2020: The year that things fell apart

For the last five years politics has been many things, but it has rarely been dull. Despite the rollercoaster of unexpected twists, turns and sudden jolts of the last five years, I didn’t expect 2020 to be such an extraordinary year. Words like “extraordinary” “unprecedented” and “challenging” have been so overused in the last 12 months that they have ceased to have any meaning, but that is because this has been an “extraordinary” year and it’s worth taking a moment to reflect on all the unbelievable things (most of them bad) that have happened. 

At the start of the year, when Jeremy Corbyn was still Labour leader and Britain was still in the EU, almost no one had predicted the impact that the novel coronavirus, aka Covid-19, would have on the world. However, from mid-March onwards people worldwide have been subjected to lockdowns, event cancellations, periods of isolation, travel bans and endless discourse about the R-rate. In some countries the health service has been driven almost to the point of collapse and several times this year it looked touch and go for our beloved NHS.

Covid-19’s impact has been such that it has divided politics into the old, pre-pandemic politics and the new pandemic politics. Years of slow, anemic growth since the 2000’s great recession was brought to an end this year, when the UK experienced its sharpest economic contraction ever. Last year I pointed out that we were overdue a recession and that the “impact of a second recession after years of anemic growth could be devastating.” At the time I didn’t know how much of an understatement this was. Even if the UK can roll out a Covid-19 vaccine next year, we’re likely to be looking at many years of a painful, slow recovery.

Covid-19 made everything worse

In many ways Covid-19 has changed everything. Rishi Sunak, a fiscally conservative Chancellor, has embraced massive borrowing and massive government intervention into the economy to keep Britain on life support, in the hope of making it through the pandemic. For this he briefly enjoyed immense popularity, but now the old politics of austerity and large public debts is rearing its head again, and Sunak’s commitment to balanced budgets during a time of economic hardship and health uncertainty has caused his start to wane.

Covid-19 has rubbed salt into the wounds of this country’s already battered social fabric. Inequality has become worse during the lockdown, as has child poverty, housing uncertainty and almost everything that can be made worse by the combination of a health crisis and an economic recession has been made worse. There’s even talk of a “K shaped recovery” where certain regions or sectors of the economy rapidly bounce back and others do not.

There is almost nothing that is bad about Britain that Covid-19 hasn't made worse, from the brunt of the pandemic being born by overstretched health workers, to people on zero hour contracts working in manual labour or in the care profession being the ones most likely to get sick, to the fact that Covid-19 has become the subject of misinformation and culture wars.

Spreading the virus and spreading misinformation

People like Laurence Fox - a perpetual attention seeker, stirrer of internet outrage and spreader of dangerous ideas about the severity of the virus - who would have been considered too crude to be shock-jocks in the past have become household names by railing against the common sense precautions of staying home and wearing a mask during a pandemic.

The fact that sane, rational people - people who don’t see signs of a conspiracy behind every health briefing - don’t have any effective counter-arguments to use against the people who have the deadly combination of not much knowledge about the virus, but loud views about how we should handle it, and that social media platforms spread disinformation with wild abandon, is an indictment of the human race’s ability to communicate in the age of unlimited communication.

New depths of incompetence

The virus has thrown a wrecking ball at the already crumbling facade of British society and any government - especially one only a few months into its term of office - would have struggled with this challenge, but Boris Johnson’s Tory government has managed to plunge new depth of indecision, incompetence and corruption, that even the last four years of continuous political disaster didn’t lead us to expect.

Each month has brought along what would have once been a regime ending fuck up. From not locking down quickly enough, to unlocking too soon, to failing to deliver a test and trace system despite spending billions on it, to not providing enough PPE for health workers and then, of course, the government saying we would unlock for Christmas and then canceling Christmas at that last minute.

On top of all that, there was Dominic Cummings shredding the little remaining credibility the government had with his misadventure to Barnard Castle over the summer. I’m sure I have forgotten some other titanic disasters, which appeared to be career ending at the time, but have since been forgotten. This year no one was held accountable, made to resign or even look publicly ashamed in the never-ending parade of screw ups that the government presided over.

Forensic opposition

This seemingly endless carnival of mishandlings, including the UK having the highest number of excess deaths in Europe, has not led to a dramatic change in the polls. The Labour Party, despite offering “forensic opposition”, has not been able to exploit the government’s serial failings or present itself as a credible alternative government. During the summer they ceded the position of official opposition to Marcus Rashford, the country’s only successful political operator, who managed to get some food to hungry children, whilst everything fell apart.

Labour’s inability to make a breakthrough happened despite repeated government failures, a new Labour leader and a new style of constructive opposition. The Tories won 44% of the vote in last year's general election and at the end of a disastrous year they are polling at around 40%, which is nothing short of a disgraceful performance from the Labour leader. Surely, any other Labour leader would be 20 points ahead when faced with the worst government ever.

Trump and Biden

The left managed to perform a little better in America this year, which offers some hope. The year began with the Democrats’ failure to impeach Donald Trump, before Covid-19 swept through the country and changed everything. Trump’s re-election campaign was set against the backdrop of rising Covid-19 fatalities and his indulgence of his own worst instinct to sow confusion, spread misinformation and fuel culture wars at a time when his country needed clear leadership.

America managed a spectacularly disastrous response to the pandemic, which made the British government look almost competent. Joe Biden and the Democrats were able to eke out an electoral victory and the world breathed a sigh of relief that by mid-January, we could at least be reassured that the end of the world wouldn’t be brought about someone saying means things to the President of the United States on Twitter.

By choosing Biden, the Democrats rejected the chance of offering a radical alternative to Trump's nationalism early on in the year and decided to run on the platform of a return to normality. In a year where everything fell apart, I can see why this appealed to many voters. However, Biden won some key states by only a percentage point or two, the Democrats lost seats in the House and the Senate remained in Republican control.

Not a repudiation of Trumpism

This wasn’t the repudiation of Trumpism that the world wanted. Despite the virus killing hundreds of thousands of Americans, the economic ruin it produced, riots on the street and his obvious unsuitability for the job of President, Trump still managed to win over 74 million votes and many believe the lies Trump is spreading about the election being stolen from him.

Even if Trump leaves The White House peacefully in January - which is still undecided - Trumpism will continue under Trump or another leader. The left doesn't have a counter narrative to halt the spread of Trump’s violent nationalism, which even won over a reasonable amount of minority voters in the November election. The US election doesn't offer any help in resolving the left’s ongoing post-2008 identity crisis.

Brexit rumbles on

The UK is ending the year with the possibility that Brexit will be over, now that Johnson has negotiated a trade deal with the EU. The usual Brexit intransigence over issues of sovereignty and fishing led us to yet another cliff edge, which once again we were only saved from at the last minute. Brexit is still a bad idea and there is still no way of stopping the slow roll towards belligerent nationalism that David Cameron began over five years ago.

Despite the many failures of Brexit, those opposed to it have consistently failed to present an argument that offers an alternative that voters actually want. This year saw hardcore Labour Remainers abandon their crusade against Brexit and finally declare that it is a losing issue for Labour. The country is still split along Brexit lines and nothing has managed to heal this divide and bring either the left or the country together. Not even the fight against Covid-19.

Now certain sections of the right are planning the next round of divisive, culture war politics by starting a campaign for a referendum on the reintroduction of the death penalty. Apparently, the country isn’t divided enough, angry enough and we aren’t directing enough spite at each other for the professional outrage merchants of the right. We have the resurfacing of this issue to look forward to.

The Labour Party

This lack of clear direction of progress for the left can be most clearly seen in the Labour Party. Keir Starmer won this year’s Labour leadership election by a huge margin, but has had little success against this monstrously incompetent Tory government. There is no uniting line of attack or narrative. Labour is not a party of economic populism, or pragmatic centrism, or liberalism, or social democracy, or socialism.

The Tories are still polling at around 40%, despite everything. Most voters don't blame the Tories for the virus or its effects. They see other countries with large numbers of cases and struggling health systems, and don't see how the situation is worse in the UK. This is a failure of the opposition to articulate a narrative about the government mishandling the outbreak of Covid-19.

On the 27th of February this year, it was the 120th anniversary of the founding of the Labour Party. A sobering thought is that Labour has been in power for only 32 of those 120 years and currently the party looks a long way off winning power. Labour won’t win an election if one happens next year. The party still has no way to bridge the divide between Bolsover and Bethnal Green. Labour are also struggling in Scotland and have no hope of forming a majority government without winning back a significant volume of seats north of the border.

Why isn’t the left doing better?

What story could unite the country? A vision of economic radicalism? Patriotic left economic populism? Biden style return to normality? I don’t know, but Labour (and the left more broadly) need to decide the story we want to tell, if we want to start winning again. As this year has shown, saying “we’re not the Tories'' isn't enough. The Tories are handling everything terribly, yet this hasn’t led to a huge swing towards Labour. Labour needs a story to tell to win voters over.

After a year of disasters for right-wing governments worldwide, why isn’t the left doing any better? We are still adapting to the post-2008 crisis world, let alone figuring out where we need to be for the post-Covid-19 world. A new Labour leader and the US election didn’t answer the question of what does a vote for a left-wing party mean in the 21st century?

What story are we telling that voters can believe in? What does our movement stand for? What will we change when in power?  These are the questions we urgently need answers to as the world needs a left alternative to the status quo quickly.

New challenges for 2021

The environment is getting worse. This year started with bushfires in Australia that showed the danger we face from the looming environmental disaster. The Tories have committed to a program of environmental policies, which doesn’t go far enough and has opened up a new front of the culture war. Nigel Farage, Laurence Fox and a host of other far-right personalities are ready to make resistance to environmentalism a right-wing populist issue. We can see how this will play out with the battles that are already happening over cycle lanes in Kensington and Chelsea. The left needs to be ready for this fight.

Next year offers a series of challenges to the left. There will be Holyrood elections and the SNP are likely to win by a lot, which will put the issue of Scottish Independence back on the agenda in a big way. This offers problems for Labour whose position on Independence is at odds with the views of many of their target voters. Labour needs an effective story to tell in Scotland, quickly.

Labour will also need to make sure that the vaccine is rolled out fairly and effectively. I’m confident that the government will find a way to screw that up as well.

The roaring 20s

Then what? People are talking about another “roaring 20s”, of hedonism and indulgence after the vaccine is rolled out. However, we all remember how the last roaring 20s ended up: with economic collapse and the rise of fascism.

The future contains some huge challenges for the left, from the environment, to threats to the union, to far-right nationalism. The left hasn’t been able to use Covid-19 and the failure of right-wing governments to win popularity this year. We need to think about why this is, what we want differently in the future and what story we want to tell to win over voters. And we need to do this quickly.

How well is Starmer doing as Labour leader?

As we prepare to say goodbye to the god-awful year that has been 2020, we pause for a moment to take stock in all the ways this year has been less than we hoped. Keir Starmer became Labour leader this year and although recent polls show a slight overall preference for Labour (40% vs 37% for the Tories) I had expected Labour to be further ahead at the end of a year when the economy crashed and the government mishandled a serious disease outbreak.

There’s also the fact that we were assured numerous times during Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership that any other leader would be 20 points ahead and that Starmer in particular was the man to lead Labour to the sunlit uplands of a 1997 style majority.

Policy commitments

Anyway, Starmer is the leader now, for better or worse, so how well is he doing? Well, many (if not everyone) who consider themselves to be a Labour socialists or on the left of the Labour Party are not happy with Starmer's leadership. From abstaining on the Spy Cops bill to suspending Corbyn, Labour socialists have been provided with many reasons to be narked.

This annoyance with Starmer goes deeper than specific issues, even hot button issues such as the Spy Cops bill or Corybn’s response to the EHRC report. Many Labour socialists, myself included, say that what we want from the Labour Party are left-wing policies, i.e. commitments to actually doing things to improve the country. Many also claim that it is Starmer’s lack of commitment to Corbyn’s (largely popular) policy platform that is the source of their anger with him.

A typical example is Shadow Chancellor Anneliese Dodds saying that Labour has ruled out a commitment to Universal Basic Income (UBI) in the next Labour manifesto. This didn’t go down well on my Twitter timeline (storm in a teacup, perhaps) and was seen as further evidence of the lack of left-wing policy from this opposition.

The five week wait

Looking beyond the headlines, Starmer’s Labour Party is still committed to many solid left-wing policies. These include reforming Universal Credit (UC), taxing the top 5% of earners and the Green Recovery (aka the Green New Deal).

Yes, Labour have announced that they will not seek to implement UBI in power, but they will instead change the amount of time that a new UC claimant has to wait for their first payment, which is currently five weeks. Dodds said: “People waiting five weeks for social security doesn’t make sense.”

The five week wait for UC causes immense suffering for the poorest people in society. If you need welfare, being made to wait five weeks for it drives people to destitution and homelessness. Changing or scrapping the five week wait is desperately needed.

The vibe of politics

Many Labour socialists who don’t like Starmer have argued that he will go back on this and his other policy commitments before the next general election, offering more centrist policies instead. This might be the case, but for now there is a raft of left-wing policy that Labour is committed too, from climate change to housing.

Can Labour socialists who are angry at Starmer see the future? Maybe, and you rarely lose money betting that the Labour Party will disappoint you. However, from where I stand, there is every chance that Starmer will offer a policy platform in the next general election that is to the left of the one Ed Miliband offered in 2015. So why are all the policy loving Labour socialists so disappointed in Starmer?

Stephen Bush, the political editor of the New Statesman, has said many times your impression of a politician is mainly about the vibe that is given off and not about specific policies or statements. He has also said that left-wing Labour members’ dissatisfaction with Starmer is because they don’t like his vibe. I think Bush is right. I must admit that I don’t like the Starmer vibe either. I don’t like how he talks about respect for the troops or the police like he’s ticking off the Daily Mail’s list of the most important people.

The vibe is not good. But the policy is

I don’t like the vibe of Starmer telling Labour MPs to abstain on a bill to expand the clandestine powers of the state in order to appear tough on security. (Also, how do you appear tough by essentially doing nothing?) I’m sure there’s worse vibes to come, probably on immigration and some stupid culture war issue that the right-wing press will make really important to cause pain for Labour.

This said, I’m willing to accept the shitty middle England vibe, if it’s in exchange for the policies that are being offered, such as an end to the five week wait or the green recovery, or more money for schools and hospitals, or steps to tackle homelessness and the huge numbers of people with insecure accommodation. Mouthing Daily Mail talking points about the troops and the flag costs nothing, despite the fact that I personally find it distasteful.

The policies that Starmer is offering are not my first choice. I would prefer Universal Basic Income as part of a Labour government’s welfare policy. The environmental policy that Labour ultimately offers in the next general election is likely to be more moderate than the one I would prefer, but there’s every chance that it will rise to meet the challenge of the looming environmental disaster.

Put your vote where your mouth is

I’m still willing to vote and advocate (to my tiny following) for The Labour Party as they’re offering policies to improve the lives of many people, including the poorest and most disadvantaged in society.

When Starmer became Labour leader, I assumed that I wouldn’t like some of the things he would say, such as praising the army or Winston Churchill, but if he’s willing to actually do something about poverty, homelessness and the environment then he’ll be worth voting for.

A hill to die on

Many Labour socialists who claim to dislike Starmer because of his abandonment of left-wing policies, are responding to the vibe he gives off. As Bush has said, the point where the vibe went bad for many Labour socialists was when Starmer sacked Rebecca Long-Bailey from the Shadow Cabinet. Their estimation of him then continued to go downhill with Starmer’s handling of the EHRC report.

My own view is that Starmer has mishandled the publication of the EHRC report and the suspension of Corbyn has turned this into an even bigger inter-party row than was needed. Corbyn is entitled to make a statement in his defense following the publication of the EHRC report, but at the same time Labour needs to do more to tackle antisemitism. A big intra-party row doesn’t help with putting in place a process to kick antisemites out of the Labour Party or help Labour rebuild its public image as a party that is against discrimination.

It turns out that the hill that many Labour socialists are willing to die on is the argument that antisemitism has been weaponised against Corbyn. I don’t think that everyone on the left of the Labour Party is an antisemite or that it’s antisemitic to support Corbyn. I also don’t think that the treatment of Corbyn by the current Labour leader is the biggest issue facing the left right now. The fact that unless we stop capitalism's uncontrolled rampage through the natural environment the outside world will look like The Desert of The Real from The Matrix by 2100 is the most important issue in politics.

Pro-welfare reform. Anti-environmental collapse

That’s the hill I am willing to die on. Probably literally. The most important dividing line in politics is between those who want to do what it takes to stop the looming environmental disaster and those who think dealing with it can be deferred (or that small adjustments will make the difference). Another crucial division is between those who genuinely want to use the state to help the least fortunate in society and those who want to use it to funnel money towards their mates. Next to these issues, internal Labour Party beef matters about as much as a fart in one of those tornadoes made out of fire that they have in Australia now.

