2021: The year we failed to rebuild

2020 was one of the most eventful years of my life, as every aspect of my existence was turned on its head. By contrast, 2021 was a diminishing returns sequel. A lot of the plot was repeated, but in a tired and boring way. 

At the end of 2021, we haven’t moved much from where we were a year ago. A new Covid-19 variant is causing a surge in cases, further restrictions look imminent and the NHS is under massive strain. At least the government didn’t screw up the vaccine role out and we got to have some fun over the summer.

Politically, it appears that very little has changed either. The Tories still have a stranglehold on power that isn’t letting up anytime soon. Labour are still nowhere close to an electoral breakthrough, even after the Tories have spent another year presiding over chaos, mass death, and scandal after scandal.

Johnson’s goose is cooked

One thing that has changed is that Boris Johnson is no longer sitting pretty in Downing Street. He will most likely finish out the year in Number 10, but it looks unlikely he will be living there next Christmas.

A succession of scandals has meant that, finally, both his party and the public have turned against him. The rank hypocrisy at the heart of Tory rule has been exposed to the nation. Whilst we were all dutifully staying in, and not attending our loved ones’ funerals, Number 10 was enjoying Christmas parties or cheese and wine in the garden.

Johnson is a serial liar and has long been the slipperiest person in British politics. Journalists, campaigners and opposition politicians have tried to hold him accountable for his actions, but he always greases his way out of actual consequences for the things he says and does. Now, this particular greased-up goose appears to be cooked. We have finally found a line of moral reprehensibility that the public (and Tory voters) do care that he crosses.

No thanks to Labour

Johnson appears to have lost his election-winning mojo and the Lib Dems have taken a safe Tory seat in North Shropshire. How long can a party, where a lot of people despise Johnson, keep him around now that he is a drag on their electoral performance and not a boost? Well, Boris, if it isn’t the consequences of your own actions.

None of Johnson’s newfound unpopularity is due to the opposition. In a year where Covid deaths have soared, inflation looks set to spiral and the government is beset by scandal, the Labour Party has taken this opportunity to do nothing.

We’ve had the first full year of Keir Starmer’s leadership and it has been so full of nothing that it’s hardly worth writing about. The only thing that Starmer has shown any effectiveness in doing is organising against the left of his own party. Other than that, Labour lost the by-election in Hartlepool and even I, someone who follows politics closely, cannot tell you what Labour stands for.

What does Labour stand for?

Under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, Labour stood for socialism, the end of neoliberalism and a politics based on using the government to help address the country’s deep structural issues, from inequality to the environment. When Corbyn left, there was a lot of noise about how the serious grown-ups were back and the grubby socialists with their wild, unworkable ideas about reducing inequality and helping poor people were gone. Now, after a year of the grown-ups being back in charge, we can see that their clever plan to win back power was to do nothing. Well, I am impressed. Never has so much noise been made by so many about so little. It’s truly remarkable.

Starmer himself has broken many of the pledges that allowed him to win last year’s Labour leadership contest by a large margin. We were reassured that he was Ed Miliband, but with a little more polish, and many Labour members were happy with that. Mentioning patriotism 69 times in every communication wasn’t what we had in mind. Whatever the thinking behind Starmer’s lack of action, it doesn’t appear to be working. At the end of another terrible year for the government, the way forward for Labour doesn’t appear to be any clearer.

Democrats and reality against Republicans

Across the pond, we see a bigger and louder version of the same problem. Joe Biden was the great hope of the left a year ago. The Democrats offered a model of moderation, avoiding divisive social issues and focusing on competence and the economy as a way to beat populism. One year later, the great hope appears to be more of a damp squib. The Democrats’ Build Back Better program looks unlikely to pass Congress and Biden has not bridged America’s political divide.

The strategy of compromise to produce change has led to compromises on the plans for change and ultimately a compromise on nothing. America is as rabid as ever, and over a year on from the 2020 election, a staggering number of Americans still believe the complete bullshit that Donald Trump actually won. Even to the point of invading the Capitol building earlier this year and killing five people. If the Dems can’t win with reality on their side, then there really is no hope for them.

Meanwhile, China wants to invade Taiwan, Russia wants to invade Ukraine, Ethiopia is invading itself, the sea is trying to invade the land and Omicron wants to invade my body. If we really are planning on using Covid-19 as a chance to build a better society we had better get going on that. Because everyone with authority is at best doing nothing and at worst making everything, well, worse.

The dominance of the right

Globally the left appears in dire straits. The Danish Labour Party won an election by offering radical left-wing economic policies (yay) but also, er, rallying against refugees. I would be worried that Starmer would get some bad ideas from this, but that would require him to express an opinion. The right has seized the initiative by blustering about many voters’ problems with the neoliberal economic order. By promising to ‘level up’ or take on Wall Street, many former left-wing voters have switched to the right. 2021 was not the year they came home.

It has to be said that much of this switching has been caused by fears (stoked by the right) of immigration, trans people and young lefties with dangerous, radical ideas like treating people fairly and not dying in one of those tornadoes made of fire they now have in Australia. If you’re voting for Johnson or Trump because you hate trans people having the freedom to be themselves, or refugees looking for a place to call home, then you have no right to call yourself left-wing no matter who you voted for in the past, what union you’re in, or whether you hate people who went to Eton as much as the next person.

A dangerously radical platform

It’s easy to say that the left should run away from the debates that turn boomers the colour of Abbot Ale at their mere mention, in the hope of winning these boomers’ votes to do something as yet undefined about all the terrible things happening in the world. That plan isn’t going well in Britain or America, and it also involves shafting the young, ethnic minorities and everyone whose ideas about sexuality are more complex than whatever passed for sex education in 1963. That’s not a left I want to be a part of.

We can see where the Tories’ levelling up agenda has got us. The Northern leg of HS2 has been scrapped. So, the plan to level up the North is to build trains in the South. Remember, you can’t trust the Tories to sort out regional or any other kind of inequality. The left could be making hay from all this. Labour can rebalance the economy and make sure that women and people of colour don’t have to fear the police, all whilst not having illegal parties when people are dying. That shouldn’t be a dangerously radical platform. That should be common sense.

Time is running out

There was a part of the year where it looked like the pandemic was over and we might get some normality back. Now, that seems like a beautiful dream that we had to wake up from and smell the omicron-flavoured cheese. The sense of politics returning to normal was short-lived and everything, politics included, seems to be back where it was at the start of the year.

In 2021 we failed to rebuild or make anything better for the world. Now we are 20% through the crucial decade to avert the looming environmental disaster, and the best we have to show for it is a lukewarm commitment from COP26 this year. The left needs to get serious about the change we can and should offer the world. The established organs of Labour and the Democrats aren’t going to do it, so we have to do it ourselves. And do it now. Time is running out.

Why the left should be wary of the New Cold War on China

There’s a New Cold War brewing. Once again, the world is being divided into West vs East and nations are being asked to choose a side. This time, however, the enemy of the West isn’t Russia, but China.

I am not looking forward to this New Cold War and the moral superiority that having a clearly defined enemy brings to the people who like to bellow their political opinions on TV or on social media. I am not looking forward to being repeatedly told that China is the biggest threat to Western Civilization since The Great Turkish War in the 17th Century, with the same sense of immovable certainty that was used to tell me that Saddam Hussein definitely had WMDs and that there was no alternative to austerity.

We should resist the simplistic, demonising arguments about how awful China is. This kind of rhetoric easily spills over into outright hatred, and is often a cover for the people gagging for a “legitimate” reason to hate people who look different to them. Everyone remembers the War On Terror, right?

Not a remorseless enemy

On the left, we need to be ready to counter a tide of people, from a loud man in a pub, to a Tory MP on Question Time, to a conflict-stirring opinion columnist, terrifying people into hatred by endlessly saying how dangerous China is.

To whip up as much hysteria as possible about this new Red Peril, China is often described as remorseless and impervious to reason. As if China is the Borg, or the Reapers from Mass Effect, not a nation of 1.4 billion people that has all the diversity of human character that any other nation has. The point of this rhetoric is to dehumanise China so that any measure will be accepted in the New Cold War.

Lessons from the Old Cold War

There is something almost funny about watching some of the people most responsible for pushing the “globalisation is inevitable” narrative now earnestly insisting we must undo globalisation to stop the spread of a nefarious web of Chinese influence. If the age of globalisation is over and we’re going back to the age of Cold Wars, then those of us on the left must learn a crucial lesson from the previous Cold War.

There were many on the left who saw the Soviet Union as anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist and thus inherently good. Viewed through modern eyes, Jean-Paul Sartre’s praising of Joseph Stalin is beyond cringe. Although never a majority, some on the left were willing to overlook the Soviet Union's authoritarian government, the secret police, disappearances of dissidents, mass starvation and abandonment of Marxism in all but name, simply because the Soviet Union was the enemy of the capitalist West. We cannot afford to be so simplistic in the 21st Century.

Against demonisation

Critiquing the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party’s authoritarianism, their treatment of the Uyghurs minority, their treatment of Hong Kong protesters, the conditions that are allowed in many Chinese factories (conditions that Western company’s exploit to provide us with cheap goods or even expensive goods - hello Apple) and the destruction of the environment are all valid.

Criticising China, specifically the Chinese government, doesn’t make you Donald Trump. It can be done without frothing at the mouth about people from another country who are a remorseless danger, in a way that is both deranged and fills people with fear.

We mustn’t demonise China the way Trump and his ilk do. The very notion that China is so culturally different to us that we cannot peacefully coexist is already alarmingly common. There is real danger in this becoming mainstream. It will spread racism if frightened, angry and stupid people assume that everyone Chinese is a 5th column for a hostile foreign power. Just look at the rage targeted at all Asians because of the pandemic.

Priorities for the 2020s

Whipping up hatred for another country is also a great way for our leaders to distract us from the problems we have at home. Tories and Republicans would much rather we worry about China than about our own government's destruction of the environment and the terrible economic and social conditions in Britain or the US. The West can spend the 2020s fighting China, or fighting climate change.

Our leaders would rather we were frightened and angry at China, rather than focused on the far reaching social and economic changes needed to avoid a climate catastrophe. They would rather the West’s energy be poured into fighting endless proxy wars, instead of cooperating to build the green infrastructure that the planet needs.

Be wary of hatred

The issue of China requires some nuance. There is a lot to criticize about the Chinese government. On the left we must not fall into the trap of simply saying Tories/capitalists are bad, therefore China is good. This overlooks the terrible things going on in China right now. We must also be aware of the dangers of whipping up hatred, and be on the lookout for those looking to profit from a rising atmosphere of suspicion of people with a certain ethnicity.

There is more to be gained from a world where we cooperate instead of hating each other. Cowardly leaders would rather their peoples hate each other. The greatest threat to our leaders is that we rise above their base propaganda. We mustn’t be tricked into hating people who are different from us.

The peoples of the world have more in common than we know, and this idea frightens the powerful of the world more than hot or cold wars. Let us not be tricked into hating people because it serves those who want us distracted from the real issues. Let the people of the world decide they would rather have peace and cooperation than a New Cold War that serves the interest of the powerful.

"The Bund , Shanghai , China" by MNmagic is marked with CC PDM 1.0

Is Wetherspoons’ boss Tim Martin the UK’s highest-profile Libertarian?

What you are about to witness is the first of a series of articles looking at that most bizarrely British of phenomena, the pub chain JD Wetherspoons. 

For the uninitiated, or the unBritish, JD Wetherspoons - or Wetherspoons or Spoons - is a chain of pubs with at least one in every decent sized town in the UK. They’re known for their cheap drinks, meals cooked a-la ping (in a microwave), uniformity of design and toleration of drunkenness.

British people absolutely love Wetherspoons. It’s one of the few things that still binds our increasingly divided island together. Whether you are a banker or an unemployed steelworker, you’re probably only a few days away from your next visit to Spoons.

A product of capitalism

At first glance Spoons is the epitome of the globalised capitalist world that created it. The chain was founded in 1979, the year of Margaret Thatcher’s general election victory that hailed the beginning of the age of neoliberalism. It’s the McDonalds or Starbucks of pub companies: they all look the same, they all stock the same range of products (mostly), they’re everywhere, you know what you’re getting from them in a reassuring way. As a text or work of art, Spoons is an expression of 20th century capitalism.

There is something charmingly British about Spoons. It’s a slightly less sincere, more cheap and cheerful, almost ironic, take on the identikit chain restaurant model perfected by American big business. Each Spoons has its own identity and its own charm. They all have names, which usually reflect the area where the pub is based. Somewhere in every Spoons is a board with old photographs of the local area and a few titbits of local history.

Each Spoons also sells a good range of real ale, and did so before it was cool. They don’t build their own buildings and often preserve an interesting piece of historic architecture. Spoons can be found in former cinemas, car showrooms, station cellars, theatres and banks.

Spoons’ charm

There’s an unpretentiousness to Spoons that is a welcome offset to the self-consciously modern aesthetic of many craft beer pubs and beer brands (although there are many places that excel at using this aesthetic). In an age where most pints (especially in London) cost more than £6 and the cost of meals out is forever spiralling, Spoons food and drink is always reasonably priced, usually tastes good and arrives at your table quickly.

There are little things that make Spoons charming, such as the fact that each one has an individual, brightly coloured carpet. This has prompted a blog and a book documenting them. Some Spoons are spectacular. Stand out examples are The Knights Templar in Holborn, London (a former bank), The Caley Picture House in Edinburg (a former art deco cinema) and The Palladium in Llandudno (a former theatre).

It should be said that some are not so pleasant - avoid the Surrey Docks at all costs - they can be dark, grotty and filled with alcoholics that have been barred from every other pub. Despite their surface similarities, entering an unfamiliar Spoons can be a gamble. Somehow this adds to their charm.

The politics of Tim Martin

The Wetherspoons chain is also an expression of the politics of its chairman, Tim Martin. Via the medium of op-eds in Spoon’s slightly eccentric magazine, beer mats and sometimes posters, Martin communicates his political views to a surprisingly large and captive audience. In 2017 Spoons claimed its magazine had a readership of two million, although I take that with a pinch of salt.

Martin has many opinions (a lot of them relate to how his industry should be given tax breaks and what he thinks of government health advice on alcohol consumption) but he is most well known as being a prominent supporter of Brexit. He has been photographed with both Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, he has been name dropped by Farage as a Brexit supporter and spoke before Farage at an event in Parliament Square on the night when Britain finally left the EU.

Martin is not alone in being a pro-Leave celebrity. There were a lot of famous people who backed Brexit from Michael Caine to high profile MPs like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who have used Brexit to revive their atrophying political careers. However, Martin was different, he served a very specific purpose for the Leave campaign and it has everything to do with the pub chain he runs.

Wetherspoons is in our communities

Martin’s boon to the Leave campaign was not the people he could convince to vote for Brexit via his magazines and beer mats, but as a well-known business leader who was vocally pro-Brexit. The business community was strongly pro-Remain, as businesses prefer regulatory continuity and Britain’s EU membership gave them tariff and bureaucracy free access to the European market, so Martin was invaluable to Leave as a business leader bucking the trend by pushing back against fears of economic woes post Brexit.

As well as showing that business was not 100% united against Brexit, what made Martin helpful for the Leave was the type of business he runs. Martin runs a pub chain, a business that people across the country understood and could see how it benefited their lives. Wetherspoons is in voters’ communities, employing people, providing a space for relaxation and meeting friends. It is a vital part of modern British life and the man in charge of it said that Brexit wasn’t going to wreck all these things.

Bankers and tech companies could come out against Brexit, but this could be shrugged off as they’re all based in London, draw their employees from a small section of society, work across national boundaries in a way that could be described as footloose and do technical things most people don’t understand or see the benefit of. I’m not saying these businesses don’t matter to the UK economy, I’m saying a lot of people don’t know that they matter.

Libertarian Brexit

The reactionary, nostalgic, nationalistic politics of Brexit don’t fit so comfortably with the image of Martin as a man who runs a business that employs a lot of immigrants. It appears that Martin is at heart a libertarian.

The Libertarians (by which I mean the right-wing Libertarians, who love to quote Ayn Rand) most people meet tend to be wealthy and work in industries such as finance and tech (ones that also tended to support Remain). Martin projects the image of a man who is more at home with the left-behinds of the small-town boozer than the jet setters of the international finance and tech world, but his politics have more in common with Ancaps  than provincial Tories.

Lots of Libertarians also supported Brexit on the basis that Brexit was a campaign for less government. However, Brexit was only partly sold to the public as a way to get rid of paper pushing civil servants interfering in the world of business. It was mainly sold as a way to kick out immigrants, give the Europeans a black eye and restore the pride of Britain. “Take back control” could mean taking back control from Eurocrats creating regulations holding back the lion of British industry, or it could mean taking back control of our borders.

Libertarians and social conservatives

Martin was willing to link his Libertarian anti-Brexit stance with social conservatives such as Farage. Farage may be a Libertarian himself - his earlier UKIP manifestos contain the Libertarian dream of privatizing the NHS - but any Libertarian pretensions he had have long since faded to be replaced by a man who spreads misinformation about migrants with HIV and pals up with Donald Trump.

Martin has certainly flirted with the bellicose anti-European rhetoric of the socially conservative Brexiteer, including attention grabbing stunts such as not selling products from the EU in his pubs. However, Martin himself doesn’t come across as very socially conservative. He made pro-immigration comments in a speech he gave in Parliament Square on the night Britain left the EU, which were received poorly by the pro-Brexit audience waiting in the rain for a speech from Farage.

