This week in Brexitland, November 30, 2023
There is one reason above all others that the left keeps losing elections. It’s an alarmingly simple reason, actually
If you want to tell the simplest story about 21st century politics so far, it’s that the right has gone further to the right and yet managed to generally win elections, while the left has gone further to the left and usually lost elections. Obviously, this doesn’t hold up everywhere in every election, but it seems like the general pattern.
Some might conclude that hard right politics has some sort of intrinsic appeal, while hard left politics doesn’t hold the same attraction for voters. This is, in fact, the thesis that is either tacitly or explicitly peddled by a lot of right-wing hacks at present. But I don’t think this is the case. I think it’s much more basic than that. The right and left have developed different ways of political campaigning over the last 25 years and the right’s way of doing it is brilliant, while the left’s way of doing it is diabolically bad.
Although the technical details about how each side of the political spectrum campaigns are important to this story, it mostly comes down to something much more simple than that. It’s about defining your approach to political campaigning in the first place, starting with what you want to achieve with it. For the right, they want to turn out as much of their core vote as possible while convincing enough swing voters to bet on them. So, the idea of political campaigning from a 21st century right-wing perspective is to get as many new people to vote for you as you can without alienating too many of the people who are on your side already. It’s essentially about getting as many people to vote for you as you can, to put it in an even simpler way.
Hold on, you say, isn’t that what the left does too, try and get as many people to vote for them? Isn’t that what every political party does? No, strangely enough.
The left looks at campaigning in a totally different way than the right looks at it. To the left, political campaigning is about shouting your position as loudly and as boldly as possible. Getting in people’s faces. It’s not about trying to convert anyone to your cause; if people disagree with your side, they must be evil and past redemption. They focus instead on energising their “progressive base”, which they have convinced themselves is the majority of their respective country, even after that has been debunked as a concept election after election, referendum after referendum.
There are two current examples of this to draw upon: Just Stop Oil/Extinction Rebellion and the pro-Palestinian marches.
The green protest groups seem to have a goal of making climate change a more salient and politically important issue. Yet the tactics they employ achieve the opposite of that. Sabotaging sporting events, blocking roads so people can’t get to work, vandalising works of art - these seem almost designed to do the opposite of what you’d think those advocating for climate change to be taken seriously would want. It communicates that climate change should be an issue only for upper-middle class liberals with too much free time on their hands. It does not seek to inform about the subject of climate change, nor attempt to reach anyone on the fence nor further, to try and convert anyone who might currently be a climate change denier. In fact, these campaigning tactics probably convert more people into climate change deniers than anything else.
The pro-Palestinian marches are done in a remarkably similar style. Shout about “genocide” and “apartheid” and to anyone who questions anything about anything you’re saying, just call them a fascist. These campaigning tactics are pushing a lot of people to the right, and certainly further and further away from the Palestinian cause. There just seems to be no thought whatsoever put into convincing anyone who isn’t on side already. In fact, like with the campaigning tactics of the environmental groups, the methods employed are pushing more and more people who might give it a friendly ear away from the pro-Palestinian cause.
Before you say, “What about Starmer and Labour being 20 points ahead in the polls?”, that’s the exception that proves the rule. Starmer and company have set out, almost from the start, to campaign like Tories, with the focus being on allying fears people might have about Labour while at the same time, targeting swing voters with their messaging and general campaigning. This has led many on the left to complain about Starmer and call him a Tory. And I get it. “Why is Starmer not standing in the road shouting like a maniac at people? Why isn’t he blocking traffic with a large banner? Why isn’t he calling anyone who disagrees with him slightly a “supporter of genocide”? He must be a Tory!” It’s become so engrained on the left that in order to truly be of the left, you must campaign in a wholly destructive manner, no one can see past it.
It’s a shame that left-wing campaigners cannot learn the lessons of many, many years of failure. Particularly on issues with which I agree with them, such as climate change. It would be nice if there could be campaigns designed to try and convince people not currently in their tent to enter it, instead of annoying people by blocking the roads, shouting abuse at passersby and destroying works of art. Campaigning is the art of persuasion, folks. The left need to learn that.