Maybe it will be revealed that Starmer doesn’t take the looming climate threat seriously enough to commit Labour to the necessary radical reforms to protect the continued existence of the human race. Maybe he will go back on commitments to policies that will help the poorest in society to try to win the votes of Daily Mail reading curtain-twitchers. If so, then I wouldn’t be able to justify voting for him. Until then, a vote for Labour remains the best way to make society better.

I’m not about to run out and get a Starmer tattoo or claim he’s the greatest Labour leader ever, but if Labour socialists are serious about wanting left-wing policy then that’s still what Labour stands for. The fight for left-wing policy should be the hill we are willing to die on and the fact that we don’t like the vibe - however disappointingly Sainsbury’s Saturday afternoon shopping trip the vibe is. So far Starmer still has my vote, but it’s a long time until the next election so I’ll have to keep watching.

"File:Official portrait of Keir Starmer crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0

Do young people’s votes matter?

Sage, the government’s scientific advisory group, has issued a stark warning about the effects of the pandemic on young people. Children’s schooling has been disrupted. Students have been locked down at universities. Retail and hospitality jobs, overwhelmingly staffed by young people, have been devastated by the pandemic.

The report warns of a lost generation, which reminds me of the previous time we were warned about a lost generation: when the 2008 financial crash wiped out the prospects of a different generation of young people.

Despite getting very little credit for it, young people have sacrificed so much to protect their predominantly retired elders (their job prospects; their independence, their university experiences; their relationships). Irresponsible parties or raves are very much the outliers. Young people, like all age groups, are generally following lockdown rules. They are also more likely to recognise government failings in managing covid, whereas older people are more likely to blame ‘the public’.

Appealing to this government’s conscience to help young people will not work. This government has figured out that it can do whatever it likes to young people and it won’t make any difference. Young people didn’t vote for this government and the Tories don’t care about anything apart from inflaming the culture wars that keep older, socially conservative Brexit voters mad and voting Tory.

Winning over older voters

Young people like me didn’t vote for this government. Older people voted for this government. Older Brexit voters switching from Labour to Conservative was a major factor in Boris Johnson winning the largest majority in more than ten years. Young people like me (by which I mean anyone under 45, the age at which party affiliation flips) have clustered together in cities either to go to university or because that’s where the jobs are. Whatever party young people vote for it will only affect a handful of seats and thus the interests of young people can be safely ignored.

Just take a look at Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party. Corbyn was very popular amongst young voters like me. I, and many other people like me, were tired of different forms of bland centrism. Corbyn offered the chance to broaden the political debate.

However, Corbyn’s lack of patriotism and reluctance to commit to annihilating millions of people in a nuclear war was a major turn off for older voters. Offending some Boomers’ sense of patriotism massively outweighed inspiring millions of young people, and thus led to a huge electoral defeat for Labour.

A commitment to young people

I can see why tactically older voters are more valuable than young ones. However, I’m disappointed by Labour’s failure to stand up for young voters. Young people have to deal with insecure employment, bad housing, low wages and are looking at being the first generation to be worse off than their parents across their lifetime. All we can see from Labour is reassurance that Keir Starmer supports our troops.

How about a commitment to improving the housing situation, from Labour? Or tackling the looming environmental apocalypse? No, that would be the sort of thing young people want, definitely not the sort of thing that wins votes. I’m not sure who Keir Starmer’s Labour is supposed to appeal to, but it’s definitely not young people.

A mass defection of young voters

I would say that all young people should spurn Labour for The Green Party or for some other party (except the Lib Dems, we’ve seen where that gets us), however, it would make little difference. Young people are clustered together in cities where Labour has huge majorities. Even a mass defection of young voters to the Greens is unlikely to make any difference to Labour.

Boomers living in Tory/Labour swing seats have a much greater impact on elections and thus politics is catered towards them, with parties falling over each other to be tough on immigration and to be seen as on their side in the culture war. The First Past The Post voting system means that in seats with large Labour majorities, the party can afford to lose the votes of lots of young people.

A tale of two constituencies

My own constituency of Walthamstow is the sort of place that young, left-wing, socially liberal people live. We have craft beer bars, pop-up restaurants and a chronic housing shortage. Our MP Stella Creasy has been the MP since the 2010 General Election. In the 2019 General Election, she won 36,784 votes or 76% of the votes. That’s a majority of 30,862. The Tories came second in 2019, with less than 6,000 votes. If 10,000 young people switched from Labour to the Greens as a protest about how Labour is ignoring young voters, it would be a 577% increase in the Green vote but, Labour would still have a majority of 20,862, making that huge Green surge pointless.

Meanwhile in Bolsover in Derbyshire, where they have working men’s’ clubs and deindustrialization, we see how crucial a few voters are. Bolsover is the sort of place that young people leave to find work elsewhere and Boomers live in larger numbers. In 2019 the Tories elected their first-ever MP to this seat since it was created in 1950. The Tory majority is only 5,299 votes. Labour being seen as unpatriotic or relaxed about immigration can make all the difference in this seat. This is where the votes matter. 

Not just an age divide

Of course, young people are not all the same. Young people’s views differ by race, class, location and who they vote for just as they do for every other voting demographic. I’m sure that there are young people in Bolsover who didn’t like Corbyn’s perceived lack of patriotism and don’t like social liberalism, are hostile to Black Lives Matter and not fussed about the environment.

I know that in Walthamstow, there are Boomers that care passionately about social justice, the fate of the planet and the problems affecting young people. The country is divided by more than age alone. There’s an education divide, a wealth divide, a geographic divide and a values divide.

However, it’s a depressing future for young people, whilst politics is geared so much towards the old. Especially the old who live in specific places, care about a specific set of issues and have a specific set of values. Reports like this one should be a wake-up call for politicians to help the young, but I fear it will fall on deaf ears.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.

Why the environmental movement needs mindbombs and critiques of capitalism

Getting people to care about climate is difficult. Years of raising awareness about the looming environmental catastrophe have not resulted in popular demand to enact systematic change. The far less existential threat of Covid-19 has had a far bigger impact for the simple reason that people saw an immediate danger to themselves and acted.

For those of us who want to change society to mitigate the worst of rising global temperatures, there remains the elusive goal of finding a message that will cut through and finally effect real change. A message that will escape the echo chambers of middle-class lefties and convince people of the immediate need to act.

Social media noise

Social media seems to be the ideal tool for this as it allows climate activists to go directly to the public without the need to filter their message through the traditional media, much of which is hostile to the message that rapid social change is needed. However, more than 15 years of social media (Facebook was founded in 2004) has not moved us any closer to achieving the goal of a widespread awakening to the need for environmental change. 

There is a lot of noise on social media, so for a climate message to cut through it needs to be attention grabbing. Remember it needs to hold people’s attention in a world where Donald Trump and Kayne West are creating a lot of noise.

Mindbombs

To find what works in the age of social media, inspiration can be drawn from the pre-digital age. It’s worth looking at Greenpeace, who pioneered a strategy they called the “mindbomb”. A 2015 article by Karl Mathiesen defines the mindbomb as: “an image that sends a collective shock through the world leading to action.” This can be seen as a precursor to today’s viral memes.

The original Greenpeace mindbomb was footage of a Russian whaling ship, hunting whales with harpoons in the Arctic, shot from a rubber speed boat in 1975. Over the years Greenpeace has been adept at creating images that stick in the public's mind and prompt action.

Jerry Rothwell, who directed an award-winning 2015 film about Greenpeace called How to Change the World talked in Mathiesen’s article about the importance of bearing witness to an event in creating mindbombs. “Things like Ferguson, the witnessing of an event can still have the power to get people to active and out on the streets and protesting,” he said.

The problem with relying on social media

So, we need to create social media mindbombs that grab attention. However, to cut through all the noise on social media these mindbombs have to be really attention grabbing. Rothwell had criticisms of many contemporary activists, he said: “There’s been a tendency within the organisation to just paint a banner and hang it off a famous building and I think that just doesn’t wash, it’s just not interesting enough.”

There is a problem with relying on social media to deploy mindbombs to spread a story, which is that social media can distract us from or distort our goals. Social media is very good at getting our attention. It’s on our phones, carried with us everywhere we go and is constantly using push notifications to get us to stop what we’re doing and pay attention to it. Social media is good at holding what psychologists call the “spotlight” of our attention - i.e. what we are focusing on right now - but in doing this it distorts our desires and goals.

Distorted goals

Former Google employee and winner of the Three Dots prize James Williams explains this in his book Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy that as well as distracting our spotlight, what we are paying attention to now, social media can distract our “starlight”, which is our ability to navigate by our higher goals and values, our guiding stars.

Williams argues that social media distracts our starlight by changing our actions so that we are no longer guided by our values, but instead we are guided by the goals of social media platforms. Williams says that when our starlight is distracted it makes us want simple pleasures over complex ones and short-term rewards over long-term ones. It means that we can’t live our lives according to the values we want to live by.

This happens when reach, shares, clicks and engagements on social media take the place of our higher goals such as changing minds or prompting people to take action. 10,000 shares is not 10,000 people convinced. It’s probably not 100 people convinced. It’s just more time spent on social media, seeing more ads and having more of our data extracted to sell to advertisers.

Owning the libs or being owned by platforms?

This becomes political when a movement’s higher goals become replaced by reaching people on social media. Political movements become distracted from their starlight when they focus on increasing their metrics on social media platforms instead of winning people over to their cause. This happens when a political movement believes that 10,00 shares is 10,000 people convinced.

This can be most easily seen with the America right. They have become obsessed by sharing videos of Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson “owning libs” as their support shrinks to a narrower and more radicalised section of society. The US right’s goals have been replaced by that of social media platforms to such a degree that they are constantly sharing content that holds attention, whilst not stopping to think that a video of Shapiro shouting over a college student isn’t convincing anyone who wasn’t already signed up to their agenda.

Stories not content

This should be a lesson for the environmental movement when creating social media mindbombs. Yes they get attention, but are they serving our goals or the goals of social media platforms? It might be better to create attention grabbing stories, rather than attention grabbing social media content.

We need a story that people can believe in, that becomes their goals or starlight. When we are all motivated by our starlight to make this world a greener, fairer, better place changing the world will be easy.

Middle-class, hipster environmentalism

As middle-class environmentalists it's tempting to make this story we want to tell a reflection of our values and lifestyles. Our advocating for economic change needs to go beyond wanting the economy to be based locally, producing organic craft beer and avocado toast. These specific examples are deliberately stereotypical, but they serve to make the general point that we mustn’t make the story we tell about a greener future one where we shop differently but everything else is the same.

Something that appears cool and desirable to middle-class Westerns might not be desirable to everyone. Vijay Kolinjivadi, in an article for Al Jazeera, said:

“In theory, ‘coolness’ just is. It is imbued with all the things that reflect deep relational values of care, affection, creativity, connection, authenticity, and meaning. It should have no racial, gendered or socio-economic boundaries and likewise, have no impact on those fronts either.

“In practice, it involves the reproduction of a particular way of being which invariably sets in motion new avenues for capital to expand, allowing everything that has meaning to be hollowed-out and commodified for profit.”

A critique of capitalism

We need to be aware of a story that is environmentally progressive, but doesn’t include a critique of capitalism, racism or other power systems that are preventing the social change needed to stave off an environmental catastrophe. The story we want to tell needs to be transformative in many ways and not just environmentally.

We see this with gentrification. When middle-class people move into an area of a city, we often see a focus on green living reflected in the changes to the local economy, such as zero-waste shops or organic cafes opening.

This overlooks the damage done by gentrification to lives of poor people. As Kolinjivadi said: “In the process, the implicit socio-economic violence behind gentrification will be invariably ‘greenwashed’ and presented as development that would make the area more ‘sustainable’, ‘beautiful’ and ‘modern’.

“Thus, immigrant-owned grocery stores, halal butcheries and community centres will soon be replaced by vegan chain restaurants, hip vintage clothing joints, organic food stores and coffee-shops galore, as landlords push out poor tenants to make space for more well-to-do ones.”

A story that wins support

The story we tell about the change we want to see in the world must not be a story about changing consumer patterns, but instead focus on ”resistance on externally-conceived and profit-driven developments as a moral and even survivalist imperative and work to re-establish community through solidarity economies, replenishing those relations severed by the growth-centred logic.”

If we want to win over people to believing in our story about a better, greener future then it needs to offer more change than making everyone an environmental hipster. It needs to tackle the root causes of injustice, such as capitalism, racism, sexism, homophobia. etc.

Planet of the Humans

Now is a time where we need challenging narratives about a better future where we have overcome the problems created by capitalism or racism. Optimistic stories about the environment are threatened by eco-fascist narratives, doom and gloom narratives about there being no hope and narratives about the environmental movement itself being suspect.

The most recent example of the latter is Michael Moore’s new film Planet of the Humans, which spreads disinformation about the climate movement. To give you an idea of bad it is, singer-songwriter and climate activist Neil Young described the film as: “erroneous and headline grabbing TV publicity tour of misinformation. A very damaging film to the human struggle for a better way of living, Moore’s film completely destroys whatever reputation he has earned so far.”

Moore’s film blames overpopulation for the looming environmental disaster and spreads disinformation about how the green movement has distracted attention from overpopulation as the cause of climate breakdown.

Unexpected praise for Michael Moore from the far-right

Moore doesn’t offer any answer to the question of “what do we do about there being too many humans?” The audience can make up their own mind and many people have jumped to the worst possible solution. Unsurprisingly, this focus on too many humans as an environmental problem has led to the film being heralded by the most extreme parts of the right.

Bill McKibben, one of the people Moore targets in the film, wrote a response in Rolling Stone where he reports that “Breitbart loves the movie” and that so does “every other climate-denier operation on the planet”. I don’t think it was Moore’s intention to make a climate film that energises the far-right (I think he wanted to bolster his reputation as an edgy provocateur by taking on the liberal establishment), but his environmental narrative of too many people aligns with the far-right narrative of certain groups of people being a threat to society. 

This is what happens when the basis of the narratives we tell about the environment are not positive stories about the better world that we can create. Doom and gloom stories can be easily co-opted by eco-fascists and turned to their ends.

Freeing people trapped by doom and gloom narratives

This is why the environmental movement needs mindbombs AND critiques of capitalism. We can win people over to the idea of a better tomorrow, with an attention-grabbing story that offers solutions to the loom environmental catastrophe that tackles many of society’s social and economic problems.

Our narrative needs to be informed by what worked well in the past, such as Greenpeace’s mindbomb approach, which can be adapted for a social media age. However, we need to be aware of the problems of social media and make sure that the goals of tech platforms do not substitute our goals. We must be guided by our Starlight, which is our goal to make a better future.

There are many people captured by environmental doom and gloom narratives who think that the problem is too many people and not our economic and political systems. Our story about a better tomorrow can free these people and make the world a better place, if we can tell it right.

What can the left learn from Biden’s victory?

Finally, some good news. Donald Trump is on his way out of the White House. He may not admit it, he may be incapable of accepting that he lost, but this particular circus is nearly over. Trump will be a one term President.  

It's unequivocally a good thing that Joe Biden Beat Trump in last Tuesday’s election. A second Trump term would likely have been worse than the first, more corrupt and more incompetent. It’s difficult to put into words how glad I am that the world doesn’t have to worry about the President starting a nuclear war to settle a Twitter beef.

Joy tempered by disappointment

There is a caveat to my joy, which is that the Democrats should have easily won this election. Trump received more than 72 million votes, which is way too many for a man who left the economy in ruins, allowed the coronavirus to run rampant and is a compulsively lying, authoritarian who doesn’t respect himself, the office of the President or even soldiers who have died for America. The Democrats should have been able to beat Trump in their sleep. Not by less than 4% of the vote.

Of course a win is a win, but the numbers are more than just to boost Joe Biden’s ego. This was not a repudiation of Trump. There was no blue wave and Trumpism is very much alive, even if Trump is on his way out. Downballot, the Democrats did poorly, they failed to take back the Senate and lost seats in the House, narrowing their majority.

What can the left learn from this?

What can the left worldwide learn from this election? The American election doesn’t offer a solution to the left’s post 2008 financial crash identity crisis. Yes, a centrist, establishment left-wing politician won, but he was up against an unpopular incumbent and it was after a summer of radical-left activism that fired voters up for change, or at least dumping Trump. The closeness of the election could also be read as many voters being lukewarm towards a President who will be dependent on radical left Congressional Representatives to pass legislation. 

One clear lesson is that simply being competent and sensible isn’t enough to win, even when faced with a clownishly incompetent opponent, so take note Keir Starmer. Biden is the very measure of a moderate, sensible, experienced, competent politician and he only narrowly beat a deranged serial fraudster whose administration has been a giant dumpster fire and let a deadly virus rip through the country whilst ruining the economy. Clearly values and issues of identity are more important to many voters than even extreme incompetence. 

Another crucial lesson for the left in Britain is that many Americans don’t blame Trump for the spread of the coronavirus, which is likely the same for the Tories in the UK. People view this as a natural disaster (or the fault of China) and not a matter of effective government. There’s evidence that Trump handled the virus badly, worse than a lot of other countries, but many voters aren’t considering different countries’ relative performance in handling the virus. They just see lots of countries with lots of cases and think: “everyone has it bad so it’s no one’s fault”.

