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's black and white ministers' show

My favourite election headline appeared in the Croydon Guardian: ‘BNP “too racist” for black vicar.’ Reverend James Gitau, 63, from West Croydon, joined the BNP and went on the campaign trail on 10 April with Nick Griffin. A pastor with the United Holy Church, Gitau came to Britain in the late 1990s. He issued a press release at Misterseed.com, a website for diaspora Kenyans, in which he declared: ‘BNP is the only party which boldly speaks against sodomy in public . . . condemns use of contraceptives . . . abhors our children’s abortions etc etc . . .’

‘It is true that the old BNP policy was to send all black British citizens back to their original countries, Gitau continued. But he reckoned that ‘the new BNP embraces all races from the minorities’. To prove the point he went campaigning alongside Griffin and another BNP vicar, the party’s Lincoln candidate Reverend Robert West. Like Gitau, West has a thing about gays, branding them ‘dirty and disgusting’ during his election campaign and opposing ‘perv partnerships, which are an abomination in the sight of God and must be ended’.

The Daily Telegraph, reporting on the appearance of this black and white ministers show in Barking and Dagenham, described how West would shout ‘It is not racist to love your country!’ as Gitau stood next to him and ‘Every time the Rev Mr West shouts a slogan, Gitau shouts, “Hallelujah!”’

West’s brand of ‘Christian’ bigotry managed to bring out 1,367 people prepared to vote for him in Lincoln. But the BNP declined to allow Gitau to stand for it in Croydon Central, where it already had a perfectly acceptable white bigot in place in its candidate Cliff Le May. He wrote to London Mayor Boris Johnson telling him to ‘stop ruining our community by stuffing New Addington with violent immigrants who have no right to live among decent civilised white people’ and called the Conservative candidate Gavin Barwell a traitor to his ‘race and nation’ for his party’s immigration policy.

Faced with the likes of Le May, Gitau decided that the BNP was a bit too bigoted even for him. He stood as a Christian Party candidate instead, winning 264 votes – which was still more than 19 of the 41 Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition candidates managed, by the way.

Bloodied but not beaten

Were you up for Nick Griffin? It wasn’t actually a ‘Portillo moment’, which has to be unexpected as well as pleasurable, but the chunderings of the Fat Fuehrer (‘It is going to be too late for Barking but it is not too late for Britain’) were a joy to behold. The BNP’s Barking battering, where it lost all 12 of its councillors as well as being beaten into third place in the parliamentary election, was the highlight of a good night for anti-racists, which saw the far-right party lose all bar two of the council seats it was defending.

We shouldn’t get carried away, though. The BNP may be doing a good impression of a party on the verge of implosion as elements turn on a leader who picked up 3,500 fewer votes than the BNP council candidates in the wards that make up Barking. But while its defeat in Barking was spectacular, as it was in its second major target area, Griffin’s former ‘jewel in the crown’ of Stoke-on-Trent, its overall performance was one that any socialist electoral alternative at the moment would die for.

Nationally, the BNP won 563,743 votes (1.9 per cent) in 338 seats. That compares with 192,746 (0.7 per cent) votes in 117 seats in 2005. In other words, the BNP averaged 1,663 votes per candidate in 2010, a slight increase on the 1,647 votes per candidate it achieved five years ago.

The party’s absolute vote has held up well, and it has established small bases for itself across wide swathes of the country. Away from the headlines, in 10 seats in Leicestershire, for example, it got between 3.2 and 6.5 per cent of the vote, saving three deposits saved and getting 18.1 per cent (745 votes) in a Leicester City Council by-election. In Bradford, its candidate Paul Cromie was elected with 2,212 (30.8 per cent), beating the Tory by 15 votes on a 66 per cent turnout.

The BNP’s large-scale loss of councillors on 6 May was due in large part to the higher turnout from holding council elections on the same day as local elections, rather than reduced BNP votes. Even in Barking, many of the party’s councillors would have been re-elected if the turnout had been the same as in 2006. All but one of the Green and Socialist Alternative councillors in Lewisham, and Green councillors elsewhere in London, were defeated for the same reason.

