, the flags of socialism and social democracy.
These are the candidates that believe in public ownership, redistribution of wealth through progressive taxation, in health and education free and comprehensive for all at the point of need, who are anti-war, and who know that spending £100 billion on Trident whilst at the time slashing funds to the public sector is both immoral and wrong. There is a big constituency for these ideas. The historical task is for the ‘others’ to speak with one voice. There is simply no other alternative, unless we get used to the idea that Brown, Cameron, and the other one who seems to be popular at the moment, are the best our democracy can do.