The left needs to win more than the centre

Enthusiastic talk about a blue wave or a Biden landslide turned out to be overconfident bluster. In some of the key states, such as Pennsylvania, Georgia and Wisconsin, Biden won by less than 1% of the vote. This tells us that being in the centre isn’t a sure path to victory, even when faced by an opponent of (or at least supported by) the extreme right.

Biden won the majority of registered Independents and Independents made up a bigger proportion of the electorate than in 2016. Biden also won the key swing voter groups of white college educated women, suburban voters and white working-class voters. However, Trump was able to turn out his base and loyalist Republicans, which was nearly enough to see him to victory. Winning the middle helped Biden, but whilst populists like Trump are finding new supporters on the right, the left needs to think about more than just winning the centre.

Biden’s success with swing voters has carried him to the White House, but it didn’t translate into support for downballot Democrats. The Democrats failure to take the Senate will most likely result in four years of Republican stonewalling to make Biden look ineffective, so that an establishment Republican can win in 2024. Any talk of a new age of moderation and compromise, when the Republican Party is led by Mitch McConnell, is only hot air.

A Democratic vision for America 

The Democrats should have done better than they did. They chose a gaffe prone, dull candidate and failed to express a coherent vision of how the country would be different under their leadership. The fact that the coronavirus prevented a lot of campaigning played to their favour as the less the country saw of Biden, the better.

I am not saying that the Democrats have to move further to the left to win. The policies I support in Britain would be considered extremely left-wing in America (policies like not letting corporations trample all over politics and people not having to pay for healthcare) and I recognise that America has different politics. The Democrats need a vision that can transcend left and right politics, instead of sitting in the middle. They shouldn’t rely on “we’re less corrupt, stupid and incompetent than the other guys so you have to vote for us.”

The appeal of Trump

Trump surprised us all by winning over more Latino and black voters that anticipated. The tactic of calling him a racist and then expecting everyone not appalled by racism to vote against him didn’t work. Trump is a racist, but he didn’t divide the electorate along racial lines. The left needs to realise that the appeal of populists, like Trump, clearly goes beyond just a sense of white grievance at changing demographics and the anger of the “left behind”. 

Trump’s appeal is rooted in anti-establishment, anti-elitist and anti-liberal right-wing populism. However, he also has a message that it’s okay to feel good about American history and that you don’t need to worry about racism or sexism, as long as you’re not saying the N word or hitting women.

Trump’s message is that those who think racism and sexism are more complicated than the above are at best whipping up a lot of fuss about nothing and at worst are planning a Mao Zedong style Cultural Revolution with violent public denouncements. This message appeals to more than just white, blue collar voters. Some minorities want to hear it too, which should concern the left.

Difficult problems in the future

The Democrat’s policies on healthcare are more popular than they are as a party. Just as Labour’s policies on tax and redistribution are more popular than they are in the UK. It seems voters want left-wing policies, but not left-wing governments. The left needs to ask itself: what is stopping us from winning if we have popular policies that the voters want? I don’t have an answer to this and whatever the answer is it won’t be simple or easy. 

Trump will be out of the White House before the Super Bowl, but it’s not all bread and roses for the left in America. There’s little hope of resolving the left’s identity crisis and no clear path forward for the 2022 midterms, where it’s essential that the Democrats take the Senate and hold onto their majority in the House.

Even if Trump quietly disappears (which I very much doubt he will) the threat of Trumpism remains and this election has left the ground fertile for a less incompetent aspiring extreme-right authoritarian, whereas it was supposed to be the destruction of the populist right and the restoration of liberal democracy in America.

When thinking about our fight against the populist right I’m left to conclude that Trumps’ defeat is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end, but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

"Joe Biden" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Zoom Under Water

In 1946 George Orwell outlined his model for the perfect pub, in an essay for the Evening Standard, which he called The Moon Under Water. This essay describes the ideal London (or any city based) local drinking establishment and it sets the standard for idyllic pubs, as well as inspiring the name of many Wetherspoons across the country.

Orwell’s pub had “barmaids [who] know most of their customers by name, and take a personal interest in everyone” and a design aesthetic where “everything has the solid, comfortable ugliness of the nineteenth century.” Right now, I would very much like to visit a “pub that has draught stout, open fires, cheap meals, [and] a garden,” as pub going has been seriously curtailed by the current deadly disease outbreak.

These are dark days for the local boozer. Now that we’re heading towards winter flu season, the Covid-19 infection rate is rising and many parts of the country under are local lockdowns. Another national lockdown or countrywide closing of pubs could happen at any moment, which would be a serious blow to the pub industry, its employees, pub goers nationwide, and my own relaxation.

Even on the few occasions I have been to the pub in the last six months, it hasn’t been as relaxing as it once was. The threat of getting sick and dying does impede my ability to unwind somewhat. I take the risk of catching Covid-19 seriously, and I can see why as a nation we prioritise keeping schools open, but we all need a break from the unending misery of life during a pandemic and now that pub trips are off the menu I feel that I am rapidly losing my marbles. 

Collective online drinking 

This isn’t to say that I haven’t been engaging in social drinking since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, I have just been doing it at home. A drinking session now involves gathering around a laptop with a bottle of beer ordered as part of a Tesco's delivery and dialing into a Zoom video call; whereas before it involved gathering around a small table with a freshly poured pint and looking at the actual, corporeal version of my friends. 

Collective online drinking can take many forms, as can in person drinking. I have attended intimate one on one sessions where we engage in in-depth philosophical discussions, rowdy group piss ups and even online beer festivals. In these Covid-19 times, it seems there is no aspect of collective public drinking that can’t be turned into collective online drinking. 

This virtual pub, that provides so many of the features of its offline predecessor could have many names. The Skype Arms? That’s a little unimaginative. Maybe, The Home and Hounds, which is cosy like a pub should be. Orwell had his Moon Under Water, so for the rest of my essay I will refer to this pub as the Zoom Under Water. 

Enter the Zoom Under Water 

So, we have gone from Orwell’s Moon Under Water to our Zoom Under Water. The Zoom Under Water offers many of the social benefits of an offline pub, such as providing a space for unwinding, socialising and inebriation. It can provide beer and companionship, which is the minimum viable (MVP) product for a pub. 

This concept of MVP is worth dwelling on for a second. MVP is product designer speak for the absolute minimum a user will expect from a product. It’s worth thinking about because most of us don’t spend much time considering the minimum we would expect from a product or a place or a pub. 

Minimum viable pub 

Whenever I pop into a pub for a quick drink, or a long session, I evaluate this against my tastes and expectations. Every pub is compared to my own personal Moon Under Water. This standard is subjective, every pub I go into doesn’t have to conform to my exacting ideas of what a pub should be for me to drink in it. Most places aren’t the maximum viable pub, a high bar that only a few places come to meet.

This is how most of us (or at least those of us who try to think critically about pubbing and/or have a sense of personal taste that relates to where we drink) approach the idea of evaluating a pub. This is difficult when applied to a pub in our own home, which simultaneously conforms to our tastes more than any pub ever could and at the same time is a long way from our ideal version of a pub, because it’s a home and not a pub.

This is why it’s worth approaching the Zoom Under Water the opposite way around. We should start by thinking about the minimum viable pub. What do we need for our homes to be transformed into a pub? I would argue that it is relaxation, inebriation and company. 

The Zoom Under Water vs the Moon Under Water 

The Zoom Under Water can offer these things, without the negative aspects of pubbing such as:  obnoxious drunk strangers, missing last orders, being unpleasantly sobered up by wind on exit or cramming onto public transport whilst resisting falling asleep so that our phones isn’t stolen on the way home.

Granted those are all positives. The main flaw of the Zoom Under Water, and it is a significant flaw, is that it is always the same. No amount of customisable Zoom backgrounds can convince you that you are not always in your home. 

Limited and unlimited choice

This sameness usually means that the Zoom Under Water always serves the same beers. If we order our beer online to be delivered to our homes then we have, theoretically, all the beer in the world to choose from. When presented with this near-infinite range of options, most of us fall back on what we know well. Netflix offers hundreds of thousands of shows, but the most watched shows are Friends and The US Office, because most people are already familiar with these titles. When presented with an ocean of new and uncertain options, we cling to the rocks of what we are familiar with.

The same applies to beer, when shopping online I am more likely to buy Brewdog, Beaver Town or Fullers Beers as I know them well. This means that the Zoom Under Water lacks a crucial part of the pub experience: discovering new drinks.

When faced with a limited range of options, such as the three, four or even ten beers, we are presented with the possibility of trying something new. Sure, some people always order Carling or London Pride, because that’s their drink, but many take this opportunity to broaden their taste. This is one of the great things about pubs, they give us the chance to find new beers for ourselves.

Algorithms and entrenched brands

In the world of internet content this is called discovery. The internet is supposed to be the ultimate tool for discovery and although it does offer people the opportunity to try something they didn’t know they wanted before (have you considered fascism, you might like it?) generally the internet has not opened us to a whole new world of discovery. If anything, it has entrenched the power of established brands that we were already familiar with.

This is because there is so much stuff on the internet that it needs to be curated for us, which is done by algorithms on tech platforms. These algorithms look at what they know about you, what they know about what you like and what they know about what the people who are similar to you like, and then make recommendations based on this. The net result is that the same things that you already like are being constantly fed back to you. 

The impact of this touches everything from the beer that we buy to the news that we read. It becomes dangerous when it extends to our politics. The process of reflecting ideas that we already like back to us means we are not exposed to new ideas or people who think differently to us. By showing us more of what we agree with and less of what we disagree with, we end up in an echo chamber where more and more extreme versions of our beliefs are bounced back to us.

The loss of discovery 

When I am sitting at home drinking the same beers that I like, checking Facebook and Twitter and reading opinions that I agree with, I am left thinking that discovery is something we’ve lost. The internet once promised to open us up to new possibilities, but it has entrenched the power of established brands and established political parties. We’re angrier than ever, but a revolution seems further away than ever. 

The freedom that all the choice in the world should offer has been lost because it is un-navigable and anything built to make it navigable has so far only created echo chambers. The solution to this is to remember to be open-minded, to seek out new experience and views that challenge your own. To keep trying new things. 

Right now, we are stuck at home without new things to try. Apart from being at home all the time, which is new for me at least. However, now that there’s nowhere to go we might as well spend our time trying something new even if it’s small. A new hobby or a new TV show or even try a new beer, rather than always ordering the same ones over and over. 

We need novelty

We need novelty and we need new discoveries, as we have seen the problem with having what we already like constantly fed back to us. This has been the great strengths of off-line pubs, how they allow us to discover new beers by limiting our options. It’s one reason why the beer industry supports a huge diversity of breweries and has become more diverse in an age where large brands are becoming more entrenched. 

The Zoom Under Water doesn’t show us anything new, it only reflects ourselves back to us. That's why we need the experiences that create novelty. In an increasingly online world this is what’s being lost, but if we are aware of this we can seek out novelty and try to add some discovery to our lives.

Image of The Moon Under Water, High Street, Watford was taken by Dr Neil Clifton and was found on Wikipedia. It used here under Creative Commons.

Will Trumpism continue without Trump?

Four years ago I was confident that Hillary Clinton would easily beat Donald Trump, so it’s with some trepidation that I start this blog post by saying that the polls are looking good for Joe Biden in the election this November. 

Election website 538 forecasts a Biden win in 87 of the 100 scenarios they projected (at time of writing). The predictions of a Democratic victory could be wrong and Trump has come from behind to beat the odds in the past, but the smart money is certainly on Biden and he could possibly win a huge landslide.

There is the very real possibility of Trump refusing to acknowledge his defeat and sitting in the White House like the blockage in the drain of democracy that he is. If that happens it will be the most unprecedented thing that has happened in this whole unprecedented Presidency. 

I think Trump will leave office if he loses. Probably not without a fair amount of grumbling on Twitter. He will most likely go when, after losing them the White House, Senate and House of Representatives, the Republican Party finally grows a spine and cuts him loose. The more important question is: what happens to Trumpism after Trump? Will it die with his political career? Will someone else emerge to be the standard bearer for bloviating hate in American politics?

Trumpism beyond Trump

Trumpism won’t end with Trump. Trump satisfied a need that a group of American voters want. This may be a minority of voters, and if Biden really wallops Trump then we’ll find out exactly what the floor in Trump’s support is, however, the itch in American politics that Trump scratches won’t go away if Trump loses.

What some voters want, and what Trump stands for, is America’s naked self-interest, free from constraint by any other principle. Trump is purely transactional; he sees the world through the prism of what benefits him (which is why he doesn’t understand military service despite claiming to be a patriot) and he appeals to voters who see politics the same way. The “ask not what you can do for your country, but what your country can do for you” voters.

America First

This is summed up by Trump’s adoption of the (antisemitic in origin) slogan: America First. Trump supporters want America First. They don’t care about America’s allies or the values that America is supposed to represent around the world. They don’t have vainglorious ideas about America being the world’s policeman or the exporter of free-market capitalism, which makes them different from how many establishment Republican politicians see America. They want what benefits America (and themselves) within the country.

They don’t want to apologise for America or to compromise for America. They see the world as everyone vs America and make no distinction between fellow democracies, America’s close allies or authoritarian dictatorships. They see all countries as equal before the question of: what have you done for America recently? Many voters see politicians in these terms and Trump is the perfect candidate for them.

Bellicose politics

Trump is also rude about his enemies. He isn’t restrained about what he says or holds back in any way, especially when laying into someone he (and his supporters) doesn’t like. This is another itch that Trump scratches. During the Cold War American conservatives had the perfect enemy they could loudly denounce: communism. Communism was the ultimate anti-America and conservatives could be as loud as they want in demonising it.

Since the end of the Cold War, conservatives have wanted an enemy they can be loud about hating. The politics of globalisation and international cooperation of the 1990s didn’t provide this. Islamic terrorism in the 2000s was a partial substitute for communism, but it didn’t provide the need for an enemy inside America working to bring down the country that communism provided. Islamic terrorism is mainly something that happens far away from America (barring one notable and high-profile exception) and therefore doesn’t exist to many Americans.

Trump’s endless bellicose crusade against liberals, mainstream conservatives (mainstream by American standards, or terrifyingly right wing by everyone else’s standards) BLM, antifa, the media and anyone else who has been mildly critical of Trump’s massive corruption and defaming of the highest office in America, meets the need for conservative voters who want an enemy they can hate and indulge in violent fantasies about defending their local grocery store from.

Blue collar social conservatives

Trump also provides a rallying point for blue collar social conservatives. This is odd as Trump is in many ways the opposite of a socially conservative blue collar voter. Sure, he hates immigrants, liberals and people who went to college, and he isn’t afraid to say so in un-PC ways, but in many other ways he is the opposite of blue collar socially conservative values.

Trump has no time for faith (he claims to be religious, but clearly doesn’t believe there is a power higher than himself), he has no self-denial (Trump has never held back on indulging himself), he is an affront to the traditional family (Trump is a serial cheater and serial divorcee) and he doesn’t believe in service to the community (Trump has never done anything that doesn’t benefit him personally immediately).

These blue collar socially conservative values are at odds with liberal metropolitan America’s values of self-expression and self-actualisation. Trump certainly believes in pursuing his own self-actualisation and pretty much insults every blue collar socially conservative value, but he still provides a rallying point for people with those values. By saying you support Trump, you are able to make a bold statement about your politics, which is another need in American politics that he satisfies: being the visible symbol for a group of people with certain values.

The culture war isn’t going away

This stark divide in values between many Americans has led to a culture war between liberal and conservative Americans, which shows no sign of ending even if Trump loses big time. Not all conservatives are Trump supporters, but Trump does provide some things that many conservatives want: America First, being aggressive towards conservative America’s enemies and being the symbol of blue collar America - at least until Google invents a self-driving, Confederate flag flying, country music blasting pickup truck that is legally allowed to stand for office.

Yelling “America First” and being rude about his enemies is key to Trump’s success. He may have gotten into the White House because people disliked Hilary Clinton more than they disliked him and he may get kicked out of the White House because more people dislike Trump more than they dislike Biden, however, Trump got the Republican nomination because he gave conservatives what they wanted.

Another politician will emerge to provide these things, whatever happens to Trump in November. This may be a politician who is less of an unhinged, impulsive, stupid, megalomanic than Trump and thus might be a lot more effective at rallying their support against the restrictions that the American constitution places on the power of the presidency, which is something we should all be worried about. If Trump is Barry Goldwater to someone else’s Ronald Regan, then we should all fear that someone else.

All this means that the era of Trump’s politics isn’t over, even if Biden wins in a landslide.

Donald Trump picture taken by Gage Skidmore and used under creative commons.

I have nothing to offer except my bafflement

Sometimes I am lost for words (although that doesn’t stop me blogging). I don’t have the words to express how outraged I am about the fact that the number of Covid-19 cases is going up and at the current rate of spread we could see 50,000 new cases in a day by mid-October.