The BNP may be bloodied but it is far from beaten yet.

Enough said

Take the A13 trunk road against the BNP

There are various versions of Billy Bragg's 'A13' around but I don't think you can beat this one from a youngish Billy on tour in Germany in 1985. I've long since lost count of the number of times I took the A13 in the 1980s and 1990s. My girlfriend's family lived in Barking and (no offence Barking, I'm sure you understand) we sometimes longed to do as the song suggests and:

It starts down in Wapping
There ain't no stopping
By-pass Barking (Billy Bragg's birthplace) and straight through Dagenham
Down to Grays Thurrock
And rather near Basildon
Pitsea, Thundersley, Hadleigh, Leigh-On-Sea,
Chalkwell, Prittlewell
Southend's the end

Like my home town of Stoke, Barking has become better known than it should have because of the success of the far-right British National Party in gaining seats on the local council. As in Stoke, the BNP is pouring resources into its general election campaign there, as well as trying to build on its local council base. So I dare say I'll be driving down the A13 to support old friends and family in the borough who'll be doing their best to stop them.

The people at Philosophy Football have produced another of their fine shirts (above), inspired in part by Billy Bragg's 'A13', to support the anti-BNP campaign. You can buy it here.

Realistic ambitions

It’s probably unwise to make predictions about the coming election, especially when you have form in this area. In 1992 I chose for the front cover splash of the election-week New Statesman, which I then edited, a story by Sarah Baxter headlined ‘Yesterday’s man’. ‘So long John, it was nice knowing you. With these words, the public is preparing to bid John Major farewell,’ her piece began. As we now know, it was five more years before we could finally say goodbye to him; the Tories won their fourth consecutive election victory with what is still the highest-ever election tally of 14.09 million votes.

I think I’m on safe ground, however, in saying that Labour will attract nothing like that level of support this time around, even if it does somehow contrive to pluck a fourth election win from the jaws of what has seemed for most of Gordon Brown’s premiership to be certain defeat. The party had already shed four million votes from its 1997 high water mark of 13.5 million by 2005, leaving it only 770,000 votes ahead of the Tories. Its 1992 losing tally of 11.56 million would be regarded as a stunning achievement in 2010.

All the talk, as I write this, is of a hung parliament. This is not just being wished for as a less-bad alternative to an outright Tory victory. It is seen as desirable in its own right by constitutional reformers who dream of a Lib-Lab pact ushering in a more proportional voting system, an elected second chamber and enhanced civil liberties.

Desirable though these reforms may be, we should beware the perils of such an outcome. The majority of the electorate, whatever its mistrust of the Tories, is none too keen on the continuance of this government. Nor does the Labour Party, on recent behaviour, deserve to remain in office. Divided and embittered, at war within its own ranks, its principal parliamentary actors have long since lost all sense of unity of purpose – or indeed much sense of any kind of purpose save that of power. To hold onto it with a minority of seats and in all probability the support of barely one in three voters and fewer than one in four of the electorate at large would be to invite disdain. It would diminish democracy, further undermine public faith in parliament and stoke up future support for a new populist politics of the far right – which is a much more frightening risk facing us over the coming decade than the Cameronite brand of Conservatism.

In the absence of an overall majority, the continuation of Labour in government – even, perhaps especially, a coalition government – would quite likely be merely the prelude to a more crushing defeat a little way down the line. For the left, it is hard to see how this election can be about anything but damage limitation. Backing the campaigns of good sitting MPs and individual candidates (most, though not all, of them Labour); working for the isolated breakthrough of left, Green or independent candidates in that handful of seats where they have a chance of better than derisory votes; preventing the far right from getting its first foothold at Westminster; trying to minimise the scale of the inevitable Tory advances; and above all preparing for the long, hard political slog ahead, both within and beyond the electoral arena – these should be the realistic limits of our ambitions, and the essential, rudimentary platform for any future recovery.