His business employs, especially in London, many immigrants. I’m sure he doesn’t have a BLM poster in his window and he hasn’t pre-ordered Shon Faye’s The Transgender Issue, but I can’t imagine him frothing at the mouth about how awful young people are, as the Spectator does. Mainly because young people are buying Jager-Bombs in his pubs. Maybe he does hate the woke-left, I don’t know him personally, but his Brexityness seems to come from a place of wanting less government, not hating foreigners.

Martin, Carswell and Farage

The politician Martin most reminds me of is Douglas Carswell, the former Tory MP and then UKIP defector who ultimately fell out of favour with his new party. Carswell, like Martin, seemed to be looking for a British Libertarian Party and, finding none, chose one leading the charge to reduce the amount of government in the UK.

The Carswells and Martins of this world could have had their referendum and made a purely Libertarian, anti-government argument, but this would not have won over the majority of the population without the need to link Brexit to stopping immigration and some people’s need to show Johnny Foreigner the middle finger. Farage himself said that linking Brexit to reducing immigration is when the Brexit campaign gained momentum.

Not being a Richard Littlejohn-esque social conservative shouldn’t excuse Martin for all the bad things he has done. Like a lot of Libertarians he treats people with less money (i.e. his staff) badly and would treat them worse if the law allowed it. His comments that his employees should get a job at Tesco’s, when his pubs closed (instead of him paying furlough) during the pandemic, shows a basic callousness to people he is responsible for who were losing their livelihoods. Similarly his angling for his pubs to stay open during the pandemic would have put his employees at risk.

The weakness of Libertarianism

The interesting thing about Martin’s politics is that it shows that, in the UK at least, for a Libertarian campaign to be successful it needs to align itself with a larger socially conservative movement. There isn’t enough support for Libertarian policies simply by themselves. Having less government wasn’t enough to get us out of the EU, but arguments for “taking back control” and against immigration were.

The weakness of Libertarianism in the UK can be seen in the failure of Martin’s other political campaigns. Mainly to secure a VAT reduction for the hospitality sector, a campaign that is so nakedly self-serving you must admire the fact that he argues for it with a straight face. It’s ironic that Martin’s biggest political success will probably hurt his business by making it harder to find staff and source products at the low prices his customers expect. Recently Spoons posted a loss.

The losers from Brexit

I have no sympathy for Martin because of how he treated his staff during the pandemic. It was this, more than his views on Brexit, that has moved him from the silly political eccentric to dangerous ideologue.

Like a lot of people who voted Leave, Martin will ultimately be the victim of Brexit. Whereas the people who used Martin to advance their own political standing, the Johnsons and Farages of the world, will do all right out of all of this. We are no closer to the Libertarian dream of getting rid of the government, and Martin’s tax cut for the hospitality sector isn’t going to happen either, but it will be harder for him to find staff and stock for his pubs.

"80 - Natural Copper Bar Top, Wetherspoons, Brigg" by Metal Sheets Limited is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Where is Labour going?

A barman recently asked me, whilst I was waiting for my pint of locally sourced artisanal craft beer, to name an aspect of politics where Labour have a policy and the Tories don’t have a vaguely similar one.

‘There must be loads,’ I said and then struggled to name one.

Spending more on the police? Both sides want to do that. Tackling regional inequality? Everyone is into levelling up. Averting an environmental disaster? Although the parties differ on the details, their positions are superficially the same. Fixing the housing crisis so that young people can afford somewhere to live? ‘Nobody wants to do that,’ the barman said, shaking his head.

So, what does Labour stand for now that the Tories are for spending money and creating jobs north of the Watford Gap? As we just had Labour conference it’s worth reflecting on this. The answer is that no one knows. This is one reason why Labour is too busy fighting itself. The conflict, or High Conflict as I dubbed it recently, is over what the party should stand for. This is a crucial and necessary debate. It’s how we escape the quagmire of no one really knowing what the point in Labour is.

Starmer’s values 

Sir Keith “any other leader would be 20 points ahead” Starmer (he’s currently eight points behind) became Labour leader because the members liked what he was selling. His pitch was Jeremy Corbyn’s values with the competence and polish of someone who’s run an important, prestigious government agency in the past. This was backed up with 10 pledges, which prompted me to choose Starmer as my second choice leadership candidate.

Starmer wasn’t my first choice, but I was willing to accept some moderation, mainly in tone, to achieve electoral breakthrough and a government with core-principals I could get behind.

I now see that I have been thoroughly wallet inspected and feel a complete fool when I look at Labour and see very little of the competence that we were promised. The values behind this opposition are murky at best. They can’t even do a convincing job of being outraged at this government’s massive corruption. Starmer has also gone back on several of the ten pledges - this week he said he didn’t support common ownership of energy utilities - so there goes those values that people were voting for.

The return of the Prince of Darkness

“Do you know who I think of when someone says Labour values? Peter Mandelson,” said no one ever. Despite this, disgraced former cabinet member Peter Mandelson, a person some people unironically refer to as the “Prince of Darkness,” has found himself at the heart of this opposition.

New Labour’s heyday was 20 years ago and I can’t think what he has to offer now beyond 90s nostalgia, the vague sheen of electability (that will fool absolutely no one) and a less than confident sign that “serious” Labour is back, because nothing says serious like digging up someone from the New Labour era and then standing next to them in the hope that if the voters squint in just the right way Starmer will look like a young Tony Blair.

It shows Starmer’s desperation and lack of ideas if he’s turning to people who were, whatever your view of their politics, doing successful opposition politics the better part of 30 years ago. Can you imagine another industry where you would hire a consultant whose frame of reference is this far out of date?

“Nowhere to go”

It’s worth remembering that the seat that Mandelson once held, Hartlepool, is now a Tory seat. Mandelson once said that the working-class vote have “got nowhere to go” when asked about New Labour chasing middle-class Labour/Tory swing voters and saying little or nothing to the communities that had been voting Labour for years. Well, they found somewhere else to go.

Mandelson and Starmer clearly don’t have a vision that can win these voters back and they have no idea of how to find new voters. Instead, they would rather continue the Labour naval gazing by having a fight over how the leader is chosen, instead of engaging with literally any voters.

The party could take up the environment as a cause, which might convince younger voters (aka the future of the party) who are considering supporting the Greens to give Labour another chance, but to do this Starmer needs to find credibility or conviction. The only thing he says with any real conviction is that no one likes Labour; which he says over and over, thus making it more true.

Negative vision

The most concrete thing that can be said about Starmer’s vision for Labour is that he thinks that Labour is not a party for socialists, radicals, environmentalists or BLM supporters; unless they are very quiet and don’t ask for things that might upset little Englanders who voted for Brexit and Boris Johnson.

The Labour leadership have shown complete contempt for, and an unwillingness to engage with, those on the left of the party, which means the conflict/High Conflict will rumble on. This vision of Labour is a negative vision, defining Labour by what it’s not rather than what it is. A negative vision is all that the current leadership has. They have no answer to who Labour is for.

Saying Labour is not for the sort of people who voted for us in the last election, it’s for the people who didn’t, does make some sense. Labour is a party that needs to win more votes to be in government. However, when you look at how Labour is polling amongst the people who didn’t vote for it you have to ask yourself: what is going on? This brings me back to the barman in the craft beer micropub, pointing out that the Tories are offering these voters what they want and Labour has nothing special to offer them.

Hollow platitudes and bad vibes

If you asked Starmer “who is Labour for?” he would probably say “everyone”. Almost everyone would agree that Labour being a big broad tent is good and the party should welcome everyone and look out for everyone. However, this is how most parties describe themselves. The Tories say they’re looking out for everyone’s best interest, then raise taxes on working age people to protect the property wealth of and pay for the social care of Boomers. The Labour leadership’s vision needs to be more than hollow platitudes and giving off bad vibes to the people who have kept voting for them during these wilderness years.

At the rate the party is going we won’t put a dent in the Tory’s majority. Everyone knows this. But still we go through the motions, hoping the Tories will finally do something so bad that the voters decide they don’t want them in power. Although they’re sitting pretty after over 120,000 died from a disease that the Tories did too little too late to contain, so I’m not sure what else it will take.

Starmer doesn’t have an answer to “what is Labour for?” beyond “it’s not for socialists”. Labour also doesn’t have a policy that the Tories don’t also have a similar policy on and thus the party is completely without vision. Conflict within the Party is inevitable unless Labour has a vision for its future that all its members can believe in. Defeat at the next election is certain unless Labour can do better.

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

A simple narrative about bad people doesn’t justify a forever war in Afghanistan

In the chaos following the collapse of the Western-backed Afghanistan government and the sudden seizure of the country by the Taliban, another battle was taking place. It was a battle between competing narratives of what happened, why it had happened and what would happen next. These narratives vied for supremacy across the airwaves, in newspapers and on social media. 

One narrative was that the Western presence in Afghanistan was a forever war. This story explains the past 20 years as a bottomless pit that money and human life has been poured into. It argues that no amount of soldiers or bombs could have brought peace to Afghanistan. The Taliban would takeover whenever the US left, whether that is now, in another 20 years, or in 100.

This story has its counter-narrative: that the West didn’t have the will to defeat the Taliban. This narrative argues that our military was held back by not having enough troops or enough of a free reign to root out the Taliban in Pakistan. Or it argues that we didn’t spend enough, or have enough of a plan, to rebuild Afghanistan as a modern democracy. It draws on the historical parallel that America paid to rebuild Germany and much of Europe after the Second World War and argues they should have done the same here.

It’s the 2000s all over again

Each narrative about the war warrants a blog post of their own, digging into precisely what they say about Afghanistan and the war the West fought there. As time is limited, I want to zoom in on one narrative, which was an argument for the war continuing.

This narrative argues that there are bad people in the world and you just have to kill them. One version of this narrative was put forward by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic and another was advocated by everyone’s favourite frontman for Western countries doing a war in another part of the world, Tony Blair, in (no prizes for guessing) The New Statesman.

They say the classics never go out of style and the early 00s is about old enough for a retro revival, so why shouldn’t Blair dig up some of his greatest hits, such as “radical Islam is really bad and a threat to the west” - banging that drum definitely isn’t responsible for Brexit on any level, no not at all - and his unending hunt for a big idea that unites everything together. Considering we are supposed to live in the post-ideological age, Blair has spent most of his career in search of an ideology to either embrace or destroy. 

The graveyard of Empires

These articles and the discourse that follows them, like an echo that diminishes in intelligence but somehow manages to get louder, contains a subtext of “we are for whatever the anti-war movement is against because we hate those stupid hippies with their idea that maybe tonnes and tonnes of explosives isn’t the solution to every problem.” The “whatever” in this case appears to be more war in Afghanistan, the graveyard of empires.

Presumably, all this is so that a new adaption of Sherlock Holmes set in 2110 can still start with Dr Watson being wounded serving with the British army in Afghanistan, just as the character was in the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories and Martin Freeman’s incarnation was in the recent BBC adaptation. As much as I love symmetry, this commitment to accurate adaptions of Victorian literature seems excessive.

Of course, it wasn’t just hippies who wanted the war to end. It was 44% of British people. Unless 44% of British people are hippies now and I wasn’t informed. If that’s so, then I need to break out the tie-dye and the Creedence tapes.

This narrative excludes the nuance between the Taliban on one hand and ISIS or Al-Qaeda on the other. I’m not a fan of either, but the Taliban are now the de facto government of Afghanistan, whereas ISIS is a death cult. Making the Taliban international pariahs reduces our ability to influence what goes on in Afghanistan and thus helping people who live there.

A narrative about women and religious minorities

Another argument inherent to this narrative was that the Taliban victory would be awful for women and religious minorities in Afghanistan. Historic evidence and a lot of what has happened since the Taliban took over the country indicates that life will be oppressive for women and religious minorities in the fundamentalist Islamic state that the Taliban are creating.

The plight of women and religious minorities is frequently drawn on when making an argument for continuing the war, but its supporters never argue that we should relax our immigration policies and allow the people who flee the awful regime into our country. The Taliban are awful enough that we should kill them, and any civilians who happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, but not awful enough that their victims should be allowed to come to the UK.

An unlimited capacity to create war

The Venn Diagram of people who use this narrative to justify endless war and people who believe that the state should be rolled back through punitive austerity programmes is almost a circle. The Taliban visit such suffering on people that they need to be crushed with overwhelming military force, however homelessness, fuel poverty or families unable to feed themselves are acceptable sufferings. Fixing them would be a waste of taxpayers’ money.

How would you describe a society that has a seemingly unlimited capacity to create war, but haggles intensely over the cost of any minor improvement to the conditions in which its own citizens live? Militaristic? Miserly? Bloodthirsty? Callous?

The smart people vs the dumb people

There is an element of what could be described as technocracy to this. According to YouGov, 44% of British people either strongly supported or tended to support the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan and only 8% strongly opposed it. However, a certain group of Very Smart™ people think that it should continue and they know best, so all the stupid people need to shut up.

Even the stupid people whose family members are being killed, or whose taxes are funding the endless war, need to shut up. Because even though their money and family members are good enough to be fed into the inferno of war at a terrifying rate, they are too stupid to decide when this should stop. 

Too many deaths

If your argument is “there are bad people in the world and you just have to kill them” then my point is that we have been killing a lot of these bad people (and many not-so-bad people who just happened to be around) for a long time and there’s still many to kill.

At what point do you stop killing for a better world? When a million people have died? Surely a billion is too many? Right? What we were doing in Afghanistan wasn’t working so we shouldn’t just keep doing it in the hope it will start working at some point.

Yes, the Taliban are terrible, but we can’t kill our way to defeating them. We tried that for 20 years and it didn’t work. So, what’s to be done? I don’t know. I do know that the simplistic narrative of “there are bad people in the world and you just have to kill them” is too simple for a place as complex as Afghanistan. If we are going to fight a forever war, we need a better justification.

Afghanistan flag image created by DQttwo and used under creative commons.

The civil war in Labour has become a High Conflict. How do we get out of it?

It will be news to exactly no-one that there is a conflict within the Labour Party. However, I believe it would be better described as a High Conflict. What does that mean, I hear you ask? Well dear reader, a High Conflict is where the conflict itself is the reason why two groups are fighting. Sound familiar?

Conflict is when you fight to achieve something. Better rights for women or ethnic minorities, a shorter working week, the return of looted artwork, or an end to the use of fossil fuels. High Conflict is conflict for the sake of conflict. It’s not when you’re fighting to achieve something, it’s when you’re fighting to stop the other side winning. This is what the Labour Party has become. It’s like a dysfunctional marriage, where the couple is only together because they can’t afford to move out (that’s the electoral system in this tortured analogy).

The book

High Conflict is the subject of Amanda Ripley’s book High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Her book focuses on America, but it perfectly sums up the sorry state of the Labour Party.

Ripley describes many different High Conflicts: in non-partisan local politics, between liberals and conservatives, in marriages, families, companies, religious communities and even between gangs. High Conflict can trap anyone or any group. It’s destructive, achieves little and is difficult to escape.

From reading Ripley’s book, I saw that the factions within Labour exhibit many of the signs of High Conflict. Ripley uses the metaphor of a tarpit to show how difficult it is to escape High Conflict and how fighting just makes it worse. Labour is stuck in a tarpit right now and it won’t stand a chance of getting into government unless it can find a way out.

Fire starters

There are several fire starters for High Conflict that Ripley identifies in her book, three of which are present in the Labour Party. They are group identities, humiliation and conflict entrepreneurs.

Group identities are the easiest to spot. The ongoing civil war doesn’t neatly break into two camps, but there are plenty of polarising divisions around which group identities are built, such as pro-Corbyn vs Corbyn-skeptic, socialist vs social democrat, centrist vs left or Momentum vs Progress. The presence of group identities gives people a flag to rally around for the High Conflict and prevents individuals from empathising with their opponents.

Humiliation is also easy to spot. Almost everyone in Labour believes that their faction is being ignored or shut out. Some feel humiliated because Jeremy Corbyn was chucked out, or because Peter Mandelson was brought in, or because Angela Rayner was demoted, or because Jess Phillips isn’t in the cabinet, or because the leadership isn’t sufficiently pro-EU, or because the leadership isn’t talking enough about “traditional Labour voters” or … you get the idea. I could keep writing this list until the next election.

Conflict entrepreneurs

Another important fact that Ripley identifies in starting and prolonging High Conflict are conflict entrepreneurs. Conflict entrepreneurs are people who create High Conflict because it benefits themselves. See the film Marriage Story for examples of how the American divorce-industrial complex is filled with conflict entrepreneurs who turn simple resolvable conflicts into High Conflicts at great financial gain to themselves.

The conflict entrepreneurs in Labour are the people who get attention, social media followers, blog views and, ultimately, power and money from intensifying the High Conflict in Labour. Politics is a field that’s rife with conflict entrepreneurs; that politician you hate who you’re thinking of right now is probably one. Conflict entrepreneurs don’t campaign to win anything, they just stir up conflict so that people pay attention to them (and in the attention economy, attention is money and power).

I’m not going to use this space to accuse anyone from profiting from the High Conflict that has engulfed Labour. Conflict entrepreneurs may not even know they are conflict entrepreneurs, and their followers certainly don’t believe they are; unless they find all this internecine fighting entertaining, like the world’s most bureaucratic soap opera. What I am asking you to do is to think about a politician or journalist’s motivation. Ask yourself: would this person’s livelihood be destroyed if they got what they claim they want?

American hyper-partisan conflict entrepreneurs

For a concrete example of a conflict entrepreneur, we will travel across the pond to America where the political High Conflict is worse than here and there’s big money to be made from being a conflict entrepreneur. Ben Shapiro - a man whose purpose in life is to whip up conservative hatred for liberals and is beloved by the people who confuse the ability to be rude to college students as being a good orator - is an obvious example of an American hyper-partisan conflict entrepreneur.