This comes after the government encouraged us to eat out to help out, go back to work in offices and go forth and stimulate the economy. They asked us to do all this and now the number of cases is growing at an exponential rate. Who could have predicted this would happen? Oh wait. Everyone.

Howls of rage

There should be howls of rage at the state of the UK. Every newspaper and news website should be shouting about how terribly the government has managed the Covid-19 outbreak. How can they encourage us to go eat out when there is a deadly virus on the loose? Why didn’t everyone with a voice or public platform shout: “No! This is irresponsible!” How can the government act surprised when their own policies drive up the infection rate?

Even the most right-wing newspapers should be calling for this government to go based on how badly they have managed the pandemic. But no. It looks increasingly like the government can do whatever it wants, manage the situation however badly, and get away with it. Even the outrageous case of Dominic Cummings breaking all the lockdown rules led to no accountability. The government folded its arms and said “no” to accepting any responsibility and that was that.

Difficult situation

I realise that it’s difficult to deal with a global pandemic and manage the economy so that there is some industry left at the end of all this. However, right now life is returning to normal in Berlin whilst London is looking at a second lockdown and England (the only part of the UK under direct Tory control) has the highest level of excess deaths. We should look at how life is returning to something resembling normal in our neighbours across the Channel and then scream loud enough to bring the Palace of Westminster crashing down on top of this useless government.

Wanted: an opposition

It would help if there was some kind of alternative to this shambles. However, her majesty's loyal opposition has focused too much on the loyal part of their role of late. Keir Starmer’s tactic is to point out what’s gone wrong after the fact, like your laziest and least helpful colleague. Anyone can point at this slow-moving disaster and say that it’s gone wrong. I’m doing it right now. Maybe I should be the leader of the opposition? Of course I shouldn’t! I’m just a twat with a blog. But I had expected our opposition to do more to improve the running of this country, than what armchair internet commentators can do. 

This is doubly annoying as it comes after years of ceaseless calls for real opposition when Jeremy Corbyn was leader of the Labour Party. Remember this from the New Statesman? Well, I want an opposition right now. For years we heard that Corbyn was doing nothing and that things would be better if Starmer was Labour leader. Now he is leader of the opposition and we hear nothing except gentle chiding of the government.

What do I know?

I never thought that I would say this, but I would prefer to go back to Theresa May’s Brexit stalemate than endure another day of Boris Johnson’s rolling fuck-up that not only fails to rise to the occasion but seems to find new depths of incompetence to sink into. At least last year we could commiserate about the sad state of politics in the pub, with our friends.

Then again, Labour is now ahead in some national polls, so what do I know? Although these polls don’t take into account electoral geography, such as Labour being nowhere in Scotland and still struggling to break through in former Red Wall constituencies, so maybe let’s not start handing out the ministerial parking spaces yet.

Is this what the country really wants? Someone with a better haircut than Boris Johnson who is willing to say they’re a patriot 58 times a day and loves the troops? Then again, if the last few years have made anything apparent, it’s that I live in a bubble and not even one of those good bubbles that keep infectious diseases out.

Maybe I don’t know anything about politics and I have nothing to offer except my bafflement.

"Boris Johnson at Conservative Party Conference" by conservativeparty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

The election of Ed Davey shows the Lib Dems are happy being a centrist party

Ed Davey has been elected the new Lib Dem leader. The man who previously lost in a runoff to Jo Swinson (remember when the chronically misinformed thought that she would be the next Prime Minister?) is now in charge of Britain’s third party and, who knows, might one day be the doormat junior partner in a coalition government. Although he’s more likely to be remembered the same way the last four Lib Dem leaders are, as hardly worthy of a footnote in history. 

What can we learn from Davey’s victory? We can infer that the Lib Dem’s members are happy with their party being thought of as in the middle of the political spectrum. Their hope is that, as Labour have become more left-wing in recent years and the Tories have become more right-wing, they can win over more voters who feel abandoned in the centre.

Leaving Brexit behind

It also shows that they are moving away from an ultra-Remain position and returning to the Nick Clegg era of appealing to centrists. During the years of uncertainty over Brexit, the Lib Dems adopted the extreme position of stopping Brexit without another referendum if they became the government.

I call this extreme because it’s anti-democratic, as it’s possible to have a stable majority government with around a third of the vote, as Labour managed in 2005 when Tony Blair won 403 seats with 35.2% of votes cast. This Brexit stance was so extreme that I’m surprised that it didn’t receive more criticism. I’m also surprised that it was taken as a serious possibility by anyone.

The road not chosen

To win the unenviable position of being Lib Dem leader, Davey had to beat Layla Moran who, had she been chosen as leader, would have indicated that the Lib Dems wanted to attack Labour from the left, perhaps in a return to the Charles Kennedy days when the Lib Dems were more radical than Labour on some issues.

The argument is that Labour cannot afford to be too socially liberal. Having a metropolitan, middle-class position on issues such as patriotism and identity, and not connecting with how the majority of the country saw these issues, was seen as a major failure of Jeremy Corbyn. If Keir Starmer wants to win back the Red Wall voters who switched to the Conservatives in 2019, then he may need to at least pay lip service to views on these issues that will put him at odds with the average young, middle-class city dweller.

A left-wing culture war?

Had Moran won, it would raise an interesting question: do the Lib Dems think they could start a culture war from the left? Could they adopt positions on statue removal or defunding the police that are to the left of where the general public are, but in line with the social values of the average Corbyn supporting Labour voter? Would attempts lure away young voters put pressure on Kier Starmer, who has to walk an awkward tightrope of trying to keep both socially liberal and socially conservative Labour voters happy?

I think this was unlikely to work. One reason why the right-wing culture war has been so successful is that right-wing newspapers and right-wing social media pick up any story that could enrage social conservatives and amplify it until leading politicians have to respond. I think the Lib Dems will be unwilling to find many publications willing to support this.

Even the left-leaning media in Britain is not sympathetic enough to the rights of trans-people, ethnic minorities or the young to give a left-wing culture war the energy it needs to succeed. Nor are they ideologically committed enough to the Liberal Democrats (or Labour for that matter) to consistently amplify stories that are useful to them.

Happy in the centre

Also, the Lib Dems tried the approach of adopting a position out of step with the majority, but highly in line with young social liberals, on Brexit and it didn’t work. Mainly because their record in the coalition still makes them toxic to these voters. This approach failed even when supported by a left-leaning media that was in favour of stopping Brexit.

Being in the middle makes more sense for the Lib Dems. In 2019 they came second in many Labour and Tory seats and are unlikely to win back the young any time soon. Choosing Davey as a leader and adopting this positioning makes sense.

Two Sirs and Boris Johnson

I don’t think Keir Starmer or Boris Johnson will be losing any sleep now that Ed Davey has become Lib Dem leader. He isn’t a threat to either of them. Although Boris Johnson must be annoyed that both opposition leaders are Knights and he’s not.

If the Lib Dems think there are loads of centrist voters to win over, and that will propel them back to the level where they can sell out all their values to the Tories for another electoral reform referendum that will be lost, then good luck to them. I don’t think this centre ground exists or is stable enough to achieve this, but I have been wrong in the past.

Broadly, I don’t see much changing from the Lib Dems. Moran would have certainly been a more interesting choice for leader, but perhaps a period of stability with clearly defined left, right and centre parties is what the country needs after three years of slow-motion chaos.

"ed davey speech 01" by Liberal Democrats is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0

Why incompetence isn’t damaging the Tory brand

The Tories are known for their ruthless efficiency, be it in dispatching leaders who aren’t working out or in making difficult decisions in government. From Winston Churchill, to David Cameron via Margaret Thatcher, the Tory brand is built around having the strong leadership to sort the country out.

This is a simplistic, right-wing reading of history, which I strongly disagree with, but it tells us something about how the Tories sell themselves to the electorate. They want to be seen as a competent party of government. Socialism may sound nice and lovely for everyone, but it leads to queues at shops and strikes in factories. Toryism may not be cuddly, but it keeps the lights on and food on the table.

This may be how the Tories would like to be seen, but it isn’t how things have worked out for Boris Johnson’s government. England had the largest increase in deaths from Covid-19 in Europe, the economy suffer Biblical devastation in April with the growth rate at negative 20%, whilst the A-Level results scandal went from a debacle to a disaster and forced the government into an embarrassing U-turn.

Tory incompetence

Things are not going well for the Tories. As usual, Gary Younge said it best when he tweeted: “I expected the Tories to be this mendacious, elitist and corrupt. I genuinely did not expect them to be this incompetent.”

Despite all of this, the Tories remain ahead in the polls with 42% saying they are likely to vote Tory in a hypothetical election and 37% Labour at the time of writing. This level of incompetence should be poison to the Tory brand, but it isn’t.

The new Tory brand

This is because the Tory brand has changed. They’re no longer the party of “making tough decisions” and not being compromised by things like human emotions, which was their brand up until Cameron left office. Now they’re more of a culture war movement than a party that sells itself on a record of competence in government.

The Tory Party has become a movement for people who love Brexit, are patriotic and hate immigration. They are a movement that is anti-woke, anti-BLM, anti-London, anti-craft beer and anti-dance videos on TikTok (or whatever it is 20 somethings are into these days). You can see this when Johnson recently demanded an end to the "cringing embarrassment about our history" by which he means an end to anyone questioning a version of British history where Britain is always the hero, which is fixed in the mind of Tory voters across the country and is free from any nuanced understanding of our national history. 

Around 40% of the country want a pro-Brexit, pro-flag waving, anti-immigration party, or hate the woke lefties enough to support the Tories no matter what. This has given them a floor in the polls of roughly 40% that the Tories don’t fall below regardless of how weak Theresa May was or how out of depth Johnson is. This 40% of mainly old, mainly outside cities, mainly non-university educated, mainly pro-Brexit, mainly white, conservative voters’ desire for a government that reflects their values and sneers at their opponents’ won’t be shaken by incompetence, especially when the government can point to boatloads of immigrants arriving to fire their supporters up.

Labour’s response

What does this mean for Labour? Appearing competent or saying that Labour would run the country better is a good start as there are some voters who will be won over by this. This involves Labour articulating a vision of how the country will be different with them in charge, something that has been sadly lacking from Keir Starmer. Instead, Labour have simply pointed out that the Tories have messed up after all of their recent mess ups which has, unsurprisingly, not moved the polls. 

What’s more important is that Labour needs to find a way to avoid being drawn into a culture war over statues being torn down or songs being sung at the Proms. If Labour are going to break the Tories’ 40% floor then they need to be able to outline their vision for transforming the country and improving everyone’s lives without being drawn into debates on social issues that remind the Tory 40% which side they are on.

Land of hope and anti-wokeness

A recent example of this is the arguments over singing Land of Hope and Glory and Rule Britannia at the Proms. This is a largely manufactured controversy that serves only to convince cultural conservatives that they and everything they love is under attack from young woke people.

As a sidebar: even in the wokest corners of Twitter, I have never heard anyone object to Land of Hope and Glory or care what is sung at an outdated celebration of British nostalgia, such as the Last Night of the Proms. We’re all too busy worrying about how many people will die when the Tories force us to go back to our office jobs because they don’t want Subway to fold.

It’s not an enviable position Labour is in, having to walk on eggshells to avoid triggering a lot of Boomers who are very sensitive about cultural issues and believe that young people (by which I mean everyone under 45) are trying to create a Brave New World: a society without history where everyone is constantly zoned out on legalised drugs. However, the country shows no sign of tiring of culture wars.

Labour needs to find some way of neutralizing these issues whilst articulating how it would transform the country into a place where everyone can have a job, a measure of dignity and doesn’t live in fear of a killer a virus - or at least believes that the government is doing everything in its power to safeguard its citizens. If Labour can’t do this, they won’t be able to close the poll gap, regardless of how incompetent the Tories are.

"Boris Johnson at Conservative Party Conference" by conservativeparty is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

It’s a mistake for Labour to want to talk about race and economic issues separately

How should Labour respond to the recent Black Lives Matter protests across the UK? I know how I feel about them: systematic racism is a big problem in the UK, you just have to look at the higher death rates from Covid-19 for people from Black and minority ethnic (BAME) groups people to know that the UK has a problem. I want the Labour Party and its leadership to be a vocal supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement and work to dismantle systemic racism wherever it is found.

One of the sad things about politics today is that there are voters who would be put off voting Labour if Keir Starmer became a prominent supporter of BLM. Part of me wants to say “fuck those guys, we don’t need them.” However, I don’t know if Labour can win power by only appealing to people who support BLM. It seems unlikely. 

Labour needs to win an election to be in power so that it can implement meaningful reforms that address systemic racism. For example, Labour could carry out the recommendations of the Lammy Review: “An independent review into the treatment of, and outcomes for, Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic individuals in the Criminal Justice System.” The Tories aren’t going to do this, but Labour needs to win power first.

Conscience against compromise

This leads to the age-old political dilemma: conscience against compromise. Say what you feel or play a tactical game to win power and then make changes. I don’t envy the position that Starmer is in. Making the wrong strategic decision on BLM, or a host of other issues, could hurt Labour’s electoral chances, prevent them from winning power and then using the power of the state to address systemic racism in Britain.

It appears that Starmer has chosen compromise. He was photographed taking the knee, in a show of solidarity with those protesting the murder of George Floyd by police in the US, but he also criticised the removal of a statue of slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. I can see the pragmatism in this approach, it aims to keep onside voters who support the removal of the statue and voters (and potential voters) who weren’t in favour of it.

It’s worth bearing in mind that a recent YouGov poll showed that 40% of those asked supported “the statue being removed, but not in the way in which it was done” and that 33% “disapprove of the statue being removed.” This could be read as 73% of voters being opposed to the toppling of the statue. It’s a courageous Labour leader who takes a stance that 73% of the voters oppose, so I can see why Starmer has opted for compromise here.

Identity politics

It’s also worth remembering that the Edward Colston statue is just one event in a long campaign against systemic racism. A single poll on one event doesn’t mean that Labour should be shouting loudly about keeping up statues of slave traders. The poll does highlight one of the key problems for Labour: what is the story that they can tell that will unite Labour voters who were glad to see the statue torn down and those who would want to see it staying up?

The discourse around events such as the removal of the Edward Colston statue are often referred to as “identity politics”. This phrase is usually evoked by people opposed to “identity politics” as a way to dismiss the voicing of objections to systemic racism or the oppression of LGBTQ+ people. However, there are a lot of voters who are alienated by identity politics and Labour might need to win some of their votes to be in power.

There is a view within the Labour Party that it needs to stay away from issues related to identity, from Black Lives Matter to trans rights, and instead tell a story that is entirely about economics.

An economic message

A form of this argument is made in the recent report from Labour Together into the 2019 election defeat, which concludes: “Our potential voting coalition shares much common ground on economic issues”. This argument is also made in Steve Rayson’s new book about the 2019 general election: The Fall of the Red Wall.

Both of these investigations into the future of Labour recommend a focus on economic issues over identity issues. The reason is that the party’s current supporter’s beliefs on identity are divergent from the rest of the country. Only a story about a radical economic change can unite its current supporters with the supporters the party needs to win, because they are so far apart on other issues.

Race and class

It is a mistake to think that Labour can win power by telling a story about the country they want to create that is only focused on economic issues, while either talking separately about racial equality or ignoring it all together. Gary Younge recently wrote in the New Statesman that he wanted the left to “end the futile attempts to engage race and class separately.” He said: “They do not exist in silos but are two interdependent forces, among many, and they are either understood in relation to each other or are misunderstood completely.”

In his article Younge talks about how people from the BAME community are more likely to be in poorly paid service industry jobs that make them more at risk from Covid-19. He said: “For historical reasons, related to migration, some groups are more likely to be concentrated in the health service, public transport and care work, while the modern economy has created significant concentrations of certain ethnicities in cleaning, taxi driving and security.

“12.8 per cent of workers from Bangladeshi and Pakistani backgrounds are employed in public-facing transport jobs such as bus, coach and taxi driving, compared with 3.5 per cent of white people. These are all areas where workers are most at risk.”

Measures to improve the conditions for people in low paid, service industry jobs fit perfectly into the economic story that Labour wants to tell about the country, but are also part of the story about racial equality that Labour feels it needs to sideline. The two issues are fundamentally linked and can’t be talked about separately. Pushing discussion of racial equality to one side and labeling it as “identity politics” is a failure to understand the details of the story that Labour needs to tell.

Informing, not undermining, solidarity

As Younge said in his article: “The effort to relegate race, gender, sexual orientation, disability – the list goes on – to mere “identity politics” has ramped up of late. The disproportionate number of deaths among minorities, the spike in domestic violence during lockdown, the manner in which disabled people were marginalised at every step – all these factors exemplify the degree to which we have experienced this moment differently in material ways that are not, solely, about economic. Acknowledging that doesn’t undermine solidarity, it informs it.”

