Politics as usual

For an election that was supposed to mark the demise of the old two-party system, the outcome of 6 May 2010 has gone a long way to restoring it. Even if reformers win the promised referendum on a new alternative vote system, it’s nothing like proportional representation (indeed, it makes it even harder for minor parties to get elected). And it won’t stop the polarisation of votes towards the two main parties that is an almost inevitable consequence of the Lib Dems going into government with the Tories.

Without having to do a thing, Labour has re-established itself as the only meaningful alternative to voting Conservative across virtually the whole of the country. The three Plaid Cymru MPs and one Green may merit a left vote in 2015 but no one can now justify voting Lib Dem if they want to keep the Tories out. As for backing anyone else – well, there is no one else. In Scotland there may still be the Nationalists but even there, when it comes to the next Westminster election, everyone knows it will have to be Labour or bust.

There were reports in the weeks after the election of the Labour Party receiving up to 4,000 membership applications in a day. There is certainly little evidence of the demoralisation and despair among party activists that followed previous defeats. Some even spoke of a ‘liberation’ or the sense of euphoria that comes from surviving a car crash you’d expected to be far worse with only a broken leg. The affiliation of Cleggite liberal democracy with the centre-right rather than the centre-left of British politics, in combination with the passing of the New Labour old guard, seems to have opened up a fresh sense of possibility in Labour and reversed the steady stream of desertions. The party is beginning to look as though it could be immensely more invigorated in defeat in 2010 than it was by the post-Iraq war victory in 2005.

The same cannot be said of the various shades of left electoral alternatives that stood for election, locally or nationally, on 6 May. Here is to be found only unrequited effort and crushing, abject failure – unmitigated by the narrow, exceptional and quite possibly unrepeatable election of Caroline Lucas for the Greens in Brighton. The Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (if ever there was a title designed to limit potential electoral support, this might well have been it) proved an outstandingly successful mechanism for squandering activists’ time, money and aspirations. A desperate 12,275 votes garnered from 41 constituencies (299 votes apiece, or 0.0004 per cent of the national poll), works out so low that you’d have to wait for about 35 jam-packed double-decker buses to go past before you found a single TUSC voter, squeezed between the pushchairs and the shopping trolleys and invisible to everyone bar himself on the crowded lower deck.

Respect mustered 33,251 nationally in what will probably be its swansong; the Scottish Socialist Party potted a paltry 3,157 – a far cry from the 117,709 constituency votes (6.2 per cent) it won in the 2003 Scottish Parliament election; and even the Greens’ 285, 616 (fewer than one in every hundred voters) pales in comparison with the British National Party’s 563,743 (1.9 per cent) or UKIP’s 917,832 (3.1 per cent).

In electoral terms at least, there really is no left alternative to Labour.

The BNP laughs while the left falls out

It’s been a depressing weekend for anyone who’s opposed to racism and concerned about the rise of the British National Party. On Saturday, in case you missed it (which you probably did, since both the pre-publicity and the turnout were tiny), there was a central London ‘march and carnival parade’ organised by Unite Against Fascism. It was predominantly youthful, colourful and vibrant, but if there were more than two or three thousand present Trafalgar Square has got a lot bigger since I was last there. That’s a long way short of the 60,000-plus who turned out in the rain for the Love Music Hate Racism event on the weekend before Dismayday (see 'Just like '78'); and no more than turned up at short notice to say hello to George Bush on his visit to London a week ago.

Far more depressing than the turnout on Saturday, however, has been the sectarian squabbling and repetitive point-scoring that erupts over every discussion of anti-racist organising (or almost any other form of organising) these days in the left-wing blogosphere. The participants have long since lost any sense of how they appear to the 999,999 people in every million who have not the slightest interest in their internecine catfights and wish only that they would go away and rattle some other tin roofs rather than keeping the rest of us awake at night.

Their arguments can be summed up in a couple of sentences. (If you really want to read them in detail you can find a representative sample here, under Liam MacUaid’s in itself unobjectionable assessment; or here on the ever more inappropriately-named Socialist Unity blog.) On the one side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a Socialist Worker’s Party front, regard the SWP as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left. On the other side there are those who see Saturday’s event as a model of broad front mobilising, regard those who didn’t support it as the font of all sectarian evil and want to drive a stake through the heart of the people they blame for splitting Respect and dividing the left.

