I have nothing to offer except my bafflement

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

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

Howls of rage

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

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

Difficult situation

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

Wanted: an opposition

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

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

What do I know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conscience against compromise

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

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

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

Identity politics

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

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

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

An economic message

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

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

Race and class

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

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

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

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

Informing, not undermining, solidarity

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

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

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

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