Labour should urgently find a story that it can connect racial equality with its economic message. Talking about racial equality is not separate from discussing jobs, education, health, economic distribution and regional inequality, all issues that Labour need to be talking about as part of their economic message to the voters. The two issues are fundamentally connected. There’s no need to separate out the “identity politics” that some voters don’t like from the economic message that they will like.

Labour needs to tell a powerful story that connects the reasons why it’s wrong that we had a statue of a slave trader in Bristol, to reasons why we have so much regional variation in job prospects, all the way through to why the economic gap between rich and poor is growing. Labour cannot tell a story that addresses some of these questions separately. It needs to tell a story that addresses them all together.

"File:Official portrait of Keir Starmer crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0

The Fall of the Red Wall by Steve Rayson shows the role that narrative played in Labour’s defeat

When the votes were counted after last year’s general election, and the Tories had won 41 historic Labour seats in the North and Midlands, it became clear that a realignment in politics had happened. 

Some of these seats had returned Labour MPs for over 100 years and were now returning Tory MPs despite being blighted by deindustrialization under Margaret Thatcher and austerity under David Cameron. Now that the dust has settled, we can begin to ask: why were ex-coal miners and factory workers turning their backs on Labour and voting Conservative?

This is the subject of a new book by Steve Rayson that is published today. The Fall of the Red Wall: 'The Labour Party no longer represents people like us' doesn’t seek simple answers to the complex question of how politics appeared to change so much in such a short time. It doesn’t reach for the obvious answers of “Brexit” and “Jeremy Corbyn”, but locates these in a wider story of social and political changes that were all brought to a head in December 2019.

The role of narrative

Rayson has conducted a lot of detailed research and thoroughly explains the causes of the fall of the Red Wall. He draws on a range of sources, from academic research to statements made by MPs, to focus groups, to polling, to articles by journalists. The book is certainly comprehensive. Rayson makes a lot of good points about what happened during the last election, but to save time I’m going to focus on the element that interested me the most: the role that narrative played in the fall of the Red Wall.

In Rayson’s words: “In traditional Labour constituencies across the Midlands and the North, a ‘never Tory’ generation put aside historic narratives of being Labour towns and Labour people and voted for the Conservatives.” He details how the dominant narrative of “Labour towns and Labour people” was defeated by a challenger narrative of “the Labour Party no longer represents people like us”. Again, this wasn’t caused by Brexit and Corbyn, although both were factors.

For many decades the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative had been weakening until it finally broke in the last general election. Many Red Wall voters’ sympathies had been with the Tories for some time, but they kept voting Labour because of the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative. It required a certain number of people to publicly voice their support for the Conservatives for the taboo of voting Tory to be broken. New stories about the Tories surging in the polls in former Red Wall seats finally caused the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative to collapse and voters’ preferences for the Tories to be revealed.

A long decline

The decline of the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative can be traced back to the 1980s and the decline of the trade unions that maintained this narrative. It was weakened by New Labour who pursued a new coalition of voters - more middle-class, more affluent, more centrist - and didn’t engage as much with Red Wall voters. New Labour thought they had no one else to vote for and, for a long time, they didn’t. This led to Red Wall voters feeling at best taken for granted or at worst looked down on by Labour’s metropolitan leadership.

This narrative was further weakened by people who were likely to have a strong preference for Labour leaving these constituencies. Younger, more liberal and more educated voters have moved to large cities where there are better job prospects. This had led to a demographic shift in Red Wall seats, making them older, less well educated and more socially conservative: i.e. much more like the typical Tory voter.

Rayson writes about how political changes also made it easier for voters to switch parties. Voters are more volatile now, Rayson writes: “party loyalty has declined over many years and we now live in an increasingly volatile political world. In the 2017 election 33% of people changed their vote from 2015. Over the four elections from 2005 to 2017 around 60% of people voted for different parties.”

Rayson also argues that more elections (EU elections, local elections, mayoral elections, referendums) make it easier for voters to experiment with switching parties before a general election. There is also the possibility of UKIP or the Brexit Party offering a half-way house for voters switching from Labour to the Tories. 

What next?

The Fall of the Red Wall mainly describes what happened, which is essential reading for anyone who cares about the fate of the Labour Party. What I was most interested in is the book’s final part: what next?

Rayson states that Labour needs a new narrative, which I strongly agree with, and that the lack of a coherent narrative was a major weakness of the 2019 campaign. He also agrees with a recent Labour Together report (which he cites in his book) that Labour needs to focus on an economic message, as left-of-centre economic views and dissatisfactions with our current economic system is one thing that unites the various disparate groups that Labour needs to win the votes of to get back into power.

The Fall of the Red Wall also makes the case that this needs to be more than a message, it needs to be a narrative. The story that Labour needs to tell must run deeper than economics, it needs to take into account how voters in the Red Wall and beyond see the world, their fears and their aspirations for the future. The story that Labour needs to tell needs to unite people in a shared vision of the country a Labour government will create.

Cultural divide

There are many challenges to this. Rayson states that: “in developing a new narrative Labour has to be cognisant of a significant divide on cultural issues. Analysis by Datapraxis for the Labour Together review indicates this divergence on social and cultural issues [between Red Wall voters and 2019 Labour voters] is growing. This presents a major challenge for Labour in developing a narrative that realms the audience’s sense of identity and reflects a sense of shared values.”

Rayson is not the first writer to point out the difference in values between former and current Labour voters. The generational aspect of this divide is not discussed enough, nor is the fact that Labour needs to hang on to young voters as the party's future and their activist base.

I was also hoping for more details of what the different values are, beyond the clear differences in views on patriotism, law and order and immigration. Understanding exactly what the values difference is will be crucial for the new Labour narrative.

Moving to meet Red Wall voters where they are

It’s not enough to just to look at how Labour’s current supporters are out step with the rest of the country on the issues of patriotism, law and order and immigration. The book shows that the voters in these Red Wall seat’s economic views are far to the left of the median voter, but their social views are far to the right. This allowed the Tories to appeal to them on social grounds with a message of Brexit, toughness on crime, and patriotism. 

Rayson makes a strong case about moving to meet Red Wall voters on social issues could alienate many voters because of how far to the right Red Wall voters are on social issues. This books chimes with a recent article by Lynsey Hanley who argues that: “Labour will win by changing minds – not pandering to rightwing voters” and is part of a wider body of evidence that Labour shouldn’t jump to the obvious conclusion from the loss of the 41 Red Wall seats.

Labour needs to know how to speak to Red Wall voters in a way that resonates with them. If Labour focuses simply on issues like patriotism, law and order and immigration to win back Red Wall voters they risk alienating the median voter (as well as Labour activists) as Red Wall voters are significantly to the right of the median voter on these issues.

My view on the narrative that Labour needs

The story that Labour needs to tell needs to offer more than moving the party closer to where the median voter is on the issues of patriotism, law and order, and immigration. Labour can wave the flag more, talk up the police (additional police has been Labour policy under Ed Miliband’s and Corbyn’s leadership) and bring back their “controls on immigration” mugs, but this won’t be enough to win over Red Wall voters.

I don’t think that many voters see a difference between what Miliband and Corbyn stood for in terms of patriotism, crime and controls on immigration. The difference between the two might have defined Labour’s civil war for the last five years or so, but from the outside it looks like Judean People’s Front Politics. Is Starmer seen as any different? He might be closer to the average voter (if not the Red Wall voter) on these issues, but is that a meaningful enough change?

My concern is that Labour is not appreciating the huge task ahead to winning back the votes that have been drifting away for most of my lifetime (and I’m not a young man). I don’t think that choosing Keir Starmer as Labour leader is a solution to the problems of Labour not being seen as representing Red Wall voters, despite the fact he’s from a different Labour tradition than Corbyn.

A step on the road towards reckoning with what went wrong

The publication of this book is a step on the road towards Labour reckoning with what went wrong last year. The detailed research and insights in this book highlight how the “Labour towns and Labour people” narrative crumbled. I hope this will be a wake up call to the fact that getting rid of Corbyn isn’t the answer to Labour’s problems. Labour needs a plan to win.

Understanding why the Red Wall fell and the role narrative plated in this fall is essential for understanding what Labour should do next. The Fall of the Red Wall is an essential tool for this as it outlines what the narrative that Labour needs to tell to start winning again might be like.

Labour is still a long way from having a strategy and narrative that can win. What The Fall of the Red Wall shows is that Labour needs to understand what went wrong and then start thinking about how to fix the problem. 

The Fall of the Red Wall: 'The Labour Party no longer represents people like us' is out today and can be purchased from Amazon.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

Ecofascism, Malthusian economists and why we need less fearful stories about the environment

Fear is a powerful motivating force. The fear of Covid-19 made us change our entire society very rapidly from one that seemed perfectly designed to spread the virus to one that is perfectly designed to contain it. 

It makes sense that fear would be a strong enough motivator to do the kind of society wide changes that are necessary to stop a climate disaster. The data tells a simple story: that if we don’t change our behaviour soon there will be huge impacts and massive suffering caused by climate change. Amping up the fear of this makes sense as a strategy to encourage the changes that are needed to prevent a climate catastrophe.

This seems self-evident, but decades of raising awareness in the hope that fear of a climate disaster would lead to a more environmentally friendly society have not worked. The story being told by the environmental movement has been consistent, but temperatures and CO2 levels keep rising.

Avoiding an oncoming train

A report from Futerra entitled Sell the Sizzle outlines the problems with a story that uses fear as a motivator for environmental action. The fear of danger is only a good motivator if the way to avoid danger is clear. The fear of an oncoming train works well as a motivator to avoid being hit by a train as the solution is simple: get off the train track.

A more recent example is Covid-19. Fear of coronavirus (and what it can do to society if it spreads unchecked) created social change because it's clear what you need to do to stop the spread of the virus: stay home. It’s that simple.

Sell the Sizzle says that when the solution to the frightening thing is not clear, the fear response produces a sense of resignation rather than action. Narratives about how we’re all doomed unless we change our lifestyles don’t work if it's not clear what we need to do.

Climate stories and white nationalism

The narrative of doom and gloom used by the environmental movement is creating more problems than just failing to motivate the change to society we need. It’s also feeding into the rise of far-right politics and white nationalism.

In an article for Gizmodo, Brian Kahn outlines the ways in which white nationalists have been using climate rhetoric. He describes Patrick Crusius, a white nationalist who killed 23 people in a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas, and a manifesto he posted on 8chan that contains “ideas central to the mainstream environmental movement.”

Crusius wrote: “[O]ur lifestyle is destroying the environment of our country. The decimation of the environment is creating a massive burden for future generations. Corporations are heading the destruction of our environment by shamelessly overharvesting resources.”

The rise of ecofascism

Kahn explains how rhetoric like that used by Crusius is part of a new trend in far-right politics towards “ecofascism,” a right wing ideology that links white nationalism with a twisted form of environmentalism. What ecofascism and the mainstream environmental movement have in common is they both tell a story of a society that is sick, dying and ultimately doomed. Both say: through our decadence we are destroying the world and we need to turn the clock back to a simpler, better time to avert a disaster.

The idea that stories about a looming environmental disaster should fuel the far-right makes sense when you think about how people react when they’re afraid. Fear of something bad happening can be a good motivator, to make someone stop smoking or go to the gym more, but fear also brings out the worst in us. It makes us act suddenly, or do things that if we were calmer we wouldn’t do.

Fear leads to other negative emotions such as anger and hatred. Anger at whoever caused us to be afraid. Hatred of the people who have awakened these fears. This is especially true when our fear relates to things like our homes, our children or our futures. Things we feel strongly about. Things that stories about environmental doom and gloom play off.

If everyone is afraid of environmental devastation in our future then they’re likely to want someone to blame, someone to be angry at or someone to hate. For a lot of people that is the corporations who have poisoned the planet or the politicians who have failed to constrain them. However, for some people their fear about the future is causing them to hate the people they already fear and hate: immigrants, poor people and people of colour. This is the fuel that sustains ecofascism.

“Overindulging in apocalyptic thinking”

In the Gizmodo article above, Kahn interviews Betsy Hartmann, a professor emeritus at Hampshire College, who studies the connections between white nationalism and environmentalism. Hartmann said: “There is a deeply problematic, apocalyptic discourse about climate and conflict refugees that is quite common in liberal policy circles and even documentaries.”

She also said: “The environmental movement in the U.S. has, I would say, overindulged in apocalyptic thinking for a long time. There’s that kind of apocalyptic bridge and then the nature-race-purity bridge. What’s so horrifying and shocking to me is that these [far-right] manifestos are openly Malthusian environmentalist arguments. I don’t think we saw that quite as much before in the armed white nationalist movement.”

18th century economists and 21st century problems

Mentioning Thomas Robert Malthus is interesting. Malthus was a cleric and economist who had “ideas” about the problems of a growing population. In his 1798 book An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus set out his thesis that people, mainly poor people, would breed and breed and there would not be enough food. 

Malthus predicted mass starvation in the near future and said that charity, or state aid, to help the poor would only make things worse as any attempt to alleviate the suffering of the poor would lead to more poor people and thus not enough food. The solution, according to Malthus, was to stop people breeding so much.

A lot of problematic environmental stories that are fueling ecofascism are descended from Malthus’s ideas. When we tell stories about how there aren’t enough resources on planet Earth to sustain the human race at the rate at which we consume, we risk drifting into telling Malthusian stories about how the problem is that there are too many people. This leads people to suggest 18th century economic solutions to 21st century problems, i.e. there should be less people. It’s easy to see how this fuels ecofascism.

A question of distribution

The problem with Malthus’s work is that it’s too mathematical. He only considered that there were too many people and not enough food. He didn’t look at the social or political reasons why there wasn’t enough food. He didn’t consider distribution or power structures that keep people hungry. 

Eleanor Penny said it best in a recent essay on Malthus when she said: “His problem is more fundamental: he framed human suffering as purely a scientific and mathematical question - recasting the effects of a brutal economic system as the dispassionate mechanics of nature. He rewrote a political problem of production and distribution as a biological problem of reproduction and consumption - distracting from its causes, exculpating its architects from any responsibility, and blinding us to possible solutions.”

Modern Malthusian environmental stories

The environmental stories we tell risk drifting into these overly simplistic Malthusian narratives that can fuel ecofascism. Stories that paint a picture of a world where poor people of colour have been driven from their homes by a climate disaster and have to move to richer, whiter nations are Malthusian.

These stories make us - those of us in wealthy countries - worry about how our nation will accommodate climate refugees. They make us worry that there won’t be enough to go around in the climate-addled future. They make us frightened of poor people, people of colour and migrants. They fuel ecofascism.

We tell these stories with good intentions, to motivate people to change the world for the better, but stories about climate refugees are only fueling the fear of migrants that spread white nationalism and fascism. If the story is that the problem with the environment is that there are too many people, then we all know what a fascist solution for the problem of too many people is.

Hartmann said when interviewed by Kahn: “Using this highly militarized and stereotyped Malthusian discourse about poor people of color is dangerous and counterproductive.” She added that: “I would say the internet and right-wing media certainly plays a role in spreading them. But we can’t ignore how Malthusian ideas about overpopulation and the environment are taught in high schools all over the United States.”

From Malthus to Michael Moor

The lesson to learn is that we need to tell stories about the environment that are more complicated. Stories that take into account social and political issues and not just the fact that we are consuming too much or that there are too many people.

There is a serious risk of the stories we tell about the environment - with the best of intentions of improving the world for everyone - spread a message that white nationalists and ecofascists can use to spread their ideas. Penny said: “Everywhere we read lazy affirmations that we are the problem; humanity and its fatal tendency to multiply is plundering the earth of its natural wealth.” Even Michael Moore is at it in his new documentary Planet of the Humans, which lays the blame for the worsening environment on there being too many people.

Somewhere to jump to

As the Sell the Sizzle report found, promoting fear without a plan a clear plan for what we’re changing into to avoid disaster doesn’t work. We can’t jump out of the way of the train without somewhere to jump to. If we are going to use fear of an environmental disaster in the stories we tell to motivate change then we need to identify where we’re jumping to. If it’s not clear, people will blame the wrong people or people in general for the looming environmental disaster, or reach for the usual scapegoats.

We need somewhere to jump to. We need to talk up the positive aspects of the new society that we are going to build that will be fairer, greener, healthier and happier.

Jumping towards a solarpunk future

Recent examples of stories about positive vision of a future can be found in solarpunk: an art, literary and design movement that is centered showing what a greener, fair future might be like. Its rebellion against the dystopian futures of cyberpunk, a genre very much concerned with frightening narratives about environmental devastation. Solarpunk gives us something to aspire to whilst showing us what a better future would be like.

There are many problems with fearful environmental narratives. They don’t motivate us to change society for the better, they promote at best nihilism about the future and at worst ecofascism. We need better environmental stories.

The solution to too much pessimism is some optimism. We don’t need stories with a naive optimism that things will just get better. We need stories that say that if we all pull together, a better world for everyone can be achieved.