Meanwhile, the BNP (642 wards contested in the Dismayday elections, winning an average 13.4 per cent of the vote; 130,174 votes in London and a seat on the London Assembly) must be laughing all the way to the polling stations.

One of the arguments over Saturday’s march concerns the fact that it clashed with door-to-door leafleting, organised by the anti-fascist magazine Searchlight, in one of two wards in east London where the BNP has hopes of winning council by-elections in two weeks time. It’s clear that this sort of local campaigning is an essential part of first halting, and then reversing, the advance of the far right. But it seems equally clear to me that big set-piece events on a national stage are an essential part of the campaigning mix too. That, after all, was the basis for the success of the Anti-Nazi League and Rock Against Racism the last time the far right posed a significant electoral threat; and the sad thing is that if you strip away the sectarian tensions I don’t believe that anyone is seriously arguing otherwise.

What also seems clear to me, though, is that the old anti-Nazi formula is inadequate to the current challenge. I was born and (in large part) brought up in Stoke-on-Trent, and my ex-partner of 20-odd years was born and brought up in Barking, the two main centres of BNP electoral success and ambition at the moment. So I know both places well; and I know the kind of people who are now backing the BNP. Dammit, some of the people in our families are among them.

The simple anti-Nazi demonising doesn’t work in the way that it used to for a number of reasons. First, the BNP has sunk real roots into some of these communities – far more so than the left. Whatever its ideological origins, whatever the backgrounds of some of its leaders, the BNP is not the same fringe Nazi organisation as its predecessors; and in places like Barking and Stoke voters know this from their personal experience. Outsiders coming in and telling them otherwise simply doesn't wash.

Second, the core anti-Nazi message is in any case weaker now than it was 30 years ago, when many people of working age still had direct personal experience of the war against fascism and couldn't stomach a supposedly 'nationalist' message that was at odds with what they and their parents had fought for in 1939-45. Put crudely, the patriotic appeal of anti-fascism has lost its punch; it’s much harder to combat the far right on this terrain than in the past. Expose them for what they are, yes, but the new-look, besuited-not-booted image is not just window dressing. As Magnus Marsdal (‘Underdog politics’) and Dagenham MP Jon Cruddas MP and Searchlight editor Nick Lowles (‘Nothing is more important’) outline in the June/July issue of Red Pepper, we are facing a Europe-wide phenomenon in the shape of the rise of a newly ‘respectable’ far right that cannot be combated on the simple basis of old-style anti-fascism.

This new far right is reaching parts of the white working class that the left is failing to touch. The reasons are many, but they boil down to two: the absence of an alternative political appeal in the form of a credible left-wing programme (exacerbated by the surrender of New Labour and other European social democratic parties to the forces of neoliberalism and global capitalism); and the absence of alternative political organisation rooted in the experiences and needs of people who have been to a large extent abandoned by the mainstream political parties and the left alike.

In the course of writing this, I dug out for reference a piece I wrote for New Society back in February 1985 (‘I’m not racialist but …’). Reading through it, I was struck by how I could have written virtually the exact same article yesterday. And if that’s not depressing, I don’t know what is.

Photo: Saturday's march/parade in London, courtesy of Harpymarx, who has other good pics too

Left blogs: the 'top 25' revisited

Every year, for at least two years, Iain Dale, the original Stakhanovite of Tory bloggers, has produced a Guide to Political Blogging. It includes his Top 100 Left of Centre Blogs. It’s a semi-randomly assembled selection of the good, the bad and Iain’s mates, in large part, and it seems to be based on an assumption that left of centre politics begins and ends with the Labour Party. But we all love lists, don’t we, and with a new one due out from Iain this autumn I thought I'd get my retaliation in first and do a mid-term review of the Top 25 he listed the last time around. I might get around to reviewing the other 75 if I don’t make too many enemies from the first lot.

Note that the second number against the blogs on the list here denotes their 2006 position. Two dashes means the blog was a new entry.

1-- Recess Monkey
It was an exclusive poll of Recess Monkey readers that uncovered 154 people who claim to have had full sexual intercourse with Lib Dem leader Nick Clegg (not counting the 28 who indicated they had partaken of oral sex with him and the further 31 who insisted their involvement was limited to ‘heavy petting and frottage’). That’s more than five times as many as Clegg claimed in his interview with Q magazine – a revelation that makes the mucky Monkey wildly popular with the search engines.

