Progressive Perspectives on the British Election

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Today the United Kingdom woke up to a new and for many troubling political reality – the Conservatives had won a resounding majority. Indeed this was a rightwing landslide unseen in a generation. The Tories will now move into government with the number and the popular mandate to enact policies that could have destructive implications for decades to come.

There is a necessary and obvious desire by those on the Left to ask “What went so wrong”? Already those from the so-called political “center” are declaring this as the end of Labour Leader Jeremy Corbyn’s progressive “extremism” and a return to the “moderate” policies that have previously ushered them comfortably into power. The fact that all evidence points to the unpopularity of this position, to say the least of its empirical failures to address any of the problems that 21st century Britain and the world face, will perhaps worryingly make little immediate difference.

To effectively counter this attack from “reactionary moderates” it is necessary to draw out the real lessons of what actually did go wrong. The answer is complex but at its heart it was one of an unwillingness to identify the threat of the Right and mobilize a mass movement for its defeat. Doing so means means showing not only that another better world is possible but also that it is populist elites who are preventing it from happening.

– Peter Bloom
Excerpted from “UK Election Shows Progressive Must Have
More Than Great Policies, They Need to Win”
Common Dreams
December 13, 2019

It is a very dark day for everyone here [in the U.K.] who wants a kinder, fairer, greener nation. . . . [W]e’ve now stepped into the same political arena as the U.S. has with Trump, India has with Modi, the Philippines has with Duterte, and Brazil has with Bolsonaro. These are very dangerous times. Just when we need to confront the greatest predicament humankind has ever faced, which is the collapse of our life support systems, our governments are in the hands of giant toddlers who just want to smash up all our public protections, our public services, any means by which the power of capital and those who accumulate it can be restrained.

– George Monbiot
Quoted in “U.K. Tories Defeat Labour in Landslide Election”
Democracy Now!
December 13, 2019

I see Britain as the latest footnote, if you like, in the global perilous state that democracy is in. What we’re seeing is the authoritarian right rampaging across the globe. And in a way, Britain has simply joined Brazil, India, Hungary, Poland and, of course, the U.S.A. So, we need to see what is happening in Britain in a global context, and that should worry us very greatly.

– Priya Gopal
Quoted in “U.K. Tories Defeat Labour in Landslide Election”
Democracy Now!
December 13, 2019

The UK and much of the world is now confronted with two visions for defeating the Right. It can either return to the unpopular and ineffectual Conservative-lite Centrism of the past or rebuild a progressive politics that is willing to fight on many fronts and in a myriad of different ways for achieving ultimate victory. At its core this project must be about reimagining society and reconnecting people concretely for this purpose.

Crucial in this respect will be showing how socialism can work “on the ground” to improve people’s lives. This means investing in efforts to build collaborative economies across the country. It also means organizing people around local issues linked to a global struggle for justice. This entails meeting people “where they are” with the aim of broadening their horizons of who is actually to blame for their problems and how they can be concretely resolved with progressive ideas and policies. It also means being willing to make alliances when and where necessary for short term political victories (or even to stave off disastrous defeats) while strengthening this revolutionary project of socialist transformation from the ground up.

In the future, Labour and the Left must be more than simply “right,” they must be committed to doing all they can to defeating the Right. They must use every means at their disposable to create a genuinely working class internationalist movement that is waged not only on social media or from the halls of Westminster but in the towns, communities, and cities throughout the country. The only way the virulent fantasies of the Far Right can be defeated is by working daily and with renewed energy to create a better progressive reality.

– Peter Bloom
Excerpted from “UK Election Shows Progressive Must Have
More Than Great Policies, They Need to Win”
Common Dreams
December 13, 2019

UPDATES

Joe Biden, Michael Bloomberg, and innumerable media commentators have used Tory Boris Johnson’s blowout defeat of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn to warn Democrats not to nominate a progressive like Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren. “Look what happens,” said the former vice president, when the Labor Party moves so, so far to the left.”

But the comparison, as the Brits would say, is like chalk and cheese.

For starters, the election was about Brexit, and Corbyn had neither a clear stance nor a clear strategy. He was torn between his long-standing opposition to the EU as a neoliberal plot and the reality that a majority of British public opinion was prepared to remain in the EU if better terms could be negotiated.

Corbyn’s position was one soggy waffle. He never made clear whether he wanted Britain to stay or remain, much less his terms as a condition of staying. The closest he came to taking a position was calling for a second referendum without indicating how he’d vote – the opposite of leadership.

Boris Johnson, for all his flaws, at least had a clear position: Let’s get Brexit done and get it over with. Now, ironically, with Johnson having won a resounding mandate, Britain may actually be able to negotiate less-onerous terms. (It’s also possible that both Scotland and Northern Ireland will try to secede.)

But I digress. There is simply no counterpart to Brexit in the American presidential race, and it was Corbyn’s failure to come to terms with the defining issue of the British campaign that did him in.