"Extinction Rebellion-11" by juliahawkins123 is licensed under CC BY 2.0 

Why Labour needs a narrative about how the country can rebuild better after lockdown

Recently, I wrote about how the Labour Party needs a new narrative to start winning again. Labour needs to tell a story, which connects with the electorate, about how things would be different under a Labour government. This story needs to resonate with people outside the echo chambers of left-wing social media and reach out to people across the country.

This needs to be a story about how things will be better after the Covid-19 crisis. As I write we are still in lockdown, the virus is a major threat, people have lost of their jobs, the economy is likely to experience a huge contraction and there is no clear sign of when we’re likely to get back to anywhere near normal. Right now, people need hope to get them through this difficult time.

What would give us hope is a narrative about how the world will be better post lockdown. We don’t need a story about how we’ll get back to normal. Normal wasn’t very good for a lot of people. It wasn’t good for the people with low paid insecure work. It wasn’t good for the people on Universal Credit who are struggling unable to feed their families. It wasn’t good for the people living in poor-quality housing. It wasn’t good for the people who don’t have anywhere to live at all.

The planet cannot afford for us to go back to normal

Normal wasn’t good for the environment. We have less than 12 years to make some really serious changes to the way we live if we’re going to avert the worse of the environmental catastrophe. Before March this year, it didn’t look like it was possible for human society to change so dramatically. Then we found that, given the will to act, huge social changes can be delivered quickly. The planet cannot afford for us to go back to normal after the Covid-19 crisis. We need a new normal, for the sake of both the environment and the people who inhabit it.

There are encouraging signs that some people within the Labour Party are thinking about the need to rebuild differently after the Covid-19 crisis. In a recent Guardian article former Labour leader and current Shadow Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change Ed Miliband said that “the current moment is a contemporary equivalent of what happened after 1945.”

He added that: “It’s never too early to start thinking about the future, to think about what kind of world we want to build as we emerge from this crisis. I think we owe it to have a sort of reassessment of what really matters in our society, and how we build something better for the future.”

Miliband gave a few more specifics saying: “I think we should be aiming for the most ambitious climate recovery plan in the world,” and that: “That should be nothing less than the government’s ambition. The old argument that you can have economic success or environmental care is just completely wrong.”

Engaging young voters

The need for this to be a green recovery is especially pressing for a key group of voters, a group that has remained loyal to Labour through Miliband’s and Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and the ups and downs of Brexit: the young. Of course in British politics, the young is everyone under 45. I don’t feel young, but apparently I am, which is nice.

The divide between young and old is one of the starkest dividing lines in politics. The young generally voted Remain and are more engaged with Black Lives Matter and trans rights. On the whole, the young favour more left-wing economic policies and, crucially, care more about the environment than the old. The environment is a key issue for us young voters and leading with this is a good way for Labour to keep the young onside.

The young are also much more likely to be hit hardest by the recession that is currently unfolding (just as we were more likely to be hit hardest by the last one). A recent study from the Resolution Foundation found that more than 600,000 more young people could become unemployed this year because of coronavirus.

Own the future

A narrative about how the country could be a better, fairer, greener place after Covid-19 is what young people need now to give them hope that something good can come from the suffering that the coronavirus has unleashed. While Tories are struggling with the present - enforcing the lockdown, keeping the economy on life support, dealing with whatever stupid thing Dominic Cummings has done this week - Labour need to own the future. They need to tell a story about what happens next.

This story will energise young voters who are already fired up about Labour. It will also reassure them that Kier Starmer’s Labour party values their support as much as Corbyn’s Labour did. It will also offer them encouragement that issues that they are concerned about, from social justice to the environment, are the ones a Labour government will champion.

A story about what a better post-Covid-19 world is what the country needs right now. It’s a story that can transcend the group of people who already support Labour, break out of the left-wing social media echo chambers and bring the country together behind the vision of a Labour government.

Does the left live in a bubble?

The day after the 2019 general election, Nick Cohen tweeted: “Never mistake your Twitter feed for your country”. He was implying that those of us on the left, rooting for Jeremy Corbyn to win the election, were out of touch with the average voter as we’re cocooned in an internet echo chamber filled with people who agree with us. 

I don’t make a habit of agreeing with Nick Cohen, but he did have a point. I had mistaken my Twitter feed for my country. I had mistaken my country for one where people cared about other people. A country where we didn’t vote in a posh buffoon simply because it was the fastest way to make Brexit go away, so that most people can go back to ignoring politics while everything else gets worse.

I wanted a Corbyn government that would tackle rising homelessness, child poverty, crumbling schools and the looming environmental disaster. The country (or at least large parts of it) had a different idea. I had made a painful mistake. If I could move to my Twitter feed I would.

Does the left live in a bubble?

It’s not just the day after a general election that I feel like this, although it’s particularly strong on those days. The left is frequently accused of living in a bubble. Another example is this Helen Lewis piece claiming (supported by a lot of evidence) that the Twitter electorate isn’t the real electorate.

Lewis cites the example of the response to Rebecca Long-Bailey’s use of the phrase “progressive patriotism” in her pitch to be the next Labour leader, and how this was seen by some on the left as dangerously close to racism. Lewis states that “to read so directly across from ‘patriotism’ to ‘racism’ is a fringe position.”

I had criticism of the use of this phrase, but as Lewis said: “Some 67 percent of Britons describe themselves as ‘very’ or ‘slightly’ patriotic. Telling two-thirds of the country that they are secretly racist is a courageous electoral strategy.” I guess my dislike of the idea of progressive patriotism is proof, if anymore where needed, that I’m out or touch with the general voter and live in a bubble.

Personal bubbles

I wonder if this is mainly a by-product of the fact that most of our politics is done online? I don’t get my political news, views and discussion from BBC news bulletins. I get it mainly from the internet, and predominantly from what is served up to me by Twitter and Facebook algorithms.

These algorithms look at the things that I read, the post I interact with and the people I follow to build up a picture of me. They then filter the content that Facebook or Twitter shows to me to reflect my interests: i.e. left-wing politics. This personalisation of content is done to keep my attention focused on Facebook or Twitter for longer so that they can show me more ads, which is how they make their money. 

This all seems harmless until a general election rolls around and I’m left bewildered by the fact that everyone didn’t vote for the party offering more money for schools, hospitals and homelessness prevention, despite the fact that all this was very well received by my Twitter feed.

“The common ground of news”

Adrienne LaFrance said, in an article for Nieman Reports: “The fear that personalization will encourage filter bubbles by narrowing the selection of stories is a valid one, especially considering that the average internet user or news consumer might not even be aware of such efforts.” 

LaFrance interviewed Judith Donath, author of “The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online” and a researcher affiliated with Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, who said: “You may have friends or colleagues, and you read the same things in common. You may decide different things about it. Then you debate with those people. If you’re not even seeing the same news story, it leaves you with a much narrower set of people with whom you share that common ground. You’re losing the common ground of news.”

This is what happened to me. Twitter wasn’t showing me the posts from the people who thought that all the nice things that I wanted from a Corbyn government were a waste of money, or posts from the people who wanted to “get Brexit done”, or the people who thought Corbyn was insufficiently patriotic to be Prime Minister. If Twitter had shown me these comments I would have logged off in a sulk and they wouldn’t have been able to show me more ads for hotels in Croatia.

Techno-fixes

There is a technological fix to this, as explained in this Ted Talk on filter bubbles by Eli Pariser. He said that the issue is that Twitter and Facebook give their users an information diet consisting of only things they like, which he calls “information desserts”. However, as any parent knows, it's best to give your children a balanced diet, not just what they like.

Sometimes children need to be given things they don’t want to eat for their own good. I’m referring to us all as children because that’s how the tech platforms treat us and it’s also, frankly, how we act online. According to this idea, it would be good if Twitter showed me some posts of people yelling about how immigrants are stealing the country and we need to vote Tory to stop it, even if I wouldn’t like it.

In principal I’m in favour of this, as long as there's a Daily Express reader somewhere having videos by Hbomberguy dropped into his timeline after he tweets “Get Brexit done” a certain number of times.

Would this work?

I can see the benefit of a varied information diet. According to Pariser it’s a diet of: “Some information vegetables. Some information desserts.” Vegetables, in this case, being people saying that Corbyn is a softy, unpatriotic, metropolitan, immigrant loving liberal and desserts being people saying that maybe the government should do something about all the people sleeping in the bus station every evening.

I’m a little skeptical if this would work. There is lots of evidence that facts (or other people’s opinions) don’t change our minds. Although I am heartened by this story of a young man who fell down a YouTube hole, became alt-right and then changed his views when he encountered left-wing YouTube.

Is this a left-wing problem?

The Facebooks and Twitters of this world might be creating filter bubbles through personalising our timelines, but that’s not specifically a left-wing problem. Everyone is on the internet, even my 69-year-old mum (hi mum, I’ll reply to your email about socks after I’m done writing this).

The accusation of living in a bubble is mainly levelled at the left, specifically the radical left. You don’t see Brexiter, Tory voters being accused of living in a conservative bubble where everyone is frothing about immigrants or Cultural-Marxism destroying Britain. No one says they should be given information vegetables in the form of Owen Jones or Laurie Penny columns.

The views of people who complain about immigrants or metropolitan elites are taken to be common sense. Occasionally, people point out that common sense can be wrong, but that still accepts right-wing views as the default position of most people. I guess if right-wing is the default position then the fact that I disagree means that I do live in a bubble and I’m disconnected from reality.

Centre or right?

Maybe the majority of people in the country are conservative. The evidence for this is a few minutes looking at the supposed “centre ground” of British politics. In January this year, former Liberal Democrat leader Tim Farron wrote an article in the Guardian about what “progressives” need to do to win. In this he said: “At present, Labour’s brand is so terrifying that it pushes voters into Conservative arms.” From reading this you would think that 2019 Labour manifesto includes pledges for a massive war to liberate Palestine, the abolishment of prisons and gender, and confiscating all money above what the average Labour voter earns.

I can see why most people might find that programme a bit too spicy for their bland British sensibilities. However, only the most brain-dead, Daily Mail mainlining, Little Englander would think that’s what a Corbyn government would have been like. Then again, it’s probably what Tim Farron, supposedly in the centre of British politics, thinks a Corbyn government would have been like. Apparently, money for teachers and nurses, helping the homeless, cheaper public transport and green jobs is “terrifying”.

My bubble is my happy place

If you haven’t guessed from my tone so far, I’m not happy with the world outside my bubble. I don’t think most British people are Nigel Farrage, but if this is Tim centre-of-politics Farron’s reality then I don’t want to live in it. So, I’m currently looking at moving to my Twitter feed and I must say that, judging by the pictures, some of these flats in Animal Crossing are very nice.

I don’t know where this leaves the Labour Party. The sad truth is that we do have to win over some people who think that Tim Farron is right and thought Corbyn was so scary that they had to vote Tory. I don’t like saying it, and I’m going to wash my mouth out with soap afterward, but after two defeats for Corbyn I’m starting to think that there aren’t enough craft beer drinkers in Britain to vote in socialism.

That doesn’t mean Labour has to give up on socialism and spend their time chasing some hypothetical centre ground voter. There are stories that can unite the country and break the left out of our Twitter bubbles. Next time I’m going to look into what these are.

The Labour needs an effective story to start winning again

In the last four British elections whatever the Labour Party was selling, the UK wasn’t buying. Be it centrist Gordon Brown, soft-left Ed Miliband or radical left Jeremy Corbyn, the British electorate wasn’t interested.

Whatever Labour tries it doesn’t work. They have policies, media plans, electoral strategies, but it doesn’t all come together. There’s been something crucial lacking: a story. A story that Labour can tell that ties up all their ideas and policies into a vision for the future that the voters can get behind.

Both Miliband and Corbyn tried to tell stories about where the country had gone wrong under Tory rule, but these failed to capture the public’s imagination. Both had popular policies, but the story that united them into a vision was lacking. Now that Labour has a new leader, Keir Starmer, the party needs to think about the story it’s going to tell.

Where stories are needed

A good place to start looking for a new story is the two debates of the last few years where Labour’s lack of an effective story has had the most severe impact: Brexit in England and Independence in Scotland.

Brexit and Scottish Independence have been a pox on Labour’s house. They cut across Labour’s voting coalition and have divided the party. This is because the stories that are being told on either side of these great divides don’t mesh with the stories that Labour is telling. The stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence concern national identity, a subject that Labour is not comfortable telling stories about. Labour is much more comfortable telling stories about class or social justice than national identity.

Stories and national identity

National identity is the story of the nation itself. The story of the USA is that it was created in a revolution to give its citizens life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. What actually happened in American history is something else, but that doesn’t stop the story of America being a great story. One that has made America, for better or worse, the world’s flagship democracy. This story is deeply embedded in American culture, seen in media as diverse as The West Wing and An American Tale.

Other countries have stories bound up in their nation’s identity. The story of Israel is that it’s the promised land of the Jewish people as laid out in the Tora and the Old Testament and that after the Holocaust, it’s the only place where Jews can be safe. Britain and Scotland have stories behind their national identity too, which I’ll come back to.

Stories of national identity and political campaigns

The story a political party or movement is telling to win over voters needs to work with the story of the nation. Brexit works well as a political story. It’s the story that says: the country is being stolen from the good, honest citizens by a nefarious elite for their own enrichment. Again, whether it’s true or not is immaterial. It’s a great story, which people believe, and it inspires them to vote a certain way.

The story that Scottish Independence is telling is that Scotland is held back, or ground down, by being a part of Great Britain. You can interpret this story in a number of ways. You can believe that Britain is too conservative, or that Britain wants to keep Scotland at heel out of spite, or any other reason why attaching Scotland to Britain (mainly England) is bad for Scotland. What’s important is that the story tells of how much better Scotland would be if it were an independent country.

You can argue about the evidence to back up this story, which is that the independence campaign was on one level. However, it is undeniably a compelling story about Scotland that motivates people to vote for independence.

Political campaigns and counter narratives

Political campaigns are stories. Remain and Leave are both stories about Britain. Yes or No to independence are stories about Scotland. For a story to win an election there are two things to avoid.

The first is the counter-narrative to your campaign’s story that can neutralise it. For the Scottish Independence, it was a story of how much better Scotland is off in the union. The story is about the money that comes to Scotland for being part of the world’s fifth largest economy. The Scottish Tories push this counter-narrative the most. Scottish Labour has struggled to tell this story as many Labour activists don’t want to be telling the same story as the Conservatives.

Contradictions to political stories

The second factor that can cause the narrative of a political campaign to become unstuck is anything that can contradict the story that you are telling. For Scottish Independence this was anything that showed that Scotland was not a viable nation outside Britain, such as disputes on whether an independent Scotland could use the Pound or could produce its own currency.

These contradictions can be more damaging than an effective counter-narrative as they lead voters to stop believing in your story. This is why the Scottish Independence referendum became an argument over the facts that support the independence story, because if they didn’t and instead contradicted the story, then the story loses its power.

Lessons from the Scottish Independence campaign

Labour got what it wanted out of the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum because of the interplay of these two factors. The story of Scottish Independence had too many contradictions. Boring stuff such as currency arrangements undermined the story the pro-Scottish Independence side was telling.

At the same time, Gordon Brown was able to lay out the counter-narrative. He was the only British politician who could tell this counter-narrative without adding to an element of the pro-independence narrative that all British political parties are the same in wanting to keep Scotland shackled to Britain.

These two factors coming together may not happen again. If Labour are committed to keeping Scotland in the Union, then they need to come up with their own counter-narrative to that of independence. The only alternative is to use the same counter-narrative as the Scottish Tories, which only fuels the independence narrative.

The left and stories of national identity

The counter-narrative to Scottish Independence that Labour need to develop (to either win seats in Scotland again or prevent Scotland leaving the Union) needs to factor in Scottish national identity. Labour also needs a story about British (or maybe English) national identity. Labour have no effective counter-narrative to Brexit and no way of contradicting the story of Brexit, which is why Brexit won the 2016 referendum and has divided Labour’s electoral coalition since.

Labour (or the left more broadly) need to tell a story about British national identity if we’re going to start winning again. Tony Blair, for all his faults, was able to tell a story about how Britain was casting off the shackles of the past 18 years. No longer will crusty old Tories be in charge. Britain was becoming a young, energetic, dynamic nation. It helped that Brit Pop and ‘Cool Britainnia’ was happening at the same time.

Critiques of stories about national identity

On the left, we have many critiques of the story of Britain. We’re good at pointing out how the British Empire was founded on imperialism, racism and exploitation. We’re also good at saying that nostalgia for a past that didn’t exist as we collectively remember it is holding us back from tackling the challenges of the 21st century.

Now don’t get me wrong. These critiques are important. They can be used to contradict political narratives or build counter-narratives. They are also important in recognising that reality is more complicated than a story, which mustn’t be lost sight of. However, the left needs to tell a story about national identity that is different to that of the populist right, or stories about national identity will be used as a weapon against us.

The left is uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity

The left feels uncomfortable about telling stories about national identity. We prefer stories about groups of people and not nations. Stories about groups of people (bound by class, region, culture, race, religion, sexuality identity, age or anything else) are important and should not be neglected. Again, they will inform the counter-narrative to the populist right that must be laid out.