Shapiro is a frequent face on many conservative media outlets and makes money writing books with titles such as (deep breath for these) Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences Americans and How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument. The worst thing that could happen to Shapiro is for him to get what he wants: the destruction of liberalism and the total domination of conservatives. This is a clear sign of a conflict entrepreneur.

The disaster of getting what you want

If everyone in the USA became a conservative, Shapiro would have nothing to rail against and have no means of getting attention or selling books and tickets to his campus speaking tours, where the terminally self-satisfied can watch a professional pundit and trained media personality be publicly rude to teenaged college students and then tell themselves that this makes conservatives right and liberals dumb.

All Shapiro does is make Americans hate each other more and further their High Conflict, whilst getting fame, money and the respect of angry people who like to take selfies in their car wearing trucker hats. When looking at Labour figures, and this is especially important for Labour figures you agree with, ask yourself: what would happen if they won? Would the end of Labour’s forever war mean they had no platform anymore? Are they fighting for a principal or just stirring up conflict to get attention?

The route out of High Conflict

Okay, so Labour is stuck in High Conflict. How do we get out of it? To escape from High Conflict, Ripley says, a route out is essential. So, if Labour wants to escape the tarpit of High Conflict then the various factions will need to start engaging with each other instead of fighting each other.

Ripley’s book offers many examples of how people have exited High Conflict, from violent gang feuds to America’s unending culture war. Most of them involve having some perspective on a High Conflict, taking a step back, engaging with the other side and asking difficult questions of yourself. Not easy when you’re in the middle of a conflict, but it's essential to stop the endless cycles of High Conflict.

The end of the Labour forever war

If Labour cannot end the High Conflict that has engulfed the party, then it won’t be able to win an election again. High Conflict ensures that Labour is only talking to Labour, and this puts voters off. Labour needs to engage with the electorate - what do they want? what does Labour want to offer them? - but Labour can only do that when it’s not endlessly talking to itself about itself.

Recognising that Labour has become engulfed in High Conflict is the first step to escaping from High Conflict. The route out of the tarpit is long, difficult and probably painful, but what is the alternative? Does anyone really think they can win the Labour civil war? Surely, it’s better to see it as what it is, a forever war that cannot be won and will ultimately destroy the party.

However, there is an added complication to all this. Ripley says in her book that conflict, as opposed to High Conflict, is good and healthy. It’s how we resolve problems and make progress. The divisions in the Labour Party are not all High Conflict, there is conflict mixed up with the High Conflict. There’s lot of problems Labour is facing, and both the conflict and High Conflict is over the solution to these issues. The conflict over what the Labour Party should be or do, is one I will explore in the next blog post.

7 lessons from 10 years of the Red Train Blog

Today this blog turns ten years old. Whoo! Happy birthday. This blog has lived for ten times longer than the period where we took Nick Clegg seriously.  

It’s been exciting (and quite emotionally draining) to write about politics for the last ten years. I have a new appreciation for why “may you live through interesting times” is a curse. 

In the ten years of this blog’s existence we have had the London riots, austerity, the student protest movement, the 2015 election, the referendum, the 2017 election, Brexit, the 2019 election, Donald Trump and now the Covid-19 pandemic. Plus hundreds of things that seemed like the biggest thing in the world for one week. Remember Change UK? No, me neither. 

Oh, Jeremy Corbyn

To stop this ten years anniversary post being so long that it takes ten years to read, I decided to focus on one thing. From the perspective of a British left-wing politics blog the most significant thing that has happened in the last ten years was Jeremy Corbyn’s time as leader of the Labour Party. 

For a little over four years the radical left took over the Labour Party and fought two general elections where, theoretically, the public could have elected a left-wing government. In May 2015 this seemed impossible, but by June 2017 it seemed tantalisingly close.

Ultimately the Corbyn project failed, and I don’t want to relitigate the Corbyn era as a lot of ink has already been spilled about this recent chapter of history (some of it by me). Instead, I want to use this ten year anniversary post to outline seven lessons from the Corbyn years that the left can use going forwards. So, sit back, put some Billy Bragg on the stereo and prepare to reflect. 

We cannot fight everyone at once

If we can learn anything from the Corbyn years it’s that the left cannot fight everyone from the soft-left to the far-right at once and win. Corbyn’s constant internal battles in the Labour Party made him look ineffectual and that put off voters (probably more than anything else). One of the strengths of the right is that they band together behind whichever candidate is likely to take down the left (from Trump to Boris Johnson). The left takes any opportunity to fight itself. 

This is partly because there are people on the centre left who believe that the radical left must be stopped at all costs (even if that cost is perpetual right-wing rule). I guess you have to admire the conviction of someone who will sacrifice their entire movement for their principled belief that socialism is awful.

I’m not sure what can be done about the fact that most of the people on the left will self-destruct our half of the political spectrum at the slightest hint of the radical left getting near power. All I can say is that the left needs to fight amongst itself less and the radical left needs to remember that it cannot fight everyone and win. Maybe the left needs to collectively go to mediation? It would be better than what we’ve been through. 

We need to work on our credibility

Many of the policy ideas that Corbyn included in his manifestos (that the left has been campaigning for for years) are popular. From free broadband, to nationalising the railways, to more taxes on the wealthiest, proper left-wing policies have more support than many on the centre left care to admit. The problem? Voters don’t want these things if they’re offered by Labour.

The Labour brand and (and Corbyn when he was Labour leader) became a spray varnish you could apply to anything to make it less popular. If Labour offered it, voters either didn’t want it or thought that Labour couldn’t deliver it.

Although focus groups showed, if isolated from the Labour brand, these policies were popular. This is why Keir Starmer has focused on improving the Labour brand - although he’s going about it in a completely cack-handed way. Labour and the left have a credibility issue we urgently need to overcome. The left needs to convince the electorate that the things we are offering are possible and that we can be trusted to deliver them.

We need to build up a better pool of talent

Corbyn was a sweet old man who campaigned for social justice his whole life, but he also practiced being disengaged from the work that needed to be done to get a radical left Labour government into power at an Olympic level. If we want power then the left needs to rely on more than a few people who have been on the back benches for 30 years and haven’t run anything more complicated than a Marxist discussion group. 

The greatest long term impact of Corbyn might be expanding the left’s pool of talent. The ranks of the left in parliament are stronger now than when Corbyn became Labour leader. There are many promising left-wing MPs from Rebecca Long-Bailey to Dawn Butler.

This also applies to the media as well. Owen Jones can’t be a one man broadcasting system for the left (regardless of how much he’s killing it on YouTube right now). To win power, the left needs people on the insides of key institutions, from parliament to the media. We can’t just sit outside the corridors of power complaining it’s all stacked against us and expect things to change.

We need to talk about the media less

This brings me to another - likely to be unpopular - point: the left needs to complain about the media less. I’m not saying that the huge reach of the right-wing press isn’t a problem for the left, or that the BBC has lived up to its values of being impartial. I am worried that a sense of defeatism is creeping into the left.

People say that we cannot win while the media is against us. Therefore we will never win and we should all go back to our townhouses in Hackney and wait for the end. We need power to change the media. Breaking up the right-wing press barons’ stranglehold on the truth won’t be possible without the power of the state. The left needs to work with the media we have now to get the media we want.

We have done great work building up blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter communities and alternative news sources that inform and educate comrades (and these give me strength in the dark moments where I’m thinking of ending it all and becoming a millennial personal finance YouTuber) however, without using the mainstream media we risk creating a parallel eco-system that doesn’t spread our ideas, is too insular, spreads conspiracy theories and only appeals to people who already share our politics. Yeah the media is a problem. We need to change this and not sulk.

We need to fight the culture war and win

While we’re on the subject of media fights: the left shouldn't be shy about the things we believe, even if they piss people off. We need to be unapologetic in our support of trans rights, better treatment of migrants and equality of all people regardless of race, class, gender identity or anything else. 

Starmer’s attempts to avoid Labour being dragged into the culture wars are going about as well as everything else he does. There’s no way around the culture wars to power, only through. Also, perish the thought of the left standing against racial equality or trans rights and winning. We’ll never out-social conservative the Tories, and I wouldn’t want us to. 

The right will call us “woke” or “out of touch” but with courage we can make arguments for a more socially just world. The huge change in the status of gay-rights in my life time shows that consensuses can change. What’s unacceptable to one generation is common sense to the next. The culture war is a way to show that the left stands for equality and that everyone else is against it.

We need to get serious about the environment

This is the biggest issue facing the left-right now as it contains all other issues. From the power of big corporations to racial inequality, there is nothing that is not connected to the oncoming environmental catastrophe. The way the climate is changing will make all social and economic problems in our society worse, but the left can lead the charge for a better, greener future.

Young people, i.e. the future of our movement, are not only strongly motivated by this issue but understand how it relates to everything else they care about, from racial equality to global development, to ethical eating. Corbyn’s greatest success was drawing energetic young people into Labour by showing them that radical change is possible. The environment is where this radical change needs to be. The youth know it. The left knows it. Everyone needs to know it. 

It’s not too late to save the world from the damage that hundreds of years of greed and ignorance has caused. The left needs to put this issue front and centre to show that left-wing policies are the solutions that the world needs.

We need to talk about how we can make the future better

Related to this is the idea that the left needs to have a positive vision of what the future will be like. What we need to do is show how the world can be greener, fairer, more just, and generally a better place to live, if we enact left-wing policies. Fear is seductive, especially the way the right uses it, but a positive story about a better future will win out.

Corbyn won massively in his two leadership elections not because people thought he was electoral dynamite, the 2010s Tony Blair, but because he embodied the idea that the future could be better than the present. Whereas everyone who stood against him embodied the idea that managed decline was the best Labour could realistically offer. What is Labour’s story about the future now? Buggered if I know. 

A positive vision of a better future can convince people. People, young and old, suffering under late capitalism need hope of how the world can be better before they act. Let’s give it to them.

 The next ten years

The left came closer to power in 2017 (and in 2019) than I thought possible in early 2015. Millions of people voted for a radical left platform led by an outspoken socialist Labour leader. If you told me this would happen when I started this blog ten years ago, I wouldn’t have believed you.

When I started this blog it was to critique capitalism and outline arguments for socialism and social justice. These critiques and arguments have moved from the fringes to being central to our political discourse in the last ten years. This is an astonishing change that happened very quickly. I can’t begin to imagine what the next ten years will bring.

Things look dark now. Between a global pandemic, resurgent far-right nationalism and a looming climate disaster, the future looks pretty bleak. However, there is also a lot to be hopeful for in the next ten years, from the radicalism of young people, to the spread of left-wing ideas, to the outpouring of collective kindness that the pandemic has brought. 

There’s a lot of work to be done, lessons to be learned and campaigning to do, but I believe that a vision of a better, fairer future will win out. It’s been an unbelievable ten years writing this blog. I’m excited (and a little scared) about what the next ten years will bring.

The choice facing the Green Party

One of (many) endless debates on the left is the Maximalist vs Minimalist solution. If you don’t know what this is, don’t worry. It means you haven’t spent hours of your life debating politics in damp rooms above real ale pubs with lots of bearded Marxists. There are many ways to do politics on the left and that is just one of them. 

The Maximalist vs Minimalist debate comes in many forms, but it essentially boils down to: should we use democratic means to take control of some aspects of the state and use these to build power for a wider revolution, or push for a revolution that will change everything? Some change now, or lots of change later?

Minimalists argue that if the left gains some power and legislates for some change - say a shorter working week or better working conditions or better housing - then the people are more likely to support a revolution, as they have seen the benefits of radical left changes. Maximalists argue this is compromising with institutions that will never bring about real change, and that only a full revolution can improve the lot of the people. Lenin was a Maximalist. Rosa Luxemburg was a Minimalist.

A more modern debate

This debate might seem quite 1910s and that’s because it is. A more contemporary version of this argument is: should the left moderate it’s policies or language to win some power and deliver some change then use this as a base to win democratic support for wider change, or should the left argue for a total transformation for society?

This debate has divided social democrats from socialists, socialists from other socialists, the people who think Ed Miliband was on the right track from the people who think that Jeremy Corbyn was on the right track, and generally been an excuse for people on the left to hate each other instead of getting things done. The debate has divided the Labour Party, but soon, this issue will be dividing the Green Party.

The Green Party

As the Greens become more successful, they will be faced with a dilemma: do they stick to a radical plan to change all of society to be greener and fairer, or do they moderate their ambitions to take control of the state, use its power to change society somewhat and then build a consensus for greater change later?

Once a party starts down the path of moderation it becomes easier to compromise values or policies to win the support of the electorate as it is. It’s easy to say: “We’ll make some noise on topics such as immigration, house building or the culture war to win more votes and gain power, then we can use this power to affect positive environmental change.”

Power, even a small amount of it, is a useful thing for any radical organisation to have. Once you have power, over a council or national assembly or in Westminster, then you get access to a range of tools to effect the change you want to see in society. You can use power to help people who need help and to build a consensus for greater change. However, to win power, compromises might have to be made with many voters' intransigent conservative views.

Will the Greens compromise?

You can stay committed to your full vision and fight for a revolution, but this is challenging. Convincing every one of the need for revolution is harder than triangulating on what voters already think to get some power from the current system. Also, it’s easy to have transformative goals when you are far from power and there’s nothing to gain from compromise.

The Greens have been good at picking up the votes of left-wing Labour supporters who are dissatisfied with the current Labour leadership. A leadership who are willing to compromise several values important to left-wing Labour members, so that the party can win over more voters and take power. I voted Green in the London Assembly election this year because I was so disappointed with the compromises Keir Starmer is making. This is fertile terrain for the Greens, but how far will it take them?

As they pick up more voters, from Labour or previous non-voters, and get closer to taking over councils or winning seats, the temptation to moderate the Green vision to win power will grow stronger. For example, the Greens now control Lancaster City Council through an alliance with the Tories. Will this cost them left-wing votes in the future? If I lived in Lancaster, I would see this as a compromise too far and not vote Green again. Will this compromise to gain power increase or decrease Green support? We’ll have to wait and see.

Ineffective compromise

This is just one council, but it shows the dilemma facing the Greens. Many younger, more left-wing voters, which Labour are losing to the Greens, are dissatisfied with how Labour has compromised to gain (or try to gain) power in the past. From Tony Blair abandoning the commitment to Clause IV, to Ed Miliband’s control on immigration mugs, to Starmer’s praise for the troops.

It’s worth noting that although Labour is trying to compromise on its radical vision to win power, the party is going about this in a ham-fisted way that is losing them the support of the voters that Labour won during the Corbyn years, without winning back the voters they lost. Ineffective compromising can be as bad for the party as ineffective radicalism.

The Green dilemma

It’s easy for the Greens to win voters from Labour’s left when there is nothing to be gained from compromising on their radical vision. Can the Greens hang onto this radical support when faced with the chance to moderate their message or policies to win power? How will the party react?

A well-timed compromise could win them power to start the process of changing this country. Or it could cost them all the support they have. Or it could win them power then bind their hands in a way that makes power meaningless. Labour has had all these fates at different points, which will be the Greens?

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

Why everyone thinks they're rational and everyone else is irrational

One thing I have learned from years of talking to people about politics, both online and offline, is that everyone thinks that they are the only person being rational. Everyone from the far-left to the far-right via the centre thinks: “if you just look rationally at the facts you’ll see that I’m right”. Most people think that political disagreements are caused by an outbreak of irrationality amongst the people they disagree with. 

If you’re reading this, and thinking: “but I am right that if you look at the facts you’ll see they support my arguments” and “everyone else is only selectively interpreting the facts” then everyone else also thinks that. The one thing that we can all agree on is that everyone else is being irrational.

Incidentally, this is one reason why everyone who has ideas about politics reaches for the metaphor of The Matrix. It’s because everyone thinks that they’re the one who sees the underlying base code of how the world really is, and everyone else is just distracted by the woman in the red dress to the point that they can’t see that everything they believe in is a fiction.

Facts and stories

I’m here to tell you that everyone is actually irrational. Facts or evidence are just pieces of information that we include in the stories we tell. Stories are what we connect with emotionally; they are the essence of our political arguments. We tell stories about how the country would be better if we voted to leave the EU or to put Labour in power to win over others.

Almost everyone thinks that stories are the enemy of facts. Stories use emotion to distract people from the truth. Facts are the truth. Generally, I hear this argument more from people on the left than the right, which might go some way to explaining the poor performance of the left recently when faced with opponents who are much better at storytelling. To win we need both together. Facts and story united make the strongest argument possible.

Facts don’t care about your feelings

Ben Shapiro - a man some people look up to because he has a talent for the performative rudeness that passes for political debate online - has a catch phrase: “facts don’t care about your feelings”. It’s effective because this is how most people think of themselves when debating: calmly laying out the way things are whilst their opponent has an irrational emotional tantrum.

There’s no denying Shapiro is good at debating. He has said some dumb things and his hyper-confrontational approach to debate is part of the reason that American political discourse is so toxic. He’s also a grade-A right-wing shit muncher. He is good at the faeces throwing, no compromise, public humiliation contest that is our political discourse. However, and this is crucial, he is not good at debating because he uses facts - he’s good at it because he uses narrative.

Aisling McCrea argues that despite Shapiro’s catch phrase, his arguments are mainly full of insults, tropes and highly emotional statements. This is a great tactic: say I only speak facts and then pass off your emotional bluster as facts. It also works because his whole “I’m on the side of facts and the left only care about feeling” shtick is a narrative, not a fact. His approach to debating is based on a story. A story that says: “my side controls truth and the other side is trying to suppress truth with adolescent emotional outbursts.” It’s a great story.