. . . As for Corbyn’s other positions as a kind of left social democrat, most of them are popular with the British electorate. British voters are disgusted with failed privatizations that resulted in worsened service and left taxpayers to bear the costs of bailouts. As John Cassidy reported in The New Yorker, 56 percent of those polled reported that they backed Corbyn’s proposal to re-nationalize Britain’s railways, and 54 percent supported his plan to require corporations to have one third of their board comprised of worker representatives.

That plan is a close copy of Elizabeth Warren’s. And that’s the larger reason why Biden’s comparison of Corbyn with Sanders and Warren fails. Most of the substantive progressive positions embraced by Sanders and Warren also enjoy broad support. The Democratic Party lost large segments of the working-class vote to Trump not because they were too aggressive in defending class interests, but because they were not aggressive enough and too in bed with Wall Street.

Biden’s comparison invites one other observation, but it’s the opposite from the conclusion that Biden draws. Boris Johnson won because he seemed to be defending Britain against the dislocations of trade. Trump, similarly, made gains on the trade issue as successions of Democratic presidents and presidential candidates failed to appreciate the harm done to working people by corporate “free trade.”

If Biden were to be the Democratic nominee, Republicans would continue to eat the Democrats’ lunch on trade, just as Boris Johnson and the Brexiteers have displaced Labour. That’s the only useful comparison, and one that Democrats should take to heart.

– Robert Kuttner
Excerpted from “Corbyn, Sanders, and Warren: the Bogus Comparison”
The American Prospect
December 17, 2019

Comparisons to the U.K. are inevitable but lazy. If you're gonna do it, you have to grapple with the fact that Corbyn was deeply unpopular whereas Biden, Bernie, and Warren all rank about the same on fav[orability].

– Adam Jentleson
Quoted in “Biden Parrots 'Profoundly Silly' Narrative That Lesson
From UK Elections Is Democrats Should Not Go 'So, So Far Left'”
Common Dreams
December 13, 2019

Although he is sometimes compared to Bernie Sanders, Corbyn is a very English figure: a sincere but dour ideologue who has spent most of his political life as a fixture of left-wing protest movements. He had been a regular columnist for the Morning Star, a newspaper of the far left that has historical ties to the Communist Party of Great Britain, from where he expressed support for leftist liberation movements in the developing world and criticized American imperialism. In 2015, shortly after he took over as Labour’s leader, he refused to sing the national anthem – “God Save the Queen” – during a memorial service for the Battle of Britain, the air war, in 1940, in which the Royal Air Force fought off Hitler’s marauding Luftwaffe. Acts like this were unlikely to go down well in the former mining villages and steel towns that flipped to the Tories on Thursday.

As the national-anthem example indicates, Corbyn isn’t a very skilled politician – or, alternatively, he is a man of such high principle that he refuses to trim his positions at all to win votes. It is tempting to regard him as left-wing puritan, but some of his gestures just seem daft and self-defeating. A couple of weeks ago, during an interview with the BBC’s Andrew Neil, Corbyn repeatedly declined to issue a direct apology to Britain’s Jewish community for the Labour Party’s mishandling of allegations and instances of anti-Semitism in the Party, even though he had issued such an apology previously. Rather than just repeating it and moving on, he doggedly stood his ground, thus insuring that the next day’s headlines were mostly about anti-Semitism instead of Labour’s policies or his attacks on Johnson.

. . . [A]n important question is whether Britain’s voters did actually reject the elements that Labour’s policy platform shares with those that Warren and Sanders are putting forward, which include substantial increases in government programs and public investment financed by higher taxes on the rich. When the pollster YouGov asked British voters, last month, about the proposals contained in Labour’s election manifesto, it found that most of them were pretty popular – and the most popular of all was raising the tax rate to fifty per cent for income above a hundred and twenty-three thousand pounds. Almost two-thirds of respondents expressed support for this proposal, and just one in five said that she was opposed to it.

Of course, polling numbers like these shouldn’t necessarily be interpreted at face value. Voters often say that they support individual policies of progressive and left-wing parties, but history suggests that getting the public to elect such parties to government requires a plausible, persuasive leader and a favorable environment. With Corbyn and Brexit, the Labour Party had neither.

– John Cassidy
Excerpted from “What Are the Real Lessons of the U.K. Election for 2020?”
The New Yorker
December 14, 2019

If Americans are going to make connections . . . they must talk about the assault on democracy from the billionaires and their willing minions. They must also plan for the inevitable character assassination of anyone [in the U.S. presidential election] who threatens the elites and their established order. . . . Corbyn and his party were relentlessly targeted by the corporate media who worked in collusion with the Tories, the surveillance state, and rightwing forces in the country. He was accused of being a Russian agent and an anti-Semite. . . . Corbyn was facing an establishment that had too much to lose if he won.

– Margaret Kimberley
Excerpted from “Propaganda and the Defeat of Jeremy Corbyn”
Common Dreams
December 26, 2019

And finally, here's Jonathan Pie's analysis of the election results . . .




See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Progressive Perspectives on Jeremy Corbyn's Achievement in the UK Election (2017)
• Something to Think About – June 25, 2016

Image: Peter Nicholls/Getty; Anthony Devlin/Getty; Shayanne Gal/Business Insider