2-7 Tom Watson MP
Tom Watson’s blogging style is concise comment and lots of links. I like it.

3-1 Kerron Cross
The ‘voice of the delectable left’, Kerron Cross reckons he’s ‘Labour’s Iain Dale but funnier’. I’m not convinced. Anyway, he recently got married and stood down as leader of the Labour group on Three Rivers District Council in order to spend more time with his family-to-be. The blog will probably go next.

4-2 Bob Piper
Bob Piper manages to combine being a ‘lifelong supporter of Aston Villa’ with following Yorkshire County Cricket Club, which is pain enough for one man. I can’t bring myself to be in any way critical of his blog.

5-3 Labour Home
A multi-author blog ‘attempting to reinvigorate the party’s base and grassroots’, Labour Home celebrated its second birthday in June 2008. Despite its youth it still feels old and wrinkly with a masthead design from circa 1987.

6-17 Bloggers 4 Labour
Has the most facile political slogan in the business on its masthead, ‘Forward not Back’, but it’s still the place to go for Labour bloggers. Its blogroll claimed 429 affiliated Labour blogs at 23 May 2008. Of these, 209 hadn’t been active for at least two months, though, and only 144 had posted anything in the previous week.

7-32 Newer Labour
Now headed ‘New Direction. Choose Change. Beyond the Third Way.’ That’s three slogans that run Bloggers4Labour hard in the meaningless stakes.

8-- Chris Paul's Labour of Love
Loves Labour Lost, or something like that. Sorry, there’s a good Shakespearean pun in there somewhere if only I can find it. And there’s a good blog in Chris Paul's meanderings, too, if you labour long enough.

9-8 Dave's Part
Dave Osler, formerly of the Red Pepper parish, is one of the few ‘don’t miss’ bloggers of the radical left. Talks a lot of left-wing sense, such as on crime (read him on recent gun killings, for example), always accessible – and often funny too.

10-35 Luke Akehurst
The ‘obscure Hackney councillor’ is well to what used to be called the right of the Labour Party, but he laces his (fairly predictable) opinions with a heavy dose of hard information. Particularly good on obscure local by-election results. Unfortunately, his satirical online doppelganger appears to have given up the ghost after a double act in which the real Akehurst and the Fakehurst gave an online interest to each other that they could never have achieved on their own.

11-73 Fair Deal Phil
'Phil Dilks became known as Fair Deal Phil when he led a campaign for reduced bus fares for pensioners and disabled people in the Deepings.’ You might expect that with an intro like that (and headlines like ‘Local man appears in Ken Livingstone's biography’), you’re unlikely to find much of interest here if you’re not from Lincolnshire. But the headline is self-parody and Fair Deal Phil has a lightness of touch that would make me a regular reader – if I lived in Lincolnshire.

12-- Chicken Yoghurt
Chicken Yoghurt is the blog of Brighton-based writer, Justin McKeating. It has one of the best ‘About’ lines in the blogosphere when he concludes his entry with the words: ‘He will now stop talking about myself in the third person.’ Well, it made me chuckle anyway.

13-- Paul Flynn MP
'Read my day. Solid blogging.’ This is that rare thing, an MP’s blog that makes interesting reading. The independent-minded Flynn makes a point of not including ‘party political propaganda’ on his blog, which helps. It also keeps the House of Commons thought police off his back, since MPs’ expenses may not be used for anything ‘interesting, provocative or original’, as Flynn revealed in Blogs censored.

14-- Bloggerheads
I looked in here when this ‘online marketing man gone native’ was doing a live blog on the abortion vote. There’s a lot going on but it’s not terribly well presented.

15-5 Antonia Bance
A Labour councillor for Rose Hill and Iffley ward in Oxford, Bance’s blog is mainly of interest to people living in Oxford, though her round-ups of what other bloggers are saying shows she is far from parochial in her reading. She wrote of the Dismayday election results: ‘A blog called Socialist Unity appears to think that the IWCA [Independent Working Class Association] and Greens losing in Oxford is a defeat for the left: they might think so, but it won’t be a Green or IWCA administration that turns Oxford into a living wage city. That’ll be the Labour party.’