Left-wing resistance to storytelling

The lesson of Shapiro’s success (if you define success as climbing to the top of the flaming trash pile that is right-wing American political punditry, or winning the admiration of millions of people whose Twitter profile picture is them wearing shades in their car, who like to send angry tweets to anyone calling themselves a feminist) is not to use facts, but to tell a compelling story.

On the left, we are more resistant to storytelling than the right. There is a deep seated belief that rationally stating the facts is all that’s needed to win a political argument. Alina Siegfried, an expert on storytelling, narrative and a spoken word artist, has written on this topic.

She interviewed Alex Evans, author of The Myth Gap, who said: “the left places undue value on rationality and reductionist scientific reason above other ways of knowing, as if that’s the only way to win an argument and change behaviour. We forget how crucial a role story, narrative and myth play in our lives and our psyches. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump alike crafted a mighty compelling myth. Just think of the slogan, Make American Great Again. Taken at face value, what American wouldn’t want that?”

Stories not lies

Looking at the success of the right globally, we can see the need for telling a story that resonates with the electorate. Storytelling isn’t a magic bullet; the left is faced with a wide range of challenges from declining class solidarity to ageing populations. However, our reliance on facts over storytelling is part of the problem. Just look at climate change: as the world hurtles towards an environmental disaster and all the evidence points towards the desperate need to act, serious work to avoid a climate catastrophe is further away than ever.

This is not an argument for post-truth politics. I’m not saying that we abandoned facts and rationality completely to pursue storytelling above all else. I’m also not advocating for bare faced lying, even if it helps us tell stories that can win elections. Lies from politicians matter. They degrade trust in politics, even if the lie helps you tell a more convincing story.

There have been many high profile lies in politics in the last five years. Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Vladimir Putin and Boris Johnson all have a casual attitude to the truth. Let’s take one big recent example, the bus that claimed that we sent £350 million a week to the EU. This claim is, at best, very inaccurate. Although the impact of the stat has been exaggerated by bitter Remainers desperate to prove that Leave cheated, it was both an effective campaigning slogan and not true.

Tory lies and left-wing facts

When fellow travellers on the left talk about being the only ones making a rational argument or preferring facts to stories, the Brexit bus is what they mean. We think: “their side lies, but they dress it up in a good story so people believe it. Whereas, we tell the truth using facts, which makes us better.”

A closer look at the “facts” of the EU referendum will reveal that both sides had a relaxed attitude to the truth in the campaign. Then Chancellor George Osborne’s statement that if the UK voted to leave, a punishment budget would be necessary turned out to be completely not true. As did talk of the pound crashing and all business fleeing the UK. This is not to justify all the economic mismanagement that has been done in the name of Brexit, of which there is a lot, but it has been a slow bleeding away and not the sudden cardiac arrest that was promised by the Tory Remain campaign.

You can argue that the EU referendum was different types of Tories lying to get what they want, and that the left tried to inject some facts into the campaign that were ignored, and there’s some truth to that. What’s more important is that an effective campaign exposes the lies that the other side tells. You can wrap a lie in a story, but that doesn’t make it invulnerable. A truth wrapped in a story can defeat it, if delivered by a skilful politician. It’s a shame that all the politicians pushing the Remain argument were about as effective as a damp piece of tissue in stopping a speeding train.

Stop being so rational

Some people will always believe that facts, plainly stated, will always defeat stories and/or lies. If you think that then I wish you all the best in your political campaigning. You should choose the approach you think is best. However, if this doesn’t work, it’s not because of a grand conspiracy involving Michel Foucault and social media companies to destroy the idea of objective truth. It’s because facts without story are boring. And that’s a fact. If you are angered by that fact, maybe you’re being irrational?

The left needs to get over this idea that the plain facts will win out against a good story. This isn’t an argument for tall tales and highly emotional exaggerations. It’s an argument to combine facts with good storytelling to be most effective in our campaigning. This is something we’d do well to learn from the right.

When you’re next discussing politics with someone you think is being irrational or overly emotional, it’s worth reminding yourself that the other person most likely thinks the same. Especially if their supposed irrationality is making you angry. Isn’t that an emotional reaction?

I don’t feel patriotic, but Labour needs to appeal to more than just people like me

As a society we have spent a lot of time writing about Labour’s woes. As a political blogger all I have done is added to the pages and pages written about how Brexit has realigned politics so that the places that solidly voted Labour for a century are now electing Tories. In these blogs, newspaper articles, Twitter threads and pub discussions one word comes up again and again: “patriotism”.  

For many, the underlying cause of Labour’s woes in places from Workington to Hartlepool is that it’s not seen as patriotic. Or that the party is controlled by middle-class, craft beer drinking, pansexual, students who care more about Palestine than Britain, and sneer at anyone with an England flag in their window as if they were some kind of subspecies of semi-intelligent human. 

Rebecca Long-Bailey attempted to use the idea of progressive patriotism to launch her bid for Labour leader. The idea was poorly received amongst her supporters. At the time, I wrote a blog that was critical of progressive patriotism, but now I think I should have been more open to the idea.

The reason that Labour isn’t seen as patriotic is not just because the radical left controlled the party for four and a bit years. Getting rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader hasn’t fixed Labour’s patriotism problem. Former leader Ed Miliband was also plagued by patriotism problems, most notably when shadow minister Emily Thornbury was accused of insulting the England flag. It’s still dogging Keir Starmer as, in May this year, the idea that Labour isn’t patriotic enough was back in the discourse.

Disliking patriotism

When writing these words, I’m imagining that I’m talking to people whose views are like mine. People who don’t consider themselves to be patriotic, or even … whisper it … people who consider patriotism to be a bad thing. A fellow middle-class leftie once said to me that “all patriotism has ever done is get working-class people to kill each other”. It’s not an over generalisation to say that, in the circles I move in, this is widely accepted.

You might firmly believe that patriotism is just socially acceptable racism, or that patriotism has been used throughout history to convince the poor of the world to throw themselves into a meat grinder with other poor people who follow a different flag, so that kings or bankers can continue ruling over the pile of bones that’s left behind. In that case I probably can’t change your mind, so you might want to skip the rest.

My key point is: I don’t think of myself as patriotic, but I understand that lots of people do consider themselves to be patriotic and these people aren’t necessarily regressive nationalists. I want Labour to appeal to more than just people like me. One thing the last few years have shown is most people (even on the far-left) have different opinions to me, so Labour needs to broaden its reach from just me to win.

I’m not saying that the left should embrace patriotism because it’s popular with voters. Certainly, something being popular and being right are not the same thing. However, my views on patriotism have changed in the last couple of years. I don’t feel any more patriotic than I once did, but I do feel Labour needs to, at least, appear to not be against patriotism.

Why patriotism matters

Already, I can hear muttering at the back that I have gone “Blue Labour” or that I’m starting down the road that led to Michael Foot supporters singing the praises of Tony Blair. Again, if you think patriotism is the same as racism, or that any acknowledgement of patriotism is inherently right-wing, then I’ll save you a few minutes and tell you now that you won’t agree with the below. However, if you’ll listen to me, I’ll set out the case as to why Labour should be a little bit patriotic.

The 2019 election result shows that Labour needs to win more seats to be in power, and while Scotland is out of the picture, Labour must win the places there Jeremy Corbyn’s perceived lack of patriotism was a drag on the Labour ticket.

67% percent of voters

Patriotism is important to a great number of voters. “Some 67 percent of Britons describe themselves as ‘very’ or ‘slightly’ patriotic,” according to an article by Helen Lewis in The Atlantic.

 Again, you could say that Labour needs to break with its 120 year history and find a new voter coalition that’s completely different to the old one (I will address this idea in a future blog post). However, if we rule out Labour completely changing politics, then the party will have to find something to say about patriotism.

There has been a lot of talk of Labour needing a narrative to unite its disparate voter coalition, so as a public transport-using metropolitan, I find it hard to ask this question: how does Labour win over people who love the flag?

Go UKIP or go home

What is key to the idea of how patriotic Labour should be is what I would call “light touch patriotism” or something subtler than the types of flag waving we usually see from politicians. Light touch patriotism doesn’t need to be in your face or loud, but it is present. On the left, there is a perception that to be seen as patriotic Labour has to go UKIP or go home. This is an exaggeration.

We fall into the trap of thinking that all patriotism is the UKIP style of angry, belligerent nationalism that gets so much attention because it’s so loud. Most people think of patriotism as “I love my country” but UKIP style patriotism is “I want my country to dominate other countries”. That’s the difference between most patriots and regressive nationalists.

UKIP patriotism is singing Rule Britannia with enough gusto to create a gale. It’s boasting about the power of the British Empire. It’s bringing up the Second World War over and over again. This isn’t love for your country. It’s fanaticism. It’s the way that children love football teams: with an undying belief in their side’s complete superiority to all others.

The alienating effect of UKIP style patriotism

That’s not what’s needed to win elections. In fact, UKIP patriotism is alienating to a lot of people, even those who consider themselves to be patriotic. One of the reasons why Leave won the Brexit referendum is that they recognised that people who were fanatical about their country would always vote for Brexit, and that they needed a softer message to appeal to people put off by chest-thumping patriotism.

This is what led to Brexit being sold as a vote for sovereignty and the NHS, and not a vote to take a dump on the Champs-Élysées and then wipe our arse with a 100 Euro note. Labour could learn a lot from how the Leave campaign used patriotism. I.e., ignore the purple-faced, flag underpants-wearing blowhards as they will never vote Labour, concentrate on how patriotism fits into a narrative with the things swing voters want: stability, control over their lives, a future for their children and communities.

Light touch patriotism

Light touch patriotism is not just the milder version of fanatical patriotism, it’s in opposition to it. It can be critical of the country at the same time as not saying that everything about Britain is so filled with toxicity that the entire national project should be condemned faster than a 1970s plastic factory still filled with poisonous goo.

Crucially, light touch patriotism can be combined with a radical economic message. It says: the country we love is ill and needs change. As with a recently divorced dad, who has hit the Johnnie Walker, Chinese buffet and angry calls to LBC a bit too hard since things went downhill, the way to help someone you love can be a radical intervention that holds back no criticism of how shitty they behaved in that trip to Costa del Sol. To save the country we love we need radical change to the state, the economy and our communities so that we can one day feel better about our lives.

The point of light touch patriotism is to reassure voters that Labour doesn’t hate the country, but wants to fix its problems. Like an abusive partner, the right uses love of the country as an excuse to do terrible things to it. They think love makes them exempt from criticism. Light touch patriotism should be a vision of patriotism that younger, more radical people in cities can get behind. It’s patriotism for people who aren’t Abbot Ale glugging, beetroot-coloured Boomers shouting at women Labour MPs on Question Time.

Inclusive and not exclusive

Light touch patriotism needs to appeal to people’s hopes and not their fears. Too often patriotism appeals to fears. It unites the people of the country by reducing us to our lowest common dementor: i.e. our hates and fears. Light touch patriotism can show how we are connected through the higher ideals of tolerance and fairness that (almost) everyone can agree with.

Light touch patriotism can include acknowledging what was wrong about the British Empire and celebrating multicultural Britain. It’s more about the Chartists than Rule Britannia. It’s Mo Farah and Jessica Ennis. Above all, it’s inclusive, not exclusive. What we all have in common is that we shared these small, rainy, inhospitable and stunningly beautiful few islands. We can live together or we can die alone.

Angry patriots

When I suggest light touch patriotism to other people on the left, I am confronted with a counter argument that it’s this view of patriotism - sensible, inclusive and critical of the country where it needs to be - that the people who have stopped voting Labour are rebelling against. People on the left argue that Mo Farah won’t be seen as an authentic symbol of Britain next to Nigel Farage.

I don’t think this is an accurate representation of the voters that Labour needs to win over. There are certainly some loud people - we have all seen them in the Question Time audience, on Twitter or even writing in national publications - who scoff at the idea that patriotism needs to be inclusive and would call light touch patriotism “metropolitan, elite, PC, woke, nonsense”. I’m not saying that these people don’t exist, but they are not representative of the people who consider themselves to be patriotic.

67% of the country doesn’t think that Nigel Farage is the embodiment of patriotism. Labour doesn’t need to convince everyone who wolfs down everything that Brendan O'Neill writes, or the people who go on Question Time to yell about “woke PC culture” until they turn the colour of a pint of Ruddles Best, that they are patriotic. Most of these aging boomers will never vote Labour anyway as they own their own homes and the Tories have protected their pensions.

Appealing to people who aren’t like me

Labour only needs to convince younger and middle-aged people who are struggling with bad housing, rising costs of living, low pay, long waits at the GP and underfunded schools that they love this country to win their vote. A little reassurance, coupled with a message of radical economic change can help Labour win back the seats that have been drifting away since the 2005 election.

In the past I have written in scorn about progressive patriotism, or light touch patriotism as I am calling it now, but Labour needs to think about how patriotism fits into the story it wants to tell about how the country will be better under a Labour government if it is to win back the support it has lost. I don’t feel particularly patriotic, and my goals for a Labour a government concern radical policy, but that doesn’t mean Labour shouldn’t seek to appeal to patriotic voters or that the two can’t be combined.

If the last seven years have shown anything, it’s that there aren’t enough people like me in the country for Labour to rely solely on people of my ilk to win power. Labour will need to appeal to people who aren’t like me to win power.

The pandemic has shown what’s wrong with our urban environment

A month or so ago I took a walk through Wood Green. In any other week of the ten plus years that I have been living in London, this would be thoroughly unremarkable, however, in these strange days of Covid-19, it was the closest thing to “traveling” I have done since the pandemic began.

For the last 13 months, I have barely strayed further than the park around the corner from my house. Walking through a different part of London was something of a treat. I was instantly transported back to all the other times I have walked through Wood Green, going to or from The Green Rooms or The Toll Gate, visiting friends, or watching a film at Vue Wood Green (hands down the best place in London to watch any of the Fast and Furious movies).

This time, all of Wood Green’s many shops were closed. On what would have been a busy shopping afternoon any day of the last ten years, the high street was practically empty. I felt as if I were walking through occupied territory. Not territory occupied by an enemy who had set up checkpoints and pillboxes to suppress the locals, but a crawling infectious enemy that transforms the land it occupies into a twisted parody of itself. Something more like Command and Conquer’s Tiberium or the creeping weirdness unleashed in Annihilation.

The shattered ruins of our former lives

For me, staying home for the last 13 months has been a manageable challenge. I’m surprised at how quickly - given beer deliveries from local breweries and the endless volume of films on Netflix - I have adapted to not going out. I found a routine that has sustained me for the last year and a bit. It involves pretending that the outside world doesn’t exist and spending as much time on my sofa as possible. It also involves not thinking about all the theatres, cinemas and museums that I can’t visit.

Being outside and walking previously familiar streets reminded me of what we have all collectively lost. Outside is the shattered ruins of the lives we had before the pandemic. I walked through urban centres designed entirely around shopping, which isn’t possible during the lockdown. Everywhere I went I saw useless urban spaces, built for the glorification of the god of retail. A god that Covid-19 has killed.

The embourgeoisement of the inner city

These large shopping centres that now stand silent are part of a specifically designed urban environment. A lot of them were parts of elaborate regeneration schemes that were designed to boost the local economy. The idea that underpinned this was that shopping would move away from the soulless American style out of town shopping centres, with acres of car parks surrounding grey warehouse-sized shops, towards something more French: inner city spaces where we could live, shop and do leisure in the same few streets.

Writer on urbanism Jonathan Meades describes this as the “embourgeoisement of the inner city” in his book Museum Without Walls. Meades says that this embourgeoisement, when combined with the decline in social housing has resulted in a demographic change around our town centres.

Walking through Wood Green I can see the evidence of the embourgeoisement of the inner city, the fancy coffee shops and craft beer bars, but these are closed alongside the Wetherspoons and the Argos. Embourgeoisement of an urban space didn’t protect it from Covid-19.

From life to death

The embourgeoisement of the inner city was supposed to breathe life into these spaces. Instead, it was just another wave of the commercialisation of all public space. Embourgeoisement created shops, shops, shops, more shops and the occasional branch of Costa Coffee where you can take a break from your shopping. Before embourgeoisement, Wood Green had shops, shops, shops, more shops of a different kind and the occasional non-brand cafe where you can take a break from your shopping. This is now all pointless.

We would like our urban centres to look like the modern day equivalent of a painting by L. S. Lowry when viewed from a nearby hill. Small brightly coloured people move between home and industry, part of a larger community. Now they resemble a painting by Giorgio de Chirico, deserted and life-less, populated by huge structures that have a disturbing absence of purpose. This is architecture without industry. Urbanism without community.

We need a new way of thinking about our urban environment. Putting large shopping centres in the middle of former industrial areas and expecting everything to turn into the prettier parts of Paris or New York is hopelessly naive. In a world where shopping is online and a pandemic can close us off from most of our urban environment, we need to ask the question: is our surroundings contributing positively to our lives?

Accessible to all

A different vision of our urban environments would include more green spaces, more places to meet people that weren’t based around buying either goods or coffee, and more leisure spaces. It goes without saying that these spaces should be inclusive for disabled people, people of different income levels or social classes, and people of different racial or cultural backgrounds.

This mustn’t be some corporate vision of people shopping and living together in a “mixed use urban development” or a world inhabited by the indistinct, characterless people who appear on the awnings that cover new developments of luxury flats. These need to be places that real people, all real people, can use. Even in a pandemic.

An opportunity for change

The pandemic is an opportunity to change and looking at our urban spaces dominated by rows of closed shops the case for change is obvious. Even if we can go back to the way things were - Saturdays given over to shopping and the occasional quick refreshment break - our urban environments are still not suitable for us.