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What NT writes here is right, but I don' think that it's the whole story. Go into any supermarket and what will you see? Ranks of Mails/Suns/Expresses with simplistic headlines which every passer-by reads, even when the majority don't take the paper. Listen to the BBC and what you hear is a kind of default conservatism - it's not that all BBC presenters are raving Tories, but that there's a subliminal assumption that the Tories are the natural party of government, that the hierarchical nature of British (particularly English) society, from the royals downwards is the natural order of things and that to argue for change is rather like being the dodgy drunken uncle at a wedding which I think NT used as an image a post or two ago. I mean, in what other country is "you're being political" a put-down? I recall fondly the Brexit voter who said that he was voting Leave because the EU was "political". It's a brilliant piece of leger-de-main which the establishment in this country has used to keep everything going for their benefit since... well since 1066 maybe...
Nick has a point about protest movements on the left and you can include the dreadful and failed Corbyn within that student politics, but not Starmer, Milliband, Brown or Blair. In fact Starmer is doing the Blair playbook so accurately and with such closely comparable results so far, that it is spooky.
Blair was so appealing to the public in leadership and moderate centrist in policy that at the time you thought that Labour would never drop this new broad consensus and return to failing with Michael Foot or even the fraught wranglings of a Wilson. But like the Tories, First Past the Post makes Labour a very broad church and the mid left and hard left are always there, attempting to capture the party for their faction. So when Milliband foolishly allowed £3 new members to immediately vote for a leadership candidate, Corbynites put the membership form on his website and every ex trotskyist, communist and Clause 4 supporter came out of the woodwork and swamped the existing membership.
Corbyn was unable to debate, do interviews properly, engage with his party, maintain niceties toward Jewish people, or to have a clue about policy and his speeches were all virtually identical. Reading out emails in PMQs and losing against a unique open goal in 2017 against the non campaigning Mrs May with unpopular inheritance tax and social care policies, did not stop Labour giving Corbyn another chance to fail bigger in 2019. While Corbyn was policy free, he attracted a classic old Stalinist fave, to take over the commanding heights of the economy, probably, or at least in stages. The unelectable government in waiting were to be putting up Corporation Tax, which was fair enough. But that was not enough. They were to nationalise 10% of company profits on top, with most going to the government and some crumbs for the union/workforce. Even this was not enough. Would they put a worker representative on the board? Although controversial as a compulsory idea, this may be not a bad idea in the company's real long term interests you might say? But no, this was far too sensible. They would make it compulsory to have 1/3 of company boards as workers without management roles. One wonders what they would all talk about on board meetings? Football, holidays, or what's been on the telly possibly? How long would it have been before the worker director numbers were expanded to becoming a majority, with affiliated Union "leadership" ? Otherwise what would have been the point of them?
No amount of electoral success by Starmer will prevent Labour's hard left from attacking him more viciously than the Tories and repeating their failed Foot/Corbyn playbooks. But when Blair took over in '97, we had an expanding economy and a charismatic leader, with public services less run down and borrowing and taxation at lower levels than today. The public are highly dissatisfied and volatile. A big Starmer win will not ensure long enough terms to give him even a chance to turn this mess around and he's ruled out joining the Single Market or even the easy one. That would be joining the Customs Union and dumping those dodgy trade deals due to wipe out domestic food production outside of organic and niches. It would happen. Subsidy has been largely ended, many farmers are working at or below cost now and many are near retirement age. They could never compete with hormone injected cattle feed lots or giant herds of semi wild livestock in the Australian outback. We could import 80% of our food as before WW1, boost all the air miles and grant more planning agreements to golf courses, with 80 odd applications in Essex alone.
Has economic growth in western Europe largely ended in our fast ageing societies? Can Starmer turn around this galloping catastrophe sufficiently to cling to office and continue the work in 2028-9? Or will the right wing press and whatever comes after out of the net and AI, work it's evil magic on the British public and they surge towards the next populist chancer wielding a chainsaw or pint of fizzy bitter? God help us.
Give us PR voting and the worst of this nasty right wing politics as expressed through the Tory party majoritarianism will no longer be able to govern, at least not normally without moderating coalitions.