Nations are made up of groups of people and we need to find a story that means all the people of Britain can live together. Most people in Britain identify with the nation and its story, not just the disaffected white old people who voted for Brexit, so the left needs to find a way to tell a story about national identity.

Labour needs to find its story

When faced with the narrative of Brexit, Labour wasn’t part of the counter-narrative - that Brexit is a bad idea and that it’s good to be in the EU - and Labour were unable to contradict the Brexit narrative. However, Labour were not telling the Brexit story and thus the Tories were able to use this story - that disconnected politicians were trying to thwart the will of the people - to convince over enough voters to win the 2019 general election.

The problem that faced Labour was that the stories of Brexit and Scottish Independence split the Labour coalition. Labour was unable to choose a side between the narrative and counter-narrative for either, and have been caught in the middle of it.

Labour doesn’t need to tell the Brexit story, but it does need to find a way to contradict it or lay out a counter-narrative to start winning again. The same is true for Scottish Independence. Contradicting a story about something as nebulous as the future of a nation is difficult, so Labour need a counter-narrative. This counter-narrative will have to involve a story about national identity.

Brexit has happened and a second Scottish Independence referendum looks unlikely during the coronavirus outbreak, but Labour still lacks a story they can tell to convince the voters to buy what Labour is selling. A story about national identity. Unless Keir Starmer can come up with an effective story that includes British and Scottish national identity then he too will lose elections as his three predecessors did.

Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.

Labour is trapped by the split over Scottish independence in Scotland and England

The further North one travels the harder it is for Labour to win. London is a Labour stronghold, but in the last election the Tories won across large swathes of the Midlands and the North. Travel north of England and you get to a land where Labour haven’t won a decent share of the seats since the 2010 general election.

Labour lost badly in Scotland in last year’s general election. However, Labour’s problems there pre-date Jeremy Corbyn’s term as leader. The problem goes back to Labour standing shoulder to shoulder with the Tories in the 2014 Scottish Independence referendum and how Labour dealt with the rise of the SNP in Holyrood before that. In the 2010 general election, Labour won 41 seats in Scotland the SNP won six. In 2015 the SNP won 56 seats to Labour’s one. Since then, Scotland has been beyond Labour’s reach.

The problems Labour is facing in its former heartlands are worse in Scotland and the factors that led to Labour’s woes have been fermenting north of the border for longer. Last December Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath, the seat of former Prime Minister Gordon Brown where Labour once boasted a majority of 23,009, was won by a SNP nominated candidate. (Although candidate Neale Hanvey was suspended from the SNP for alleged anti-semitic social media posts.)

In Holyrood, and in Scottish seats in Westminster, the SNP rule supreme. Will Labour ever be able to win in Scotland again? Can they stop the all-defeating Scottish National Party?

 The success of the SNP 

The SNP’s success is partly due to their effectiveness as a political party. Whilst I am personally opposed to all forms of nationalism, from angry Trump nationalism to softly spoken SNP nationalism, I must acknowledge that Nicola Sturgeon is a very talented politician and a great leader for the SNP. She combines a wild passion for change with a calm reasonableness that allows her to not only bridge, but to transcend, the gap between idealistic and pragmatic politics.

The SNP are able to present themselves as lefty (or at least liberal) in contrast to the underlying conservatism of the English and thus appeal to left-wing Scotts who are tired of being ruled over by right-wing governments they didn’t vote for. At the same time, they are appealing to the voters moved by nationalism: a politics of identity based on place of birth and a sense of grievance that the people born in said place have been betrayed by a culturally (and physically) distant elite.

The SNP are also in power in Holyrood and using the authority of being in government to increase their support, as all governments attempt to do. At the same time they are telling a story about how Scotland can be a radically different country, if the SNP are allowed to follow their transformative agenda. They are both technocrats and populists; passionate and pragmatic. They’re something to everyone, or at least most Scots.

Anti-English hatred

The SNP benefits from an underlying current of anti-Englishness in Scotland that can spill over into outright hatred. The SNP themselves aren’t frothing with hatred like many nationalists the world over, but they do benefit from being the electoral home of anti-English hatred. This allows them to appear moderate and reasonable whilst winning the support of people who are very angry about the status quo.

There isn’t a party more nationalist than the SNP in Scotland. No one is biting at their flank, accusing them of being too moderate and peeling off the more hardcore (or more angry) proponents of Scottish nationalism. This allows the SNP to reach out to undecided Scotts, the wavering people who could decide the outcome of a future independence vote. 

These voters are a crucial part of the SNP coalition and they depend on them for their victories in Westminster and Holyrood elections. The SNP don’t have the risk of being the victims of a rear-guard action. I do wonder how they would manage their message, if they had a more aggressive, openly hateful of the English, nationalist rival to contend with.

Labour is caught between union and independence

The SNP’s strength is that they can tailor their message to appeal to the crucial swing voters in Scotland, safe in the knowledge that committed nationalists are behind them. Whereas Scottish Labour is trapped between supporters of independence and supporters of the union, just as Labour is caught between Leave and Remain voters. 

Labour is not seen as sufficiently pro or anti-Scottish independence. The parties that have done well in Scotland have a clear position: the SNP for independence and the Scottish Tories (once on the verge of extinction) for the union. Despite Labour moving to the left, they are still stuck in the middle of a political divide.

Emotive issues

This is splitting the Labour vote is causing electoral ruin. The independence/union fault runs across the middle of the Labour voting coalition, just as the Leave/Remain faultline does. In England and Wales, the Tories revived their fortunes after the disastrous 2019 European elections by unambiguously choosing a side of the divide and leveraging it for all it was worth.

Scottish independence (or Brexit) are very emotive issues. They concern how people see the future of their country. On such emotive issues, voters response well to passion and not moderation. This isn’t the 90s, where being dispassionate and shunning ideology was the way to show you were serious about politics.

This is an age of emotive stories about what the future should be like and Labour is losing out by not having a firm stance on the most important issue affecting Scotland. For Scottish independence (and Brexit) Labour needs to find the side it feels passionate about and strongly articulate this to the voters. 

Angry English Brexiteers 

The issue of Scottish independence is not only divisive in Scotland, but in England as well. If Scotland were to leave the union, it would be a radical change to the United Kingdom. In many ways the country would cease to exist and we would become a new country. Thus English people’s views on Scottish independence is tied up with other highly emotive political debates that concern how we see the future of the country. 

From speaking to English people about Scottish independence the split of opinion (roughly) follows the same divide as English people’s views on Brexit. However, not in the way that you would think. Remainers tend to be more pro-Scottish Independence and Brexiteers more pro-union. Being able to leave pan-national political unions it appears, doesn’t extend to the Scots.

English Brexiteers really don’t like the SNP. Not all of them feel this way, but for many a Brexiteer mentioning the SNP gets their blood up faster than calling the British Empire a racist project or criticizing nostalgia for the Blitz Spirit. The root of this objection to the SNP is that they are seen as anti-patriotic. Their fundamental political goal is the destruction of the United Kingdom, or least it's irrevocable change, which is antithetical to the English.

Anger about the Barnett Formula

In addition to this, the SNP exists to campaign for Scotland. They’re seen as wanting to get more than Scotland’s fair share, and there’s nothing that makes an English person angry than the thought of someone, who isn’t them, (maybe, gosh, someone who is different to them) getting more than their fair share).

This is tied up in anger about the Barnett Formula and how public money is allocated to Scotland. The Barnett Formula seems quite reasonable to me (it will obviously cost more to run an ambulance service in the Scottish Highlands than in East London) however, many English people see the SNP’s advocating for Scotland as nothing but naked greed at the expense of English taxpayers. 

English Remainers and pro-EU Scottish nationalists 

English Remainers are different. They’re generally more in favour of Scottish independence and some are even more vocally pro-SNP. I have seen some Labour supporting English Remainers praising the SNP when Labour make noises about accepting the referendum result and listening to Labour supporters who voted for it. This is usually tied up with English Remainers claiming they are politically homeless.

The SNP have won affection from English Remainers by doing the two things they want most from English political parties: being pro-EU and winning. The SNP does this well and no English political party can muster both.

My view 

I’m an Englishman (anyone who has heard my ridiculous RP accent will know I am incurably English). I was born in the Midlands and live in London. However, my family has roots in Scotland, something that was acknowledged by giving me the Scottish name Alastair. As such I have fondness for Scotland as part of the United Kingdom that goes beyond what I feel for other regions, even my native Midlands.

Personally, I am opposed to Scottish independence. I see any form of nationalism as stoking the fires of strife between people. I feel no strong national identity or attachment to the nation state. I don’t want to make more nations, but less of them. I want to see humanity united in a common union of us all, although I’m not sure what this would look like as a political project.

Also, if Brexit has taught us anything, it’s that unwinding political unions along a timeline that satisfies voters hungry for immediate change is a waste of time that could be better spent doing anything else. Like more Olympics and Eurovisions, everyone loves those.

England divided

It’s my strong belief as an Englishman that the issue of Scottish independence says something about how we see ourselves and our country. On one side we have those who believe that your national identity, as determined by where you were born, is important and want these national identities to be protected. Protecting national identity includes taking Britain out of the EU, but keeping the United Kingdom together. It also includes limiting immigration and preserving British culture as it is. 

On the other side we have those who are skeptical of national identity and value political projects that transcend nations. They believe that national cultures are enhanced by the mixing of people and the changes this brings. Their belief in this includes supporting parties whose purpose is tearing up existing nation states, so long as they preserve the overall goal of maintaining the political projects that transcend nations.

The way forwards

If Labour is going to form a majority government ever again then it needs to be able to win in Scotland. Now that Labour has a new leader, Keir Starmer must make winning back Scotland a priority if he is serious about winning power in Westminster. Labour needs a position on Scottish independence that shows passion and that speaks to Scots. Half measures will not be enough. 

Labour’s problem in Scotland speaks to a bigger problem facing Labour across the entire United Kingdom. The problem is that Labour don’t have a story they can tell that speaks to people across the country, a story that makes the voters desire a Labour government. This story needs to include Scottish identity and go beyond it to include all national identity. How can Labour tell such a story? That’s what I will dive into next time.

Truth, stories and pain: how do we know what is real?

This is a story that is made up of other stories. Many long stories are smaller stories pieced together. Star Wars is made up of the story of two droids escaping Tatooine, then the story of the heroes surviving inside the Death Star and finally the story of the battlestation’s destruction. Similarly, the news is the story of our civilization told through smaller stories about power cuts or votes in parliament.

This story begins not long after I finished university, when I was caught in the nether world of recent-graduate unemployment. I paraphrase Ronan Harris of Futurepop group VNV Nation: I was so far from the shores of studenthood I had left behind, still far from the shores of employment I had yet to reach. I got very good at playing Worms United on an old PS1 that I found in the basement.

At the time I was an angry young man and the focus of my anger was religion. I had recently read Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and was fired up to tell all religious people, of whatever faith, that they were wrong and that they needed to embrace the objective truth of science. Preferably through watching Richard Dawkins documentaries on DVD, which I owned quite a lot of. I know now that this attitude of superiority and rudeness to people who think differently is not helpful. I am still very much an atheist, but I do not feel the need to declare this to everyone I meet.

At the time, there was a story I told myself about who I was. The story was simple: through my life and learning I had come to see the truth of the universe: there was no bearded man in the sky who had made everything, no paternalistic father figure or jealous supernatural tyrant watching over us. I believed that the material world was all there was; no spirits or ghosts or angels or demons. My life via Scout Group church services and internet atheist forums had brought me to an understanding of this fundamental truth of the universe. It was a story that was incredibly important to me. The story was me.

Then I moved in with a group of former students in the same position as me. A group that included a High Anglican, who was considering a career in the priesthood of the Church of England, a Roman Catholic and a man who followed a diverse pantheon of gods and other supernatural beings drawn from a variety of faiths that included Buddha, nature spirits and the Norse god Loki, amongst others.

There is a finite number of hours that bored adults can play Worms United for, and so eventually we started arguing. A lot. About everything. Gradually, and through many shouting matches, something dawned on me. They were as smart as I was, probably smarter. There was not a veil of ignorance protecting their worldview that I needed to puncture. Not only that, but they had stories about their lives that had led them to be the people they were, just as I did.

This led me to think: who is the arbiter of objective truth? How do we know what is true and what is not?

In their book Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – And Why Things Are Better Than You Think, Dr Hans Rolsing, Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund laid out ten simple methods of defining the truth. Their tips (such as avoiding comparing extremes, remembering that things can be bad and getting better, avoiding lonely numbers and avoiding single perspectives) are useful for not being misled by eye-catching dramatic headlines, but they do not help tackle questions such as “is God real?”

Dr Rosling et al’s Factfulness ties in with post-enlightenment thinking, which claims that truth can be found in the scientific method. This appealed to me as an atheist, but the question of the existence or non-existence of God remains impervious to scientific investigation. We are no closer to a definitive answer to the question than the enlightenment thinkers were.

Technology companies claim that they have found the truth of humanity through big data. All the information gathered through our devices betrays the truth of who we are. We are more ourselves when we are alone with our phones then we are with anyone else. Big data reveals preferences and patterns of behaviour that even the most probing focus group cannot uncover. However, big data may reveal truths about human behaviour, but not about the universe.

I could not prove objectively that I was right, and that God or Loki did not exist. I did not stop being an atheist, and I still am. However, I came to see the story of my life not as a journey towards discovering a fundamental truth about the universe, but as a story of finding my truth about the universe, which was one amongst many. It was the only way to get along in a small house with no jobs, no money and little to do.

The story of my first post-university houseshare is now key to how I see myself. It includes the story that made me a hardcore Dawkins-esque atheist, but it also includes other important lessons about life such as the benefits of personal growth, the value of re-examining your thinking and the importance of friendship. This is a better story.

As well as my opinions about atheism, I have deeply held political views about the importance of being tolerant towards other people of different races, religions, sexualities, gender identities, subcultures and interests. I believe it is important to be respectful of other people and their personal stories.

The story of my post-university houseshare fitted into this. It was a story about how I was open-minded and receptive to a plurality of views and lifestyles. We cannot be certain that God did or did not cause the Big Bang, even though I believe he did not (or at least we cannot be as certain about the origins of everything as I am about the fact that the table I am leaning on exists). This also applies to the question of whether Loki is real or how tangible the spirit of Mother Nature is. I have my own beliefs, but I do not have a direct line to the objective truth of the universe. As we cannot know if our beliefs are the objective truth, it is important to be open to new ideas and to seeing the world from other people’s point of view.

There was another story that I told myself that factored into this. It was about all of history and how it could be expressed as the story the powerful trying to exploit the weak and the weak crying out in anger and frustration. This cry of frustration has echoed through time and could be felt in Moses’s demand of the Pharaoh to “let my people go,” through medieval peasant uprisings, the Levellers, Peterloo, the Suffragettes, the Civil Rights Movement, the Stonewall riots and all the way to anti-austerity protest movements. This cry of pain was captured in the works of Harriet Jacobs, James Baldwin, Robert Tressell, Pablo Picasso, Laurie Penny, the Selford Mods and many others. This was a single story of the shout of defiance in the face of oppression that had sounded throughout all of human history. 

In the last few years this story of being tolerant to a plurality of different views and life stories has come under attack. There are those who do not want to listen to the voices that throughout history have cried out in pain as they were clamped down on. The voices of women, people of colour, LGBTQ+ people, poor people and people who did not fit into the limited range of pre-set sockets that their society had provided.

Being a tolerant person was part of the story of who I am, but I also agree with Karl Popper that: "In order to maintain a tolerant society, the society must be intolerant of intolerance." Attacks on tolerance have come from internet trolls who wish to silence women who speak out in the #MeToo movement and social media hate preachers who to vent their anger at people of colour who demand basic safety and bodily autonomy.

Some of those who attack tolerance are in groups with names such as GamerGate, the Proud Boys, Incels, the alt-right or neo-Nazis. There are too many to name here and we are all too painfully familiar with the forces of intolerance. There is no general name for them all that I could use in this polite essay, so I will refer to them as the “forces of intolerance”.

Members of the forces of intolerance have two things in common. Firstly, they reject the story of history as a cry of pain from the oppressed and in doing so reject the stories of many people throughout history who have suffered at the hands of the powerful. They seek to recast themselves (they are usually white, straight men) as the real oppressed people of history, and thus they reject any understanding of political power throughout history that I recognise.

Secondly, they believe that their actions are supported by objective truths about the universe. This I find very frightening. They have no time for the opinions of others or other people’s stories. It is no coincidence that thinkers championed by the forces of intolerance, such as Jordan Peterson, are so critical of postmodernism, as postmodern ideas about there being no objective facts threaten their certainty.

When I see Ben Shapiro claim that “the facts don’t care about your feelings” and then making an emotionally-charged, subjective statement which he passes off as fact, I remember the story of my life. A story that tells me that I used to believe that certainty was on my side until I met other people who were equally certain and so learned a valuable lesson. This was a painful, frightening lesson to learn, but it was worth it to be more open-minded to the experience of others.