They are too dominated by private commercial spaces that you need to spend money in to be allowed to use. They should be accessible for public transport and contribute towards the solution to the environmental challenges we all face.

We won’t be able to change our urban spaces as quickly as we were able to close them down, but we can start thinking about the different urban environment we want post-pandemic. Then when we know what it is we want, we can make it real.

"Empty Shopping Centre" by delcond is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Coded Bias shows how deeply embedded racism is in our society

The film of A Time To Kill opens with a scene of horrific racism. I’m not going to describe it here because it’s awful. If you’ve seen the film (or read the book it’s based on) you’ll know what I mean. If not, then take my word for it being both horrific and racist.

Events like this scene have been terrifyingly common throughout American history, as well as occurring in countries like Britain - where we like to pat ourselves on the back for being less racist than America, whilst celebrating our own racist colonial history. In addition to being a shocking depiction of how horrifying racism can be, this scene underlies some of the common misconceptions about racism. 

I’m aware that I’m a white person writing about racism and I don’t fully appreciate what it’s like to experience it as an everyday occurrence. I can’t speak for all white people, but from my experience there is an incorrect assumption by many white people that racism has two criteria. Firstly, that it’s an action that someone made a conscious decision to do, i.e. someone chose to be racist. Secondly, racism is always clearly racism, i.e. something that, if seen by a neutral white person, they would understand to be horrific. Events such as murder, rape, arson and beatings fall into this definition.

The subtle nature of racism

The opening of A Time To Kill meets these two criteria. An awful act - so bad that it moves an all-white jury - and one that the perpetrators choose consciously to do, even as a spur of the moment decision. Burning down an African American church or lynching someone also fits these criteria. The misconception that racism must have these two criteria obscures how subtle a lot of racism is.

A new documentary on Netflix presents a different picture of racism. It shows that it might not appear horrific at first and not arise through conscious decisions. This is a more nuanced exploration of racism than the very violent opening of A Time To Kill. It’s more nuanced than the films that focus on the sort of instances of racism that even a white person, unaware of their white-privilege, would consider racist.

This film is called Coded Bias. It begins by exploring the inbuilt biases in facial recognition technology. The film follows Joy Buolamwini, a grad student at MIT who was working on a project involving facial recognition and discovered that the software being used to scan people’s faces struggled to read faces of women and people of colour. Buolamwini realised that she had to wear a white mask for the software to recognise her face.

Failing to recognise faces

Buolamwini discovered that the problem with the software failing to recognise women or people of colour’s faces meant that many times, facial recognition software failed to match, or provided the wrong match, for people who are not white men.

Coded Bias goes on to look at a group called Big Brother Watch, who are organising against the use of facial recognition software by the Metropolitan Police in London. They follow police surveillance vans using facial recognition software, which is flagging people for the police to question who aren’t the suspects they are looking for. The film shows an example of a school boy, a person of colour, who is questioned by the police but is not someone they are looking for. He was flagged for questioning by the software.

The reason for these mistakes is that the software is not familiar enough with women or people of colour’s faces. The AIs that match police camera footage to databases of suspects need to be trained to analyse human faces. To do this, these AIs are fed millions of photographs to scan for faces. However, not enough women or people of colour were included in the training data that has been fed to AIs, so the AIs didn’t understand the difference between different women or people of colour when they encountered them in the real world.

The taint of discrimination

The reason why women and people of colour were not included in the training databases is that these databases were initially made out of the photos that were to hand, i.e. pictures of the staff at the elite universities and computer science labs that pioneered AI and facial recognition research. I’m sure I don’t have to explain to you why women and people of colour have been historically underrepresented at elite universities and research institutions.

This failure of facial recognition software to recognises people of colour’s faces - which has real world consequences when this software is being used by police - shows how subtle racism is and how the taint of discrimination creeps into everything that our society produces. Machines may not have bias in their hearts, but the society that produced them did.

The companies and institutions that use this technology are not transparent about how they are used. When the police question someone, that person has no way of knowing that the reason they are being questioned is because an AI that can’t tell the difference between different people of colour flagged them as a police suspect. If we don’t know what means are being used to investigate crime, then the concept of due process and fair legal proceedings goes out the window.

Assumptions about racism

Some believe that using machines to select candidates to interview for a job, or to identify police suspects in a crowd, is a way to strip out the human biases from these processes. There is no denying that humans bring their gender and racial biases into their decisions (consciously or unconsciously). However, machines only follow the programmes of their designers and unconscious bias can creep into their design. The machines our society makes reflect the prejudices of our society, just as the makeup of the faculty and student body of our elite universities represents the prejudices of our society.

The problems that Buolamwini found when she tried to design a piece of university course work that could recognise her face is connected to the opening of A Time To Kill. They both show how racism is a part of our society, but their differences show an assumption that many people make: that racism is a conscious decision by bad people and that it’s not something that can come about through unconscious biases that are so deeply ingrained in society that they are invisible. Like the air around us, racism can be invisible, and we don’t think about it, but it's always there.

No one set out, with deliberate malice in their heart, to create a facial recognition AI that would misread women and people of colour’s faces so that police in London can harass an innocent school boy. However, that is exactly what happened.

Racism doesn't have to announce itself

Many people (most of them white) like to tell themselves that if they don’t have hate in their heart and they don’t use the N word they’re not racist. If you’re thinking that, then you can give yourself a pat on the back for being a better person than a far-right thug with swastika tattoos, throwing bricks through the windows of a mosque. You are objectively better than that piece of scum.

However, you can still be doing something racist without deliberately choosing to be racist and without being motivated by hate. You could be using software that’s incorrectly flagging up people of colour for police questioning, and not stop to ask what’s happening or what the effects of this are on the people being falsely questioned by the police.

This idea that racism is only done by people like the vile dirt-bags depicted in the opening of A Time To Kill, people who have hate in their hearts and the N-word on their lips, leads many white people to either ignore or become angry at the people of colour who try to explain how racism is often subtler than the clear morality of a Hollywood film. Racism doesn't have to announce itself with Sieg Heils and street fights. It can be brought quietly into the world by people with the best of intentions, who are still subject to the deep-rooted biases in society.

Deeply embedded racism

Coded Bias shows how deeply racism is embedded into our society and how it manifests in surprising ways that have profound effects on people’s lives. The film ends with Buolamwini testifying before Congress about the serious impact that biases in facial recognition software can have.

We need to be aware of how our technology can replicate the deep-rooted injustices in our society. We also need to be aware that just because something isn’t obviously racist that doesn’t mean it’s not racist.

Labour can be the party for Walthamstow and Workington, but it needs a vision first

Once again, it’s my sad duty to report that the Labour Party has lost an election. This time it’s the Hartlepool by-election; another post-industrial Northern seat has gone over to the Conservatives. On the same, Super Thursday, day of voting Labour also managed to come third in the Scottish elections. The party did win the elections for the Welsh Assembly and the London Mayor, but even the latter victory was by a smaller margin than anticipated. 

What this shows is that Keir Starmer isn’t the natural winner he was advertised to be. The idea was that a man in a smart suit, who is schooled in political strategy, has a good brain and knows how to run things would instantly be seen as the best man to lead the country, especially when compared with an incompetent clown like Boris Johnson. Starmer’s Prime Ministerialness is turning out to be less self-evident than his boosters thought.

To explain how we got into the situation of choosing a man who looks like he’s running a branch of NatWest as the leader of the Labour Party, and then finding out that there’s more to becoming Prime Minister than holding a really good meeting, we need to talk about Tony Blair. Now, I know there are a lot of hot takes about Blair, and I don’t mean to add to the pile, but he was the last Labour leader to win a general election.

What does Blair have to say about being Labour leader?

Shortly before Starmer became Labour leader, Blair was interviewed about the future of the party. Recently a clip from this interview popped up in a Labour Facebook group I’m in. The poster was trying to make the point that we should listen to Blair as he knows how to win.

In this interview when Blair is asked about who should be the new Labour leader, he says that “the most important thing is a leader with the politics to help us win an election”. I find this statement a little annoying. It’s not a profound or novel concept. It’s a sideways dig at the left of the party, not only saying that they didn’t win an election, but that they didn’t want to win. Say what you will about Jeremy Corbyn, he wanted to win an election.

Let’s take this statement at face value: the most important thing is a leader with the politics to help us win an election. This begs the question: what are the politics to help us win?

Winning politics

We know from Blair’s speech on the 120th birthday of the Labour Party last year what he thinks the politics of winning an election is. He said that his mission was to move Labour to the centre to bring together the Labour and Lib Dem vote. This is factually inaccurate; firstly because the Lib Dem vote was at its strongest when Blair was PM, and secondly because Blair won by winning over Scotland and some of Middle England to Labour, whilst not losing too much of the traditional Labour vote.

He did this by being socially liberal, pro-EU, pro-immigration and pro-free market and I’m guessing that this is what Blair meant by the “politics to help us win an election”. I have argued with Starmer boosters on Facebook that Labour being socially liberal, pro-EU, pro-immigration and pro-free market will go down like a cup of cold sick with the voters that Labour needs to win back. How many people in Hartlepool are going to come back to Labour after they announce a return to Blair’s pro-EU, pro-immigration politics?

Are the politics to win an election anti-immigration, anti-BLM, waving the flag a lot, disparaging young people and talking about how great the British Empire was when Britannia ruled the waves? It’s more likely to be the above than pretending it’s 1995 again, dusting off the John Lennon sunglasses and sticking Some Might Say on my cassette Walkman.

Winning back lost voters

Well, Blair’s successors from the Labour Right want to grab this particular bull by the horns. They don’t go as far as saying we should make Laurence Fox head of campaigns (I would prefer that we put Count Binface in charge, at least he makes better social media videos) but they do have views on what side of the culture war Labour should be on.

A recent Fabian pamphlet called Hearts and Minds: Winning the Working Class Vote says, amongst other things, that voters “are entitled to be worried about illegal migrants crossing our borders, or becoming a drain on our resources” and that some people feel “a stranger in their own country” and that Labour should be tougher on repatriating failed asylum seekers.

I don’t agree with this pamphlet and its ideas, but it does go further than platitudes, or the usual hand waving about Labour needing to connect with people from both big cities and small towns. It does seem to say that Labour should align itself with the socially conservative values of the voters it lost in 2019. Paul Mason described this plan as Labour standing for “the agglomerated prejudices of elderly people in small communities,” which about sums up how I feel about it.

Blame the young

I’m pretty sure that Blair didn’t think that the politics to win an election involved making Labour the party of the agglomerated prejudices of elderly people in small communities. I’m sure that’s the opposite of what he wants. He probably means the politics to win an election is people in sharp suits, schooled in comms and business concepts, talking about how qualified they are to run the country - y’know, New Labour - but we’ve had this since Starmer took over and it’s not working. So, now the Labour Right have another idea.

This focus on the voters which Labour has been steadily losing since about the time Blair became PM also has a hefty dose of blame for the young city people with their craft beer, tattoos and music festivals in parks for the downfall of Labour. If only they weren’t obsessed with things old boomers in small towns hate, like treating trans people with dignity and not dying from a global freshwater shortage. Corbyn might have gone, but apparently the people who liked him are still poisoning the party a year after Starmer took over.

As a member of the left of the Labour party, I get that the right of the party doesn’t want the radical change I want. They want to make capitalism more bearable, not overthrow it. Making life more bearable for the people at the sharp end of capitalism is a noble aim and I can get behind campaigns for better wages for workers, more jobs, better housing, etc. I want a revolution, but that doesn’t mean we have to live in extractive capitalist misery until it happens. If the Labour Right think they can use the power of the state to improve the lives of the poor, then that sounds good to me.

A place of greater safety

Right now, no-one in Labour is getting what they want. In Hartlepool we’re bleeding support from the fans of Mrs Brown’s Boys, and in London, the viewers of I May Destroy You are not voting for Sadiq Khan with truckloads of enthusiasm. (Don’t write in and say you watch both, you have to choose one or the other, I don’t make the culture war rules). The party is going backwards slowly and a PM who, allegedly, said “let the bodies pile high” and then oversaw 120,000 deaths just won another election.

Maybe this is more evidence that voters do really want a leader who is a craven, narcissistic, lying self-promoter who doles out culture war soundbites like they’re brightly coloured shots at an early-00s student club night (showing my age with that one). Whenever I pointed out to Starmer boosters on Facebook that the politics of winning an election look more like what Boris Johnson is doing and less like what Starmer is doing, I was told that I was wrong and that the electorate want a sensible, centre-left, social democrat, who’s a safe pair of hands.

This view seems to have become the underlying assumption amongst a good number of Labour supporters and it needs to be challenged. Labour has retreated to a place of safety. We have ended up in the centre left, smart suit, soft speaking, dinner at Pizza Express, don’t rock the boat too much or you’ll annoy people place of safety. The problem is, the Labour Party is aspiring to run more than a middle-class family holiday to Florence, and it needs some passion and some risk-taking to do this.

What does Labour stand for?

The idea that all that’s needed to win an election is a leader who is a media trained man in a smart suit and who has a proven track record of running things is comforting and reassuring to a lot of Labour members. I get that we want to be seen as reliable next to Johnson’s chaos, but this is not a vision. Labour needs a vision of how it will change people’s lives if it’s given the reins of power. Not just relying on the voters seeing us as the sensible choice.

In the absence of a clear vision, people can project whatever they want onto Labour - and none of that will be good. No-one is willing to give Labour the benefit of the doubt if it isn’t 100% clear exactly what the party stands for. Right now, what Starmer’s Labour stands for, aside from better grooming, is vague at best.

The Labour Right’s vision

The Labour Right has at least the beginning of a vision for what Labour stands for. It may be the agglomerated prejudices of elderly people in small communities, but that’s better than the nothing we have now. I disagree with Labour embracing socially conservative values - it means the party would be running away from me (as opposed to gently sliding away from me, which it’s doing right now). However, I can see how tacitly this is better than the fudge that is Starmerism.

The Labour Right’s enthusiasm for this can be seen in how keen certain members are to purge Momentum or anyone to the left of Jess Philips from the party. That would send a strong message about Labour’s identity to the voters they have lost. To justify this, they’re keen to blame all of Labour’s current woes on its younger, more socially liberal supporters scaring off frightened Boomers with all this radical talk of black lives mattering.

The party of Walthamstow and Workington

I don’t believe in blaming Labour’s problems on young city people with their strange coloured hair and strange desire to not die breathing in polluted air in the drowned ruins of our major cities before we all turn 50. I also don’t believe in ratchetting up the rhetoric on asylum seekers and immigrants as a means to win back support from Boomer Brexit voters. Especially as immigration has got less saliant as a political issue since we left the EU.

I don’t think we should take for granted Labour support in cities, like the party did with working class support in small towns during the Blair years. I also don’t think we should give up on everyone who voted for Brexit or the Tory party in the last five years as irredeemably racist and not worth attempting to convince to vote Labour again. Labour can be the party of Walthamstow and Workington, if it has a vision of radical economic change that can tackle the problems of both places.

A narrative for all

Labour needs to know what it stands for. We all know what it’s against: Tory corruption and incompetence, which is harder to argue as they successfully roll out the vaccine. Being against the government isn’t enough for an opposition, it needs to be for something. Once we know what we’re for we can craft a narrative about this country, what has gone wrong and where Labour will take it that voters of all stripes can believe in.

The result in Hartlepool and London show that Labour’s approach isn’t working. Putting on a suit and looking managerial isn’t enough to win broad support in the 21st century. There are ways that Labour can win back the voters it has lost in places like Hartlepool, along with holding onto the voters it has gained in places like London and Wales.

This will involve careful navigation of the values gap between these voters. Most notably on the issue of patriotism. More on that in the next blog post.

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

Seaspiracy is weakened by framing the environment as a consumer issue

Politics and food are deeply entwined because what you eat is a powerful statement of your identity, but also because food shopping is where individuals can use their consumer power to create change. You may think that your purchasing habits are insignificant, but the boycott of South Africa was partly responsible for the end of Apartheid. Lots of people changing how they shop can have a big impact.

It’s hard to talk about the politics of food without thinking about this consumer choice framework. If we stop people from buying Soda Streams and Israeli dates, can we stop Israeli settlements in the West Bank? Debates around buying Fair Trade or sustainably sourced produce stems from the Gandhi insured idea that we should use our consumer power to be the change we want to see in the world.

Seaspiracy vs The Cove

It is with this in mind that I approached Seaspiracy, a new Netflix documentary about the fishing industry. The film begins by looking at whaling and dolphin killing in Japan. Seaspiracy makes a case that these practices are unnecessarily bloody and cruel, although this subject is covered more effectively by the 2009 documentary The Cove.

The film quickly moves on from this to explore the environmental impact of the fishing industry, first in Japan and then all over the world. I consider myself to be reasonably well informed about environmental issues, but I was flabbergasted at how destructive the fishing industry is.

Oil spills and garbage patches

Perhaps the most impactful moment of the film is when it argues that the BP Oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 was a net benefit for marine life, because it caused a temporary stop to fishing. This fact was not only surprising, but brought home to me the impact of an industry I had naively assumed was largely benign. I had made this assumption because, even in news sources that report on environmental stories, there is little reporting of overfishing and pollution from the fishing industry.

The film draws an interesting parallel between the high level of concern over plastic straws, and other single-use plastics, against the lower level of concern about the environmental impact of the fishing industry. One thing I didn’t know is that nearly half of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is fishing gear the industry abandons.

(Un)sustainable fishing

The contrast between the two is important, as single-use plastic is seen as an issue that can be tackled with consumer power - simply stop buying single-use plastics - whereas it’s much harder to change how the fishing industry goes about catching fish. Shouldn’t we only buy sustainably sourced fish and thus change the fishing industry using our consumer power, I hear you ask? Well, Seaspiracy doesn’t think this will work.