16-- British Bullshit Foundation
‘Rather than leave the BBF lingering around - like a fart in the ether of t'interweb - I propose that we go out with a bang. Well, an online bang at any rate.’ After a ‘final’ entry in September 2007, this one-time Labour House of Commons researcher returned in January 2008 for another last fling. The afterplop, presumably.

17-9 Mars Hill
'Local Labour activist Paul Burgin's private thoughts, meanderings and odds and ends' continue to flow as freely as ever - rather too freely probably; he could do with a good editor.

18-4 Harry's Place
When it moved to a new URL, fittingly enough on Dismayday 2008, Harry’s Place ditched its old Soviet-style pastiche logo in favour of Corporate Bland. It currently features David Davis (satire, in case you were wondering). New writers and other intitiatives are promised without abandoning the blog’s original aim: ‘to provide an open forum for the democratic, secular, anti-fascist, liberal, anti-totalitarian left’. There’s only so long you can get by on slagging off George Galloway and the SWP but without Harry's vitriol towards what it sees as the Islamist fellow travellers on the left it doesn’t have an obvious raison d’etre.

19-- Ministry of Truth
Overlong and detailed postings - a light read this is not - made tolerable by the fact that, unusually among bloggers, there is original research and not merely comment.

20-- John Angliss
Gon to the great blog in the sky, by the looks of it: the attrition rate among Iain Dale's 'top bloggers' is running at about one in five. More people survived the Somme.

21-70 Three Score Years & Ten
My old friend, former left MP Harry Barnes, is still going as strong as ever at three score years and eleven. He’s also the only person I know who supports Sheffield FC.

22-- Rupa Huq
The second highest-ranking woman on the list. If there’s another reason for her being there, I’ve missed it. [12 hours later: that was a cheap shot and it's not even true. I had an attack of the Littlejohns.]

23-- Skipper
Taking your blog’s name from the fact that you used to be captain of a cricket team is a bit too old maids and John Major for my taste, but Bill Jones certainly knows how to bowl a bouncer. ‘It would take a Shakespeare to do justice to a story that combines the jealousy of Othello, the ambition of Macbeth and the indecision of Hamlet,’ is his recent verdict on Gordon Brown.

24-14 Tygerland
The author is in the process of moving to Tallinn, so this is currently a good place to go for photos of Estonia. Really.

25-- Jag Singh
Seems to have passed over at 6.13pm on 1 December 2007. Left us with the headline 'Let's celebrate mediocrity.'

Setting your hair on fire

I’m up in Crewe and Nantwich territory, or thereabouts, visiting family and feeling sorry for myself and the world in general. I’m supposed to be running the Buxton half marathon (‘tough but – tough’) tomorrow but I got taken out by a flying tackle at football last Sunday and I’m lucky to be walking. Two A&E visits, three doctors and half a dozen x-rays later, they’re ‘pretty sure’ nothing’s broken (what’s happened to the world when even doctors have lost their certainty?), so I’m happy about that at least.

In Stoke-on-Trent, where I spent the first 13 years of my life and the rest of the family still resides, I’m finding it hard to come up with other reasons to be cheerful. The local headline news today is the conviction of an Asian father-of-six for the manslaughter (he was acquitted of murder) of his BNP-activist neighbour (and father-of-seven) in a fight that marked the culmination of years of conflict between the two families. The convicted man attended a mosque in the street where I was born; the local councillor is from the BNP. I find it hard to come to terms with the fact that the BNP now represents the ward in which I spent much of my childhood. The party is nine strong now, on a council where Labour has just 16 councillors left from the 60-0 majority it had just a few years ago.

I find this far more disheartening than the kicking the Tories delivered in Crewe, but both reflect an alarming trend. Former Labour voters in white working-class areas are expressing their discontent big time electorally – and, in England at least, they’re doing so by casting their votes anywhere but to the left.

I caught a comment by Jeremy Hardy on Radio Four’s News Quiz on the way up here, in which he said that he could understand why people wanted to punish New Labour but he didn’t understand why the voters had gone over en masse to the Tories rather than the Greens or someone else. ‘It’s like saying “Ooh, I’ve always had my hair done at the hairdresser’s in the high street but this time I think I’ll set my hair on fire,”’ he suggested. The left would do well to consider why it is that people would rather set their hair alight than have it done at their place.