The forces of intolerance have not learned this lesson. They believe they are irrefutably correct. However, they have no more claim to objective reality than my former housemate who had a shrine to Loki in his bedroom.

Where does their claim to objective truth come from? It comes from stories they tell with which a lot of people, sadly, have sympathy. Narratives play a bigger role in what we think is true than ‘Factfullness’, the scientific method or big data. In his radio show The Tyranny of Story, John Harris lays out how narratives are more effective in politics than facts. He shows how Donald Trump’s story about the dangers of vaccinations was much more effective in convincing people on the campaign trail than former neurosurgeon Ben Carson’s calm facts about vaccines.

Does what you believe to be true fit into a larger narrative? Does your story tie in with a bigger story like “Take Back Control”, “For The Many Not The Few” or “Make America Great Again”? If what you tell yourself about who you are fits into one of these larger narratives, then you are more likely to think your truth is the truth.

There are many of these larger narratives and they conflict with each other. Just because I can make my personal narrative fit with “For The Many And Not The Few” does not mean someone else cannot make their narrative fit with “Take Back Control”. We all have stories, so authenticity becomes important in judging what we believe to be true.

Cambridge academic David Runciman describes this in his book How Democracy Ends as an affirmation with authentic truth-tellers. We see these people as the ones who call out the fake narratives and reaffirm the authentic ones, i.e. the ones that chime with our own personal narratives. These people can be Chelsea Manning or Tommy Robinson.

Technology also contributes to a sense of certainty. We live our lives online, tell stories about our weekend on Instagram, our careers on LinkedIn, read stories about other people on Facebook and wider society on Twitter. There are millions (and in the case of Facebook billions) of people using these platforms, which means there is too much information and it would be too disorganised for us to see all of it. All of these platforms are gathering data about us and use this to customise what we see.

What I see when I log into Facebook or Twitter is different from what you will see. On some level it is an expression of my story as represented by data points and then fed back to me as content. A news story that fits with my personal narratives, and the larger narratives about society that a technology platform knows I subscribe to, will be more significant in my circle of digital friends than it will be for someone whose data points or personal narrative is different.

This process of personalisation of internet content is dividing us into different camps, and fundamental truths can vary massively between these camps. All of this is fed by the data that technology platforms have, which we gave as we expressed our personal stories through them.

This is what allows the forces of intolerance to claim that they see the world objectively. Their message is funnelled by technology platforms towards people who are likely to see the world as they do. They do not encounter opposing views, as I did in my first post-university houseshare.

Narratives will spread amongst people in these camps and take on the appearance of objective fact, just as Harris described for Trump’s comments about vaccinations. Some of these camps can be large, with names like liberal or conservative. Some of them can be small, but the effect of a story taking on the appearance of objective truth is the same.

This process is best illustrated by the story of the “Johnlock” fandom, a subset of the fans of the BBC TV show Sherlock who believe that there was a romantic connection between the characters of Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. Whether or not Holmes and Watson are secretly in love with each other cannot be proven objectively, but a story about the future of the TV show can take on the appearance of objective fact.

There is a sub-group of the Johnlock fandom called TJLC (The JohnLock Conspiracy) who believed that Holmes and Watson would become a couple at the end of the fourth series of the show and that its creators, Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss, were hiding elaborate clues to this fact in the show.

Like any other group through which a narrative spreads and takes on the appearance of fact, TJLC is a community and its members put together elaborate explanations of why they were right. This included a 48-part YouTube series which asserted that Holmes and Watson would become a couple in the final episode of the fourth series. The final of the 48 videos claimed "it's about to happen", stating that Holmes and Watson will become a couple as a fact.

To the members of TJLC their belief was true - completely and irrevocably an objective truth. The story that they spread through the TJLC took on the appearance of objective fact, helped along by pieces of evidence such as the showrunners’ love of playing games with the fans and misdirecting them. Despite this, it was not revealed that Watson and Holmes were a couple in the final series of the BBC detective drama. The views of TJLC were revealed to be subjective opinions about where the show was heading.

Slate TV’s critic, Willa Paskin, interviewed members of TJLC for her podcast Decoder Ring, whose research I drew on heavily. When interviewing the progenitor of TJLC, who still asserts as fact that Watson and Sherlock will become a couple, Paskin states that she is becoming convinced of this fact despite the fact that there are currently no plans to make any more series of Sherlock. In the podcast Paskin said: “there is something compelling about being in the presence of so much passionate certainty."

The certainty with which TJLC asserted their subjective view of the reality of the Sherlock TV show led me to believe that everyone sees the world subjectively, based on their own personal story, the narratives about wider society they subscribe to, the personalised information environment they get from social media, and the community bubble they live in  made up of their friends, family and other people who are likely to be similar to them. Within our own subjective lives there are things that are objective truth to us, but they are all in reality subjective. We all live subjective lives.

Fake news is a part of this. It reflects the subjective lives people live and the fact that they think their subjective truth is an objective truth. “Pope Endorses Trump”? This is an objective truth to the people who support Trump and shared this fake news story on Facebook. To them, how can the Pope not support Trump? How can this not be true?

The forces of intolerance do not see their subjective view of reality as subjective. They see it as objective reality, just as members of TJLC did. This inability to see other people’s subjective truths as having validity equal to theirs is one reason why they cause so much pain. 

In their minds, it is an objective truth that saying racist, sexist or homophobic things is acceptable. In their minds, the symbols of the Confederate flag or Nazi swastika represent an objective truth about the universe that everyone else does not understand. They are wrong, but this does not stop them from causing lots of emotional and physical pain. I am writing on the two-year anniversary of Heather Heyer being killed by neo-Nazi James Alex Fields Jr at the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. This showed how dangerous people can become when they believe they have objective truth on their side.

There are many other subjective narratives that cause pain. In some people’s minds it is an objective fact that vaccines have a risk of causing autism. This narrative causes real pain for children who catch the diseases for which vaccines are available. It also causes pain for the people who cannot get vaccinated and so rely on herd immunity to keep them safe.

Narratives that deny climate science or seek to minimise the threat posed by the climate emergency also run the risk of causing real pain when communities are destroyed by rising sea levels. A subjective truth backed up by a story has a huge amount of power to hurt people.

There was a story I told myself about the world not having an objective truth in it. This story helped me understand the person who I was. However, I had to outgrow it to live with other people and to understand that they had their own story informed by different ideas, different personal experiences and different facets of the world. This allowed me to understand that the world is made up of subjective truths which might appear objective, but are not.

The world is made up of subjective truths, but this should not minimise the pain that these truths can cause. Pain is real and it is the only universal truth, so we must do what we can to minimise it, and even if we don’t understand someone’s pain we should do what we can to help them. The forces of intolerance do not see the pain that their narratives bring, and therefore their narratives must be opposed.

This is a story about how we can live together by recognising the subjectivity of each other. However, we can’t live together if it means that our own subjective truths lead us to inflict pain on each other. We must learn there is no objective truth and we must learn not to hurt each other.

"Richard Dawkins no Fronteiras do Pensamento Porto Alegre" by fronteirasweb is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Who should be the next Labour leader?

This Labour leadership race feels like it has been going on forever. I mean, when this race began, we could go outside, and now we can’t. Life comes at you fast, as they say. 

However, this weekend it will finally end. On Saturday a new Labour leader will be announced via an online video, I believe, to maintain social distancing. Then, finally, the race that began when Labour lost the general election in December will be over. There’s just one last thing for me to do: vote for the candidate I want to be Labour leader.

I’m optimistic about a Labour Party led by any of these candidates. Of the three candidates still in the race, I don’t think any of them would be a terrible leader. They would all bring something interesting to the role.

Conversely, there is no candidate that has really impressed me. None of them have seized this race as an opportunity to show that they embody the future of the Labour Party. No one has transcended this race and captured the interest of the general public.

I don’t feel as confident casting my vote today as I did when voting Jeremy Corbyn in 2015. I guess, this means that whoever wins has the opportunity to rise above my expectations and become a greater Labour leader.

So, without further ado here are the candidates in the order in which I voted for them:

Number 1: Rebecca Long-Bailey

I decided to put Rebecca Long-Bailey first mainly because of her work on Labour’s Green New Deal, an excellent piece of policy-making that is exactly what the country needs. It may sound silly to say that the looming environmental catastrophe is the biggest challenge facing the country during an outbreak of a deadly disease, but I have every confidence that Covid-19 will subside and the current state of emergency will end. The damage being done to the environment is permanent and it threatens many more lives than coronavirus. There isn’t going to be a vaccine against rising sea levels. Well, apart from being rich.

Long-Bailey has been a tireless campaigner for the things I want most from a Labour government from a Universal Basic Income to enhanced workers’ rights. She is a confident media performer, able to handle a tough interview, as she has shown during the Corbyn leadership. I have great confidence that Long-Bailey would be a capable Labour leader.

Number 2: Keir Starmer 

It was a difficult decision as to who I was going to put second on my list of preferences. What convinced me to put Keir Starmer second was his 10 pledges. Let’s be honest, Starmer has been the front runner in this contest since quite early on, and he’s very likely to win it. He could have coasted to victory saying little and making few commitments to what his time as leader would be like. However, he didn’t do that. He unveiled 10 decent, left wing pledges that are all things I agree with, from social justice to devolution. Although his pledge on the environment falls short of a commitment to a Green New Deal, Starmer is promising action on this key issue. 

Starmer was director of public prosecutions and in that time showed that he cares deeply about human rights and protecting the vulnerable. These are the qualities we want from a new Labour leader. Starmer’s political instincts may be closer to Ed Miliband than to Corbyn, and it’s frankly ridiculous that Labour will have had two leaders called Kier before one woman, but I still think Starmer has solid left-wing principles and will make a good leader.

Number 3: Lisa Nandy

Of all the candidates, Lisa Nandy is most willing to wrestle with why Labour lost last year’s general election and why Labour’s support had been declining in our traditional heartlands for a while. She has produced the outline of a plan to engage with former Labour voters in the North and Midlands. I have my doubts that Nandy’s political instincts are compatible with what many former Labour voters want (she’s properly closer to me than to them; she’s been a strong defender of freedom of movement, for example) but she does have the most concrete plan out of the three candidates.

I put Nandy last in this list, but that doesn’t mean I think she would be a bad leader. She has passion for her consistent and the Labour cause. She’s a capable media performer and has ideas about how to lead the Labour Party forward. If she has become a rallying point to those most opposed to Corbyn’s leadership, then it’s because these people don’t understand what Nandy stands for. I also want to be clear that I’m not putting her last because she decided that Labour should get Brexit done because it’s what her constituents wanted.

The winner in the room

At this point I should address the elephant in the room, which is that listing the candidates in my order of preference seems a bit moot when the polls show that Starmer is likely to win by a huge margin. His closeness to Corbyn and his pro-EU stance sit neatly at the centre of the overlapping area of the Venn Diagram of what Labour Party members like. That, and the fact that he’s a white man in a suit who can give a good speech, means that lots of people think he’s a naturally gifted leader.

As I said, I don’t think Starmer will be a bad leader. He has good left-wing principles, he looks good on TV and his background as a barrister will serve him well during Prime Minister’s Questions. I’m not sure if an ex-human rights lawyer, who sounds posh (whether he is or isn’t) and has a constituency in London is the best person to win over the people who resented the London establishment so much that they voted first for Brexit and then Boris Johnson, but I am prepared to be proved wrong over this.

If Tories are able to paint Starmer as a soft, bleeding-heart, metropolitan toff, and no-one who thought Brexit was a good idea will vote for him, then which voters are Labour planning on going after? I don’t know, but what I’m worried about is that Starmer doesn’t know either.

The Labour Party under Starmer

If Starmer wins, which he probably will, I want him to remember that his party is a broad church and the radical left is a valid part of it. It would be a huge mistake to put us in a box and ignore us. Starmer has preached unity through the years of division. Now is his chance to show that he can bring the party together. A good start would be giving Long-Bailey and Nandy senior positions in the shadow cabinet.

Starmer isn’t my first choice for leader, but as I said, any of the three candidates would be a capable leader. I agree with Long-Bailey more than the others, but I’m prepared to keep an open mind and see what the eventual winner of this endless contest actually does with the leadership. If Starmer can unite the party and take the fight to the Tories, then Labour stands a chance of winning again. If he can’t then we’ll be looking at any more years in the wilderness that can’t be blamed on Corbyn.

"File:Official portrait of Rebecca Long Bailey crop 1.jpg" by Chris McAndrew is licensed under CC BY 3.0 

How is the Coronavirus changing our politics?

The country is in grip of the most serious threat since 9/11 or Brexit or whatever the last massive existential threat to society was. Maybe, fake news?

No, but this time we really mean it. The coronavirus could kill millions and fundamentally change western society. The economy could collapse and we could all become permanently housebound, only able to interact with each digitally whilst human touch becomes a thing of the past; like people in Wall-E.

Joking aside. This is a scary time. It’s the uncertainty that scares me the most. We don’t know when this will end or what the ending will look like. There’s also the powerlessness. I can stay at home and do nothing, which is the best way to do something in this crisis. As someone who likes to be doing something, I find this difficult.

Is there more than that the government could do?

I don’t think the government is lying to us about the severity of the virus or the economic paralysis we find ourselves in. But I find myself wondering: is there more the government could do to keep us safe or to mitigate the effects of the coronavirus outbreak?

The government could have been clearer about the need to stay home. It didn’t help that Prime Minister Boris Johnson mentioned Britons’ “inalienable right to go to the pub”. For that matter, the government could also have closed pubs and restaurants sooner. 

I’m certain that the NHS will get the money that it needs. Although, the health service and the county would have been better equipped to handle this health crisis had it not come on the back of 10 years of austerity. Austerity that included insufficient health funding, as well as massive cuts to local government and social care.

Welfare is the answer

It also doesn’t help that the government has been cutting welfare for the last 10 years that has pushed more and people into poverty. Now, welfare is the answer. We need to make sure people have enough money to stay home when sick so as not to spread the virus. This means making welfare more generous.

There are also a lot of healthy people who are unable to work because their employers are closed and they cannot work from home. A lot of these people have low wages, they are bar staff or work in restaurants for example. Many more people will need financial support to stay home, so it’s essential that welfare is enough to live off. This flies in the face of Tory ideology, so Tory ideology must be jettisoned to see the country through this crisis.

The government has taken steps to protect small businesses from closure, prevent evictions and allow homeowners to take mortgage holidays. All of these are welcome. The lasting impact of the coronavirus is most likely to be economic devastation is causes and thus we need to change our economy and society to weather this storm.

The times they are changin’

This process of social and economic change has been rapid. The Tory Party, who a few months ago were still committed to keeping government debt falling, are borrowing unprecedented amounts and are announcing spending packages that dwarf the wildest dreams of Labour chancellors.

The social safety net, that has been vigorously chipped away by Tory governments for the ten last 10 years, now looks positively Scandinavian. Now that benefits have been raised, evictions stopped, income protected and accommodation found for homeless people, the population will get used to this being the new normal. Just as we’re getting used to social distancing being the new normal.

Memories of why it was considered necessary to be quite so beastly towards poor people will fade just as our memories of what it was like to go to the cinema or the pub are fading. Haven’t we always just sat inside every day, staring at Netflix whilst eating an odd stew made up of whatever hadn’t been panic bought at Tescos, whilst providing generously for those who couldn’t work?

Damage to the economy

After a few months of this, our previous subjects of devotion, like economic growth, will become meaningless. When the country’s economy has been absolutely ruined by months of no one going anywhere or doing anything, and the only profitable companies make either video conferencing software or do rapid response toilet roll deliveries, then we’ll see that it’s not necessary or desirable roll back the reach of the state in service of the free market. The state’s invisible hand turned out to be useful when a crisis hit.

In order to get through the covid-19 crisis, the government (and everyone) has had to prioritize something other than the strength of the economy: namely the welfare of all citizens. This is now the top priority of the government. After this crisis has passed, we need to make sure that the government keeps the welfare of its citizens as the top priority.

During the Second World War, the government made something other than the economy their top priority: i.e. winning the war. To achieve this, it vastly expanded the reach of the state so that it could manage the war effectively. After the war, when people were used to massive state involvement in their lives, the government continued this huge reach with the birth of the welfare state. Today it this welfare state, from the NHS to generous benefits, that will save us from misery.

Expanding the role of the state

What we are seeing now is similar to what happened during the war. Following years of austerity, the reach of the state is being expanded to protect its citizens during the health crisis. We need to hold onto this reach after the crisis to tackle the problems of austerity: rising homelessness, rising child poverty, work insecurity and inequality to name a few. Above all we need to hold onto the idea that the welfare of citizens is more important than the economy.

It’s worth taking some time to think about the world that will emerge from this crisis. Something as massive as the coronavirus, which is affecting everyone in the country, will mean huge changes to how we live. These are scary times, but we will get through them and come out the other side. However, we will come out changed. We need to think about what we want that change to be, to make sure its change for the better.