Seaspiracy shows that buying sustainably sourced fish is not an effective way to stop the damaging practices of the fishing industry. The film demonstrates that there is no way to accurately inspect the fishing boats whilst at sea to make sure they are fishing according to sustainability standards.

In one interview, a representative of the body who certifies that the food we buy is sustainably fished, admits that their representatives don’t check all the boats that are supposed to be catching sustainably sourced fish and can be bribed even if they did see unsustainable practices.

The role of government

The film concludes that the only way to protect ocean life is to eat less fish, once again framing an environmental issue as one of consumer choice. The focus on using consumer power to affect environmental change is not just limited to issues of fishing, it is a key part of many environmental narratives. Framing an environmental problem as an issue of consumer choice places the emphasis on individuals to address these big problems and overlooks the role of collective action in tackling them.

Consumers do hold a lot of power in our capitalist economic system and by shopping with the environment in mind we can send signals that might cause industries to change. I’m not for a second saying we shouldn’t consider the ethics of what we spend our money on.

However, the problems facing the environment are not just ones of consumer choice. In a world where 71% of emissions comes from 100 companies, there is a vital role for governments to take on these mega-polluters as even consumer power isn’t enough to get them to change. They must be compelled to change by the only thing more powerful than industry: the government.

Employment and the fishing industry

Seaspiracy focuses too much on consumer change as a solution to the problems of the fishing industry and not enough on what can be done by the government. It also fails to explore the impact of the collapse of the fishing industry, following everyone stopping buying fish.

The film takes aim at the subsidies that Western governments give to fishing and blames them for the environmental damage that results from these subsidies. Although it is correct that by supporting the fishing industry the government is supporting the damage it does to the environment, subsidies exist to protect sources of employment. Many economically depressed coastal communities depend on income that comes from the fishing industry, which is kept going by the subsidies.

The film does not adequately explore what the impact of everyone stopping eating fishing would be on the people who work in the fishing industry. It does explore the effect that industrial fishing from Chinese fishing boats has had on small-scale fishing in Africa. It argues that small-scale fishing is no longer sustainable because of the impact of large industrial Chinese fishing.

When fishing stops being a viable source of food and employment, it pushes the former fishermen into either piracy or trading in bush meat, the latter of which the film blames for the recent Ebola outbreak. Seaspiracy shows the negative effects of unemployment in the African fishing industry, but it doesn’t stop to consider the effect of shutting down large industrial fishing operations that employ many more people in other countries.

A powerful argument

Seaspiracy powerfully portrayals the huge environmental impact of the fishing industry. It’s horrifying to see the devastation that this industry causes, and more needs to be done to stop this damage before it becomes irreversible.

The film makes a powerful argument to stop eating seafood as a means to prevent the destruction of our oceans. I agree that we should stop using our consumer spending to support the fishing industry, but by framing this as only a matter of consumer choice, the film is missing the broader social change that is needed so that government power can be brought to bear to protect the environment from exploitative industries.

If we think of the environment as something that can be fixed at the checkout, we ignore the complex political issues - from food distribution to employment - that are mixed in with the environmental protection that together are needed as part of a broad political response to the environmental crisis we all face.

How Labour lost the working-class

The British working-class is a notoriously slippery concept to define. Coming up with a robust definition that fully embraces the complexities of class in modern Britain is challenging. It needs to be more than if you work in a coal mine, follow association football and own a whippet you’re working-class.

Many easier to define alternatives have been suggested, such as “the precariat” or the social grade C2D2, but despite these efforts most people still divide everyone in Britain into working-class, middle-class and upper-class.

The Labour Party and the working-class

For much of the 20th century the Labour Party was the home of working-class politics, supported by many (but by no means all) of the working-class at the ballot box. This has changed. Across Britain, and the Western world, more middle-class people are voting for left-wing parties and more working-class people are voting for right-wing parties. In Britain for the last ten years or so middle-class people have moved to become more left-wing on issues such as immigration and benefits while working-class people’s views have moved to the right.

There are a variety of explanations as to why this shift has happened, each one tells a story about where that theory’s proponents think that the Labour Party, and the left more broadly, has gone wrong in the last five, 10, 20 or 30 years. These explanations are competing narratives about the Labour Party, its history and its future. Below I will explain a few of the prominent narratives. My list is by no means exhaustive, but it covers the major explanations I found through my research. 

Who are the working-class?

To start we need to ask the question: who is the working-class? We could fall back on the historic definitions used by Karl Marx or Frederick Engels. Marx defined the proletariat as the social class that doesn’t own the means of production and their only means to survive is to sell their labour. This covers more than the working-class of today, a highly paid and highly skilled worker such as a software engineer or architect might fit this definition.

It also doesn’t describe the life of someone who worked in a factory in the 1970s, bought their council flat in the 80s, sold it in the 2000s property boom and now lives in leafy semi, enjoying a generous pension, but still views themselves as working-class. Someone who used to sustain themselves with their labour, but now lives rent free off a generous pension. This person might not have solidarity with younger people who are still working, regardless of what class they are.

A retired person, who considers themselves to be working-class, might be better off or more comfortable than a graduate (even one whose parents went to university) who is now struggling to pay rent from their zero-hours contract job. For the purposes of this essay, I’m limiting my focus to the people who consider themselves to be working-class as opposed to the poorest people in Britain.

“People who consider themselves to be working-class” and the “the poorest people in Britain” are not exactly the same thing (although there is a lot of overlap between the two groups). A 2016 British Social Attitudes Survey found that 60% of the British public identify as working-class and of those people who consider themselves to be working-class 47% had managerial or professional jobs. The survey called this “the working class of the mind”, which chimes with an LSE blog that says that: “Britons tend to identify themselves as working class – even when holding middle class jobs.”

A cultural definition of the working-class

The “working-class of the mind” highlights something that didn’t exist in Marx’s day, a means of defining the working-class by culture instead of economics. The proletariat were a new social group in Marx’s time, which is why he thought they held the key to overthrowing capitalism. A new group wasn’t weighed down with a history and culture that made it conform to the dominant capitalist ideology.

Whether Marx was right or wrong about this is by the by. The cultural definition of the working-class is important to how many working-class people see themselves. Having a certain shared set of values, tastes and attitudes is how many working-class people define themselves. The right attempts to win the voters of the working class by appealing to the attitudes that the average wealthy Tory and working-class voter have in common, such as shared sense of patriotism and dislike of “liberal nonsense”.

The right attempts to appeal to the cultural identity of the working class, but this doesn’t address the needs of the poor, suffering in poor quality housing or with low paid and insecure work. This cultural appeal to the working class is often more successful with older, usually better off, members of the working-class. Although under certain circumstances (such as the 2019 election) this can expand to appeal to more than just the comfortable members of the working-class.

An economic definition of the working class

I’m not here to argue that someone who runs their own business or works in a top profession like medicine or accounting (and maybe earns a 5 or 6 figure income) is not working-class, if they think they are. I’m making the point that this isn’t an essay about poverty. It’s about the political perceptions of the people who consider themselves to be working-class.

A modern economic definition of the working-class, as distinct from the middle-class, needs to go beyond what Marx wrote, as many working and middle-class people today are reliant on wage labour for their income. The more robust definition of the working class can be found in their material circumstances. The working-class are the people who cannot fall back on the reserves that the middle-class have, for example a family member who can support you if you fall on hard times.

This is the ideas of class that the left need to appeal to. The idea that the working-class are the people who are struggling with low pay, high costs of living, insecure work and poor-quality housing; the people for whom work doesn’t allow them to provide for themselves and their families. This different view of class takes into account how much our economies have changed since the idea of separate classes came into our minds.

The BBC commissioned The Great British Class survey in 2013, which found that Britain has seven classes, not the usual three. This is probably a more accurate summary of class in modern Britain, but to map seven classes onto my analysis will turn this essay into a book. So, to make this a manageable task I am limiting my definition of the working-class to the people who think they are working-class, as a state of mind or otherwise.

Different stories about the working-class

Some areas of the country thought of as traditionally working-class, such as the former Red Wall seats, are not solely defined as areas with a high density of working-class people living in them. Young people and better educated people have moved away from these areas as the jobs have moved to cities, which means these constituencies are now dominated by a specific subset of working-class people who are older, whiter and are less likely to have gone to university than the median voter.

Contrast this to places such as Haringey, which also has low wages and low levels of University attendance but is considerably younger and less white than Red Wall seats. From my experience, when arguing with someone they tend to change their definition of the working-class to fit the argument they are making, drawing more heavily on one or the other of these two broad icons.

I will try to keep my definition of the working-class in this article as wide as I can, to bring in as many stories and experiences as possible. However, the purpose of this essay is to find out why the working-class voters that Labour needs to win over to be in power are deserting the party, so I will inevitably lean more towards the Northern and Midlands, post-industrial working-class than the Southern or city based working-class who are still reliably voting Labour.

Why stories matter for this debate

In the absence of a reliable definition of the working-class we rely on stories about who the working-class are and why they might not be voting Labour anymore. Stories are not the same as political science, backed up by focus groups and polling, but they offer a way to understand the political shifts that have taken place recently in the UK.

In 2019, former mining town Bolsover elected its first Tory MP in over 100 years. To accurately explain why this happened from a political science perspective I would require hundreds of thousands of words and mountains of data, which I don’t have access to. The stories I am about to explore talk in generalities, but they are useful because they provide a broad vision of how the Labour Party has managed to lose the support of places like Bolsover. It’s up to the current Labour leadership to turn these stories into messaging and policies to win these voters back.

Story 1: It’s all about Brexit

Let’s start with an obvious one: Labour messed up the EU referendum. Working-class people were more likely to support Leave and Labour has been strongly identified with Remain. This was not only during the EU referendum itself, but in the three and a half years between Britain voting to leave and actually leaving the EU.

The story states that it was a mistake for Labour to adopt the same position as the Tories in the referendum, making it look like the establishment was lining up behind Remain and against working-class people’s desire to leave.

Grace Blakeley makes this argument in her article for Tribune titled How Labour Lost the Working-Class. She wrote: “During the [2019] election, I spoke to voters up and down the country who expressed the same sentiment: with the entire British establishment united behind Remain, they finally had a chance to kick back at a political class they felt had cheated their communities over many years.”

Blakeley makes other arguments about how Labour lost the working-class, not just the Party’s stance on Brexit, but her article is part of a story that seeks to use Brexit to explain Labour’s loss of support amongst the working-class.

There are issues with this story, not the least that it relies on a stereotype of working-class voters as Leave voters. Analysis from Lorenza Antonucci, Laszlo Horvath, and André Krouwel at the London School of Economics has shown that Leave voting is not collated with being working-class or having low levels of education (as is often claimed).

In a blog post for LSE they wrote: “rigorous analysis showed that the profile of Brexit voters is more heterogeneous than initially thought, and that it includes voters with high education and ‘middle class’ jobs.”

They go on to argue that Leave voting is more highly collated with a newly emerging “impoverished middle class” i.e. people who have middle-class jobs but have seen their standard of living squeezed.

This story also ignores the fact that Labour’s support amongst the working-class had been declining before the referendum, before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, or Ed Miliband became Labour leader. For example, in the 2010 election, 37% of people on social grade C2, skilled manual occupations, voted Conservative against 29% who voted Labour.

Labour’s disconnect with its former working-class supporters who voted for Brexit in 2016 and the Tories in 2019 is a symptom of a deeper disconnect rather than the cause itself. It’s not just that Labour made the wrong choice on whether to be pro or anti-Brexit; Labour failed to understand why people wanted Brexit. To get to the bottom of this we need a story that goes deeper and goes back further in time.

Story 2: A decline in representation

This story holds that a decline in the number of Labour MPs from working-class backgrounds has led to the fall in Labour’s support amongst the working-class. During the period where working-class support for Labour has steadily declined, it became more common for middle-class Labour candidates to represent working-class constituencies.

This often happened because these were seen as “safe seats” and a way to get political advisers into parliament, as part of the career path for middle-class Labour apparatchiks; from Oxford, to think tank, to political adviser, to MP. An obvious example is how middle-class Tristram Hunt (born in Cambridge, the son of a life-peer) was parachuted in to represent the heavily working-class seat of Stoke-on-Trent Central.

Ashley Cowburn explores the story of declining working-class representation in Labour in detail in his longread for the New Statesman: how political parties lost the working-class.

In his article, Cowburn said: “Data available from the House of Commons library shows that around 37 per cent of MPs from the party came from a manual occupation background in 1979. Fewer than 7 per cent did in 2015. Oliver Heath, an academic at Royal Holloway, University of London, claims this harmed the party’s image among its traditional voters.”

The roots of the representation issue go back at least until the 1980s. Cowburn spoke to Heath for this article who says that the decline in working-class support for Labour can be “quite clearly” traced to Neil Kinnock’s leadership "when he tried to distance the party from working-class radicalism". Heath said to Cowburn: “[Kinnock presented] a more middle-class, more sort of professional, social image of the party that then might attract some more middle-class voters. And that continued under Tony Blair.”’

The decline in working-class support for Labour happened over the same period that representation of the working-class decreased amongst Labour MPs. However, there hasn’t been a corresponding rise in support for other parties led by working-class politicians.

UKIP chose Paul Nutall as its leader in November 2016, who wanted to make UKIP the “patriotic voice of the working-class”. Today, this looks daft when we remember how ineffective Nutall was as UKIP leader, however, it was a very real fear for people on the left after the Brexit vote.

In 2017 Cowburn spoke to Nutall for his article and Nutall was keen to emphasize that many Labour MPs “have got absolutely nothing in common" with their constituents. “I mean look, do they have anything in common with a working man’s club in Durham, or a working man’s club in Hull, or Leeds. I doubt it very much indeed," he said to Cowburn.

Despite fear on the left of UKIP becoming the voice of the working-class, some people were skeptical of Nutall’s appeal. Angela Rayner, then shadow education secretary, said to Cowburn: “It’s not enough just to be northern and working-class – we’re not stupid.” She added: “We’ve been hoodwinked… it’s incredibly patronising, it’s not enough to just say we’ll have some northern trinket. You’ve got to have substance behind you.”

Why bring up the debate around an ineffective and largely forgotten UKIP leader? It highlights a flaw in the simple logic of the story that decreased working-class representation amongst Labour MPs is the cause of the loss of working-class support. UKIP were unable to steal Labour votes using working-class representation.

That said, this story is supported by evidence and goes some way to explaining why Labour’s support amongst the working-class has declined. However, I don’t think it offers a complete explanation, so we need to look at some other stories.

Story 3: Labour has chosen to prioritise middle-class values over working-class ones

This story covers a broad spectrum of ideas, such as “choosing Jeremy Corbyn as leader was alienating to the working-class” and “Labour has become too ‘woke’ for the working-class”.

Corbyn’s alienating effect on working-class former Red Wall voters is the largest factor in Labour losing last year’s election. However, like Brexit, choosing a Labour leader so at odds with what a lot of past-Labour voters wanted speaks to a deeper disconnect. The problem is not that Corbyn was Labour leader, but that most party members wanted him to be Labour leader.

The Labour Party is still made up of the people who voted for Corbyn to be leader twice. These are the members who want Keir Starmer to be more vocally supportive of the recent Black Lives Matter protest and make stronger commitments to left-wing policies. What these members advocate for has an effect on how Labour is perceived by working-class voters.

These members are at odds with working-class voters (and most other voters) on issues of identity. They are much more likely to be skeptical of patriotism, the military and the police than most voters. They have a more negative view of British history, especially imperial history.

A recent Labour Together report into the 2019 general election highlighted how the three groups (of the 14 they studied) that were most likely to support Labour had radically divergent views from the rest of the country on social issues such as immigration and patriotism. 

I write this as a middle-class Labour Party member who voted for Corbyn to be leader and whose views on immigration and patriotism are divergent for the average voter, as I have become plainly aware from polling and talking to people. I’m writing this essay whilst drinking craft beer, in trendy East London and leafing through the Dishoom cookbook deciding what I’m making for lunch whilst listening to Dream Nails. I am aware that this story says that the Labour Party has prioritised my values over those of working-class voters.

This story is best summed by a recent RT article by Dr Lisa McKenzie that argued that contemporary middle-class left-wing activists are more interested in symbolic victories (such as removing a statue of a slave trader in Bristol) than in improving the lives of working-class people.

McKenzie wrote: “The erection or removal of statues are symbolic decisions made by those with the most power to celebrate or denigrate any point, person, or narrative in history. Rather than argue among ourselves about effigies of dead white men, let’s do something positive and lasting for people who are still alive today.”

This story expects us to believe that Labour spent the last four years only talking about cultural appropriation, trans-rights and Palestine. Corbyn offered an economically radical program aimed at improving the situation of the poorest in society. Many of these policies were individually popular, but the overall perception of Labour and its leader led to defeat.

This story is also based on the assumption that all working-class people are white, Daily Express readers who have an inbuilt hostility to anything socially progressive. Some working-class people are LGBTQ+, or people of colour, or young people, who might have views about immigration or trans-rights more in line with those of Labour activists.

The working-class are not a single monolithic block who share one common set of values. Even a sub-set of the working class (such as Red Wall voters who supported the Tories in 2019) did not all vote the same way for the same reasons. There are groups within groups. Some more inclined to vote Labour than others.

Older, retired members of the working class are the most likely to hold socially conservative views and be at odds with Labour activists. They are also the least likely to be in an economically precarious position as their income (pensions mainly) have been protected by the last ten years of Tory governments, who chipped away at every other form of welfare apart from welfare for the old.

Labour is very unlikely to win back these voters, who might have voted Labour when they were working, but the ring fencing by Tories of their benefits means they are now free to vote for the party that aligns most with their socially conservative values.

Younger working-class people are more likely to vote Labour and have values more similar to the middle-class, metropolitan Labour supporters. There is a middle group between these two groups. People who are working age working-class voters in crucial swing seats, whose material conditions have become much more precarious over the last 11 years of Tory rule, and can be convinced to vote Labour if the party is serious about fixing the issues that blight this group. For example, regional underinvestment, lack of jobs and quality housing.

Research from Labour Together has shown that many working-class, former Red Wall voters have different social attitudes to metropolitan Labour voters; for example, seeing patriotism as something positive. The Tories appeal to the social values of working-class voters. Even those who are economically struggling and likely to benefit from Labour policies. Identity politics is a big issue that can turn these voters away from Labour.

The story of the Labour Party adopting more middle-class values that are alienating the working-class voters does a lot to explain Labour’s problems. However, it doesn’t explain why Labour’s economic policies were popular with both middle-class and working-class voters. To understand why this is, we’ll need to look in more detail at the political forces affecting working-class voters.

Story 4: Labour embraced neoliberalism

This story is based around the idea that it was Labour’s acceptance of the post-Thatcher neoliberal consensus that alienated the party from the working class. When Labour came back into office in 1997 they did little to challenge the low tax, low regulation, “free markets are more efficient” ethos of Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s Tory governments. Labour also did little to rebuild the power of the trade unions that had been decimated.

The story’s strongest evidence is Blair’s statement that his job “was to build on some Thatcher policies” and Thatcher’s statement that New Labour was her greatest achievement. This indicates that there was an ideological consistency between the two governments, which contributed to the prevalence of the alienating view that all politicians are the same.

Again, the process of Labour becoming a neoliberal party did not begin with Blair. It was a slow process that began in the 1980s under Kinnock, who took the party away from its traditional trade union roots and focused it towards winning the votes of the middle-class. In doing this he rejected many of the economic orthodoxies of the Labour Party. This continued wholeheartedly under Blair.

Most people don’t understand economic theory (including those who claim they do) and ideas like “neoliberalism” that might be common parlance in left-wing political circles don’t feature much in the considerations of the average voter.

Most people do have a keen awareness of the effects of economics on their jobs, their wealth and their communities. Many Labour voters have seen the negative effects of economic change in their communities as decent jobs disappeared and were replaced by insecure, low paid, causal work or nothing at all. The damage this has done in some communities (particularly in the former Red Wall) has caused many voters to look for solutions to their problems they would not have considered before, such as voting UKIP or Tory.

New Labour did very little to reverse the trend of deindustrialisation, (that began in the 1970s and was accelerated by the Thatcher government), which hit working-class communities hardest. New Labour creamed some off the top of the rabid financial capitalism of the City and used it to make welfare more generous for the working-class communities who had lost most of their industry, but they did very little in terms of offering hope or a vision of a better future to these communities.

Steve Rayson argues in his book The Fall of the Red Wall that working-class voters’ economic views are more left-wing than the average middle-class voter’s, and that voters in the former Red Wall would prefer higher taxes and more redistribution. This supports the idea that Labour’s move away from these policies in the 80s and 90s has moved them away from the values of working class-voters.

This story does little to explain why certain working-class voters switched from Labour to Tory, the party of Thatcher and synonymous with neoliberalism. The Tories’ support for Brexit partly explains this, but as we have seen, Labour’s declining working-class support predates Brexit. Brexit’s strongest advocates (the Farages and Jacob Rees-Moggs of this world) see Brexit as a neoliberal project. They’re not fighting to bring back heavy industry to Britain, but to free business and the ultra-wealthy from the oversight of the EU.

This story also doesn’t explain why Corbyn (who rejected neoliberalism) lost support amongst the working-class. It also doesn’t explain why Miliband’s Labour, with mild criticism of neoliberalism, performed worse amongst working-class voters than New Labour, who embraced neoliberalism.

The reasons for declining working-class support for Labour are more complicated than just economics. Although Labour’s acceptance of neoliberal economic policies did put them at odds with the values of many working-class voters, the social signals that Labour has been sending since the 1980s are also a factor. For an explanation of this, we’ll need to look elsewhere.

Story 5: Working-class voters are cross-pressured

This story uses the concept of being “cross-pressured” to explain the decline in Labour’s working-class support. This argument is heavily drawn on in Steve Rayson’s book The Fall of the Red Wall. Rayson writes that working-class people (especially those in the former Red Wall constituencies that he studied) typically have economic views that are drastically to the left of the median voter, but social views strongly to the right. This puts cross-pressure on said voters when choosing between a Labour Party that reflects their economic values and a Tory Party that reflects their social values.

This concept of being cross-pressured is interesting as it shows how working-class politics are different to middle-class politics. Middle-class people’s political views are likely to be more moderate than working-class people on both economic and social issues. For a long time (again probably since Kinnock in the 1980s) Labour has been chasing middle-class voters and has thus moved to the centre, alienating working-class voters on economic and social issues.

This story explains the difference between middle-class and working-class politics and also explains why the Tories were able to appeal to working-class voters, despite their economic policies being opposed to the self-interest of working-class voters.

(For those who are interested, the argument about working-class voters being cross pressured is explored in more detail in Steve Rayson’s book The Fall of the Red Wall. Shameless plug time: you can also read my article about his book that explores this topic as well.)

One piece of good news for Labour is the issue that has created the greatest cross pressure, immigration, is decreasing in its political salience. The socially liberal values of many Labour activists and the economic model based on the easy movement of workers, which the last Labour government was committed to, put Labour at odds with many working-class voters who were hostile to the rise in immigration that happened under New Labour.

Since voting to Leave the EU, immigration is seen as a less critical issue by many voters. This could be because voters feel Britain now has more control over its borders after leaving the EU. Some voters are, supposedly, not opposed to immigration, just to immigration that parliament doesn’t approve. It might also be because voters feel that immigration has declined since we left the EU.

Immigration may be less of a hot button issue, but Labour still needs to do more to make sure that the Tories cannot use the cross-pressured nature of working-class voters to lure them away from Labour. This involves Labour putting forward a program of radical economic change, one which both its working-class and middle-class supporters will like and benefit from. It also involves making sure that the party appears sufficiently aligned with working-class voters on social issues. This later part is easier said than done and bears looking at in more detail.

Appealing to the working class

There is no one clear story that explains where Labour has gone wrong in the last 40 years in holding the support of the working class and there is no single solution to the situation the party is in now. It is important to not think of the working class a single group. Younger members of the working-class are more likely to have values that align with younger people in the middle-class, who form the bulk of Labour’s activists. Winning over older working-class voters, many whom are materially well off, will be a lot harder.

Social issues, such as patriotism or Britain’s Imperial history, and identity politics will remain divisive issues that are likely to increase the cross-pressure on voters who can be won over by a Labour. To alleviate this cross-pressure Labour will have to appear more patriotic, or at least find a way to avoid accusations of being ashamed of or embarrassed by patriotism.

I’m not a patriotic person and I do think that political patriotism has many problems. I would like to explore the effects of patriotism, good and bad, on our politics in a separate essay. There are risks for Labour if the party attempts to appear more patriotic (not the least it being seen as insincere) but to win back the working-class Labour will need to appear more patriotic.

This doesn’t mean excessive or comic amounts of patriotism. Many voters require reassurance that Labour shares their values and isn’t sneering at them. For Labour to be seen as patriotic, it isn’t a case of “go UKIP or go home”, light touch patriotism is all that is needed.

Many people across the country are struggling with low pay, insecure work or unemployment, poor quality, housing, long waits at their GPs, a shortage of school places, their local school/hospital/any public building falling down, poor transport infrastructure and a general break down in the fabric of society that is supposed to hold everyone together. Meanwhile the wealthy’s interests are protected by the government. Covid-19 has made this problem much worse. This is the foundation that Labour can build a winning electoral coalition on.

The problems above affect both the working and middle-classes. Many people were struggling before a deadly disease ripped through society. There is an opportunity to win lots of votes with a message of change for the better and then, maybe, the chance in government to actually make people’s lives better.

Patriotism can be appealed to whilst also arguing for radical economic change. Over time many people whose views appear intransient can be convinced to be more open minded. The route to winning over the working-class is telling a story that offers a solution to their material problems, instead of fighting over issues of identity that divide the voters that Labour needs to win over.

The common thread of these stories

Each of these stories tells us something about where Labour has gone wrong in trying to win the support of the British working-class. Almost all of these stories trace the blame for this back many decades. Although, Corbyn carries the blame for not acting to reverse this trend and in many places accelerating it.

Corbyn has gone and his chosen successor is no longer in the shadow cabinet. The soft-left is in charge of the Labour Party and Labour’s polling has improved, but they still lag behind in the seats the Tories took from Labour in the 2019 general election. Corbyn’s election as Labour leader is a symptom of the larger disconnect between Labour’s middle-class activists and its working-class constituencies, which stories 2 and 3 argue.

Each of these stories helps us to understand where Labour has gone wrong. None offer a complete prescription for fixing the problem and the current Labour leadership would do well to bear all in mind when forming a strategy for winning back Labour support from the Tories.

Although each of these stories has useful information and all are good explanations, Labour cannot tell five different stories to win back the working-class or they all drown each other out in a cacophony of confusion. Labour needs to find the common threads of these stories to create a narrative that will win over the working-class and middle-class votes that Labour needs to get into power.

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

What does the left want?

The only thing everyone on the left seems able to agree on is that things aren’t going well for Labour. A year into the Covid-19 pandemic and the government has presided over a crashed economy and the highest death rate in the world, but still the Tories are ahead in the polls.

Everyone has their hot take on this. Is Labour not patriotic enough? Is Labour not socialist enough? Is Labour too focused on winning back the Red Wall? These questions are missing the bigger point: what is the change that we want to see?

It’s worth discussing this bigger question. I want to expand it beyond asking “what does the Labour Party want?” to asking, “what does the left want to achieve as a movement?” Or “what are we fighting for?”

What are we fighting for?

By asking this question, I want to involve more people than just those on the left of the Labour Party. The answer should include the Greens, the more left-wing members of the SNP or people who don't associate themselves with any political party, but do consider themselves part of the broader cultural and political movement sometimes called The Left.

One thing we all want is the defeat of our common enemy: The Tories. It may look like the Tories are destined to be in power forever, riding the wave of Boomer resentment of modernity, but it’s certainly possible to get Labour into power. In 2007 Labour looked unbeatable, but three years later they were in opposition. Labour can get into power and use the enormous power of the British state to make people’s lives a little bit better.

If this is our goal, then we have to start thinking tactically. What will cause the voters we need to move over from Tory to Labour? The answer to this might require some compromising over Labour being seen as patriotic. Patriotism is something I find distasteful, but might be needed to get Labour into power.

Labour in power

If the plan is to get Labour into power and then to use the power of the state to sand off the worst edges of capitalism, then we need to have a discussion about whether Keir Starmer can do this and whether Labour’s current strategy will work.

Undoing the damage of a decade of austerity would make a real difference in the lives of many homeless people, people with insecure work and people who are struggling to put food on the table. Labour can stop a lot of poor people suffering by ending austerity, and stop a lot of migrants suffering by ending the hostile environment.

To get Labour into power in 2024 will require Labour winning back the voters who switched from Labour to Tory in 2019. Voters who want Labour to be more patriotic and are opposed to identity politics. This fact is inescapable.

The left and patriotism

I don’t like patriotism and the steam roller effect it has on political debate where everything associated with patriotism is good and everything not associated with it is bad. However 75% of British voters consider themselves to be very or slightly patriotic, so patriotism needs to be reckoned with. [### link]

Labour (and the left more broadly) needs to either find a way to convince some of that 75% that we’re patriotic or convince these people that actually they don’t care about patriotism. It’s one or the other. Saying “yuck, patriotism” and hoping it goes away won’t help.

We need a plan if we’re going to convince 75% of the public that patriotism is toxic and it isn’t something we should expect from politicians. If we can’t do this then, as someone who is comfortable in my middle-class existence, it would be callous of me to say to poor people they must continue suffering under austerity because I don’t want Labour to embrace patriotism.

A bigger change to society

Does the left want to achieve a bigger change than this? Do we want to end capitalism and build a radically different society? Do we want to create a national or international identity that doesn’t rely on a patriotic, nostalgic version of Britain?

There’s lots of energy around making a big change. Every talk or meeting I attend has representatives from groups fighting neo-liberal capitalism or systemic racism in one way or another. However, the impact has been low. Capitalism remains entrenched. The racist systems that underpin society remain unchanged. The power of the banks and the right-wing media isn’t going to end any time soon.

If we want to achieve a bigger change then we need a strategy. Our strategy can’t be: wait until the climate and all the wars created by capitalism are so bad that even Daily Mail readers wake up and realise what’s going on. Too many people will be dead by that point.

The left’s identity crisis

All over the world, left wing parties don’t know what they stand for in the wake of the 2008 financial crash. The Third Way between left and right has been discredited. Does the left now stand for ending capitalism and stopping the constant cycle of crises it produces? Does the left seek an accommodation with capitalism, where taxes can be used to finance government programs to protect against its worst excesses?

We’re no closer to the answer 13 years on from the financial crash and one year into capitalism’s latest crisis.

Lessons from the last five years

For the last five or so years the left’s plan has been to put a good person in charge of the state. The Corbyn project didn’t provide a solution to the left’s identity crisis or a template for left-wing change elsewhere. Neither has Joe Biden’s victory in the US.

I’m sure that Jeremy Corbyn would have been a good Prime Minister and made sure that the Covid-19 crisis didn’t fall most heavily on the poor and marginalised. However, the fact that the left didn’t have a plan beyond “make Corbyn Prime Minister” has left us adrift now that he has gone.

A better idea of what we want

The left taking over the Labour Party to get what we wanted didn’t work. If we have learned anything in the last five or six years is that we can’t fight everyone from the soft left to the far-right all at the same time and win. We need a better idea of what we want and a plan to get it.

A clear answer to what the left wants will inform our strategy. Are we being big and ambitious or small and realistic? Anything can be achieved if we know what we’re aiming for.

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

How can British Rail’s failed Modernisation Plan teach us to ‘build back better’?

If we are to reshape our economy to achieve net zero emissions, our transport system must change radically. At the same time, as we emerge from the pandemic, there’s plenty of discussion about how we could ‘build back better’.

What historical precedents can we learn from? Policymakers could start by taking a look at the expensive disaster that was British Rail’s 1955 Modernisation Plan. This story may be well known to train geeks like me, but I am convinced it should be more widely understood. We could learn a lot from it.

After an initial post-war boom, by the early 1950s the newly nationalised British Rail was losing money as traffic began to shift to the roads. Aiming to reverse this, the £1.24bn Modernisation Plan – a staggering £29bn in today’s money – was announced in 1955.

With such an enormous remit and budget, how did they get it so wrong?

The vision seemed sound. Electrification and diesels would replace steam traction, freight handling would be streamlined, and signalling and stations would be brought up to date. The failure of the plan was a combination of incompetent execution, political pressures, and most importantly, fundamental miscalculations about the future. The two main areas in which this can be seen were traction and freight handling.

Initially, BR had continued to commission new steam engines, despite electric and diesel traction being increasingly used elsewhere, notably in the oil-rich US. Superficially that made sense. Steam locos used domestically-produced coal, when mining was one of Britain’s biggest employers. However, by the 1950s, this was beginning to look like a mistake. As labour costs increased, the labour-intensive nature of steam was becoming a problem.

In the decade of the Clean Air Act, railway yards and stations were becoming unhappy neighbours with their towns and cities. It also contributed to a PR problem: the perception that the railways were old-fashioned, dirty and reminiscent of the bad old days of pre-war life, in contrast with the dynamic consumerist happiness promised by car advertisements.

Unable to afford widespread electrification, diesels were the answer. Buying in proven designs from the US, when Britain had always built its own trains, was politically a non-starter. Instead, the idea was to trial prototypes from a range of British manufacturers, with the best performing types to be adopted as standard and commissioned in large numbers. So far so good. Until someone decided it wasn’t happening fast enough.

The result? BR started panic-buying batches of the untested prototypes. I’ve often wondered what back-handers might have been part of the procurement process here. But whatever the reason, instead of a standardised fleet, they ended up with a mixed bag of too many incompatible types from different builders. Some were so unreliable that they ended up being scrapped after only a few years. For some, the sight of a broken-down diesel being towed by a steam engine seemed to encapsulate the incompetence of the organisation.

Freight handling, too, needed huge work to modernise. At the time, most freight was conveyed in mixed trains and inefficiently handled at small facilities at most stations, much as it had been since Victorian times – as can be seen in this fascinating period video.

The Modernisation Plan’s answer was investment in vast, partly automated new marshalling yards around the country designed to sort trains wagon by wagon. These worked well, but by the time they opened in the early ‘60s, it was obvious that they were a giant waste. They would have been helpful a couple of decades earlier, but by now, lorries (aided by new motorways) were making the traditional mixed goods train a relic of the past. The new yards were a bang-up-to-date solution to a previous era’s problem.

The Plan’s failure was an enormous missed opportunity. Despite the investment, by the early ‘60s, BR was still in deficit. The government lost patience and shifted to a programme of cuts, which today are remembered as the infamous ‘Beeching Axe’. This set the tone for decades. The railway was a ‘parallel’, declining transport system, and what voters wanted was more spending on roads.

These assumptions persisted for a long time, but now themselves seem outdated. Faced with the threat of climate change, we need a transport revolution far greater than the changes BR attempted in the ‘50s, but at the same time we need to learn from the past.

A couple of themes ran through BR’s mis-steps. One was planning for the past, not the future. Another was a fundamental lack of imagination. Those empty white-elephant marshalling yards were an attempt to modernise the old, disappearing railway – a bit of foresight would have suggested investment in containerisation and bulk handling facilities instead.

We could be about to make a similar mistake with electric cars. Clearly, EVs will be a major part of the solution to drive down emissions. But EVs cannot solve the other problems of car culture, such as congestion or parking in cities. BR’s bad investment in too many types of diesel locomotives reminds me of the need to standardise EV facilities too. If we are not careful, we’ll end up with a plethora of incompatible battery charging systems and connectors.

Another of BR’s errors was simply replacing steam with diesel on a like-for-like basis, rather than recognising diesel power’s inherent advantage of less down time, meaning fewer locos should have been needed overall. Have we really thought properly about the possibilities of electric cars? Does a higher initial cost, but much reduced servicing requirements, make communal ownership schemes more viable, for example?

Whatever the advantages of EVs, a more pertinent question would be, should we even be seeking to replicate today’s car-centric transport system? With ever fewer numbers of young people owning cars or even acquiring driving licences, we have arguably already passed ‘peak car’, yet this is hardly ever reflected by policy-makers obsessed with the private car. BR’s Modernisation Plan seemed oblivious to the wider context of road building and increasing car ownership; today’s transport policy must avoid such a silo mentality.

On today’s railways, the myopic focus on speed – just like how BR focussed on wagon-load freight despite foreseeable trends away from it – seems to me to be a mistake. HS2 will lower journey times between some cities, but trains are already the quickest method for intercity travel. The emphasis instead should be on increasing capacity, and lowering ticket prices – that’s what most people actually want.

It’s also important to recognise when existing technology is the obvious solution. Electric express trains are the most effective and cleanest method of transporting people between cities ever invented. Just as the electric commuter train is the fastest and cleanest method of mass transit within cities. This doesn’t require any new technical innovations – just investment. It’s scandalous that some of Britain’s main routes are still entirely diesel-operated. Investment in overhead wires might not have made sense in the ‘70s or ‘80s, but times (and passenger numbers) have changed.

But the overarching lesson of the Modernisation Plan is that it isn’t just about having enough money to spend. In the 1950s BR demonstrated the risk of blowing a fortune on the wrong things because of outdated assumptions. To adapt to the coming green revolution, we need to ask ourselves what the transport system of the future will look like. Policy makers need to be asking people – especially young people – what their transport system should be for. Otherwise we’ll only end up trying to solve yesterday’s problems, just like BR did.

"British Railways Brush Type 2 D5500 (Class 31, 31018)" by Stuart Axe is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Labour needs a message and to stick to it

Usually watching England play in a major football tournament is a depressing affair, which is why I was pleasantly surprised at how well the team did in the 2018 World Cup. I’m not a football expert, but it seemed like new manager Gareth Southgate had got the team to function better as a single unit. The ball was skillfully passed and players were on point to receive it. 

When it all fell apart in the semi-final against Croatia, the formerly well-functioning team had turned into what I called “Shit England”, as it seemed they were just hoofing the ball up the pitch and hoping for the best.

This is how I feel about Labour right now. Like England, a change in manager seemed to deliver some good results initially. Keir Starmer introduced himself to the country and received a positive reception from people who don’t follow politics closely. The polls were moving in the right direction and Starmer had avoided the initial landmine of being accused of playing politics during the outbreak of a deadly disease.

Seeing what sticks

Recently the slick performance has given way to an undisciplined fumble. Like Shit England, Labour are throwing out anything and seeing what sticks. This reminds me of some of Ed Miliband’s cringe-worthy mistakes, such as constantly trotting out new era-defining buzzwords - One Nation, predistribution - only for it to be forgotten a week later in the desperate search to find something to make the Labour Party popular.

The latest example of this is the idea that Labour should be more pro-business. This annoys me more than the last idea, seemingly thrown out at random, that Labour should be more patriotic. Making Labour look more patriotic is about how the party is presented to the voters, not about policy. Patriotism can equally accompany neoliberal or radical economic policies. If Labour wants to appear more pro-business, this will require specific pro-business policies.

Politics for the wealthy

Britain doesn’t need another pro-business party, when we have the Tories (the party of the wealthy) the Lib Dems (the party of the wealthy with a bit of a conscience), UKIP (the party of the people who think that Britain is both a company and an Empire and should be run according to the worst aspects of both) and the SNP (who will turn Scotland into a low tax, low regulation, tax haven to lure away business from England).

Politics is already slanted towards the interests of the wealthy, without another party attempting to court the votes of the rich (and the confused people who aren’t rich, but seem to think it’s important to make life as easy as possible for those who are).

A vision for the future

All this flailing around is distracting people from the important work of outlining an alternative to the Tories. It comes at the same time a Starmer attempting to outline his vision for the future.

Starmer argued that Tory ideology made the UK more vulnerable to Covid-19. This framing came alongside a platter of policy announcements, including that Labour would “keep the universal credit uplift, end the pay freeze for key workers, prevent council tax rises, extend business rates relief and the VAT cut for hospitality and leisure, and renew the furlough scheme.”

LabourList editor Sienna Rodgers’s said: “It tied together the themes we’ve seen in Labour’s interventions over the past year: family, dignity, security, fiscal responsibility and long-term thinking.”

Tackling the problems of Britain

It’s good that Starmer is making the argument that 10 years of Tory rule led to the UK having the highest Covid-19 death rate in the world, but how does being pro-business fit alongside this?

Being pro-business is at odds with a number of the things a Labour government needs to do to fix the problems with this country. Can Labour be pro-business whilst taking on the fossil fuel companies destroying the planet? Can Labour be pro-business whilst tackling the issue of slum landlords and sky-high property prices, which blight the poor and the middle-class? Can Labour be pro-business whilst fixing the problem of too many companies offering low pay and insecure work? A commitment to tackling these problems puts the Labour party at odds with “business”.

Starmer’s pledges

When Starmer stood for Labour leader, he made a series of pledges. Many Labour members, myself included, took this as an indication of his commitment to a left-wing policy platform, or at least a commitment to a centre-left socially democratic policy platform.

The first of these pledges was: “Increase income tax for the top 5% of earners, reverse the Tories’ cuts in corporation tax and clamp down on tax avoidance, particularly of large corporations. No stepping back from our core principles.”

Is decreasing the income of the top 5% pro-business? Or is it the politics of envy, advocated by greedy socialists who want to take money away from hard-working innovators and give it to feckless teachers and nurses? The sort of thing Jeremy Corbyn would do?

Who will this win over?

The idea of chasing the support of business (or the people who enjoy a good lick of a millionaire’s boot) are at odds with what the Labour Party should stand for. There is a middle ground between Lenin’s War Communism and whatever “pro-business” means in actuality, such as taxing the wealthy a bit and using the money to offer a helping hand to the poorest in society.

This is not what Labour should stand for and it’s another example of Labour being Shit England. This “pro-business” idea is just hoofed out there to see if it scores a goal by accident, in the absence of anything resembling a strategy.

Who is this designed to win over? Everyone who voted Labour in 1997? It will take more than Keir Starmer praising Richard Branson as a job creator to achieve that.

Losing momentum

Starmer has lost momentum (in more ways than one), since the start of the year. He pitched himself as the competent alternative to the Tories, but as the government has successfully rolled out the vaccine program the wind has come out of Starmer’s sails.

There’s no better illustration of this than this recent video from Joe.co.uk talking to Red Wall voters.

Labour needs a clear communication strategy and not jumping from framing to framing, as they did under Miliband. Talk about being pro-business or more pro-flag is distracting from making the case that Starmer outlined in his speech about the future.

A message that needs to be repeated

As Sienna Rodgers said: “the argument that the Tories left the UK exposed to the worst of Covid must be repeated ad nauseam.” This simple message is what Labour needs to stick to. Just as David Cameron repeated over and over that Labour’s spending caused the financial crash or how “take back control” became ubiquitous during the referendum campaign.

Labour pitching themselves as pro-business is just throwing out things that Corbyn wasn’t in the hope that the polls will narrow. It’s the same as Shit England, firing the ball around and hoping for the best. It looks desperate even to the untrained eye and no amount of energetic kicking is a substitute for a solid strategy.

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

How the left should tell stories about poverty

The evidence is in: putting money directly into the pockets of poor people is the best way to address systemic poverty. This simple approach is the most effective solution to poverty. Doing something clever involving vouchers that can only be spent at certain shops is simply less effective.

A recent study from Oxford University has found that giving money directly to poor people protects them against external economic shocks, is easier to distribute than food (or other goods) and it stimulates the economy.

In a blog post about the report, researchers said: “There are anecdotes of welfare queens: people spending their welfare money poorly. But the anecdotes just do not bear out the reality in large samples of people. There is really no good evidence of waste. A review of 19 studies by the World Bank found cash grant recipients did not increase spending on alcohol or cigarettes.

UK welfare policy

This should inform welfare policy in the UK. In this country, we have seen the impact that cutting the amount that goes to the poor has had over the last ten years. Child poverty is up, homelessness is up, food poverty is up, child malnutrition is up. Who knew there was a simple answer to this?

So, why don’t we give more money to the poor? Well, you can imagine why. The reason is the bluster that would explode all over the right-wing press if the government were to do anything as nice as giving people who need money, some money. 

This means we have reached a point where most people in society (or at least a vocal minority) are dictating that the government follow a strategy for poverty elimination not supported by evidence. According to The Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 56% of people living in poverty in 2018 were in a household where at least one person was working, but we still hear stories about scroungers and the work-shy.

Stories about poverty

Why? Because most people have an image of poor people being lazy and feckless that has been built up in their minds over years. Mainly by right-wing tabloids, keen that the government stop doing anything that will help anyone who isn’t already rich, but also through cravenly opportunistic TV shows eager to jump on a stereotype as an excuse for topical programming. These stories, from Benefits Street to Daily Mail headlines about single mums, have a greater effect on the public than the evidence of a report from the country’s leading University.

This is because stories that we connect with work better than evidence in changing our minds, or re-enforcing that we already believe. This is something that the left has struggled with for a while, as this post by Alina Siegfried points out. It’s mainly focused on American politics, but it applies equally to the UK. Especially when she says: 

“Using the examples of the election of Trump, the leave vote of Brexit, and the complete failure of our global society to meaningfully address the threat of climate change, [Alex] Evans points out how the left places undue value on rationality and reductionist scientific reason above other ways of knowing, as if that’s the only way to win an argument and change behaviour. We forget how crucial a role story, narrative and myth play in our lives and our psyches. Nigel Farage and Donald Trump alike crafted a mighty compelling myth. Just think of the slogan, Make American Great Again. Taken at face value, what American wouldn’t want that?”

Bleak stories about poverty 

The solution to this? The left need to tell stories about welfare and poverty that contradict the right-wing narrative that is ever-present in society, instead of relying on facts to win the day. However, these need to be the right kind of stories to have the desired impact.  

It’s tempting (especially from the point of view of a middle-class person, like myself, who didn’t grow up in poverty) to make these stories as bleak as possible. We could paint a picture of a bedraggled underclass who toil all day in thankless jobs yet are unable to feed their children whilst paying rent on their damp, draughty bug-infested flat on a forgotten council estate. Something between a modern Charles Dickens and Cathy Come Home for the 2020s.

This would be a mistake. The evidence shows that using images that are bleak for depicting poverty doesn’t work in creating empathy or promoting social change. Instead, this makes everyone feel hopeless and it alienates poor people who feel stereotyped.

Stories can change minds

This applies for stories as well as photography (which is what the article above specifically dives into). Political storytelling is more than just words, creating a narrative that challenges the dominant perception of the poor will require the use of photography, video, writing and other techniques across a variety of platforms, from social media to the news bulletins on music radio.

There are several organizations in the UK who are telling these stories, some of them are charities such as Shelter and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, some are publications such as the Guardian. These stories are having an effect, as public opinion is (slowly) moving away from rapid anti-welfare sentiments and towards more sympathy for the poor. Recently a number of Tory MPs supported an increase in the rate of Universal Credit. Was this sudden outpouring of care a result of more people (and more middle-class people) claiming UC because of the pandemic or a sign of a wider change? Only time will tell.

A narrative against austerity

The left needs to think hard about the stories about welfare that we want to tell. Public sector debt has risen during the pandemic and the narratives of austerity, with its insistence on the need to cut public spending, look likely to come roaring back into politics. It’s important that the left has a counter narrative to this. A narrative about the importance of welfare as a safety net that isn’t based on depressing depictions of poverty, but ones that empower poor people and challenges stereotypes about the work-shy.

 By putting the needs, stories and opinions of the people living in poverty at the centre of any political narrative, the left can win the argument and guarantee that welfare is available to help the poorest in society. We already have the facts that show that this works; now we just need the narrative to convince everyone.

 Cover image by Victoria Johnson and used under creative commons.

What should Labour do?

It’s a new year and we’re all trying to turn over a new leaf; as much as is possible during a third lockdown. We’re trying to be better people and achieve the things we didn’t do last year. So, in that spirit, what should the Labour Party do this year to rise in the polls?

Labour needs to turn over a new leaf. There’s a huge health and economic crisis in the UK right now - not that anyone needs reminding - but the Labour Party is only 1% ahead in the most recent polls. In 2020 the government didn’t missed an opportunity to screw up, but Labour’s poll lead is within the margin of error and 41% of the population doesn’t think Keir Starmer looks like a Prime Minister in waiting (compared to 33% who do).

We all know what the problem is: Labour’s game is too defensive. To borrow a football metaphor Steven Bush used on the New Statesman podcast: Labour are playing a strongly defensive game in the hope that they’ll get lucky and the other side will concede a goal, so that they can eke out a 1-0 win. However, it just takes one screw up and the opponent gets a goal and then Labour will need 2 goals, which won’t come from playing defensively.

The alternative to defensive play

In this case, playing defensively is trying hard to avoid culture war issues and not being seen as too critical of the government during a national crisis. Taking ginger steps to avoid any cultural landmines won’t produce the ten-point poll lead Labour needs. So, what would?

Labour needs to describe a vision of how Britain would be different under a Labour government. It’s not necessary to announce specific policies at this point, when it’s so far from a general election, but Starmer and Labour need to tell a story about how the country could be different.

David Cameron did this effectively with Broken Britain, a slogan that conjured up visions of urban decay that united rural Tories and fretful, middle-class suburbanites in fits of pearl-clutching about everything that had gone wrong under the soulless technocracy of New Labour.

Constructive opposition isn’t helping Labour

It’s not enough to say where the Tories are going wrong. Starmer has consistently pointed out the mistakes that the Tories have made during the pandemic and, although Labour now have a small poll lead, the government is still polling in the high 30s. The Tories have plenty of time to switch leaders and fight a dirty campaign, filled with warnings of Labour profligacy and dog whistles about Cultural Marxism, to win the next general election.

It’s essential that Labour outline a vision for how the country will be different if Starmer is elected Prime Minister. The electorate need to believe in more than competence. They need a vision that inspires them to take a gamble on putting someone else in charge after what will be 14 years of Tory rule at the next election.

A strange voting coalition

The story that Labour should tell about how the country will be different should mainly be economic in nature. It should be focused on tackling inequality, creating jobs, providing decent housing, building infrastructure and redistributing wealth. A desire for this type of change is what unites Labour’s coalition, from young people in large cities struggling with poor quality housing and insecure work, to older people in towns with crumbling infrastructure.  

As Helen Thompson said on the Talking Politics podcast, all electoral coalitions look strange and the coalition that Labour need to assemble looks very strange indeed, filled with people with very different values and opinions. They are divided on issues such as immigration, patriotism, how they view British history and social justice. An economic message can unite these voters.

Pain points for Labour

This will be hard to do. It’s a difficult thing to outline a compelling vision of how the country will be different under Labour that the electorate can believe in. The last three Labour leaders failed to do this.

It will also be hard to avoid being dragged into a cultural war over social issues, such as statues or trans-rights. There will also be people who will try and make issues such as Scottish Independence and our relations with the EU, pain points for Labour. (Some of these people will be motivated by a genuine passion to achieve something they believe in, but they will largely succeed in causing problems for Labour and getting more Tories elected.)

Something else that will make this difficult is that the politics of debt has reared its ugly head again. The government has had to borrow substantially during the pandemic the national debt has risen and Rishi Sunak appears willing to make this an important issue again. Whether he genuinely thinks that large public debts are unsustainable or is promoting this issue as it will be tricky for Labour to navigate (or both) is a moot point.

The lesson of Brexit

Calls for austerity following a period of large public borrowing is a simple message that can be easily explained to the electorate and one that Labour has struggled to deal with in the past. However, Brexit shows that it is possible to tell a political story that transcends economics. There are things that people care about more than money, as many people were willing to be (at least a little bit) worse off in exchange for the promise of freedom that Brexit was supposed to bring.

The Leave Campaign used “Project Fear” as a means to dismiss the economic concerns over Brexit. It worked during a time of lackluster economic growth, where many were feeling the pinch of low wage growth and high costs of living. Despite this many were willing to take the risk that things could be worse in exchange for the hope they could be better.

A vision of hope

The people who voted for Brexit were barking up the wrong tree. However, they show that a story about how the future can be better than the present can make handwringing about economic constraints look timid or expose them as an argument in favour of the status quo, if enough people believe in the story of change.

Labour must offer a vision of hope and tell a story about how we can build a fairer and better economy, which works for everyone. That is Labour’s only route back to power. Playing a defensive game in the hope that the government messes up enough for Labour to eke out a narrow victory won’t work.

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