Carolyn Leckie: Electability no longer requires holding the middle ground
November 14th, 2016 - 12:05 am Carolyn Leckie
DURING the recent Labour leadership contest, political journalists routinely contrasted what they called the “electable” and the “unelectable” wings of the party.
Right now, it’s hard to imagine any wing of the Labour Party winning a majority in the UK, or in Scotland, any time in the foreseeable future. But in the shifting sands of politics, the concept of electability is fast becoming redundant.
It was always a code word for moderation, for blandness, for playing it safe, for targeting the middle class and the more affluent working class, while ignoring the rest.
The received wisdom is that elections (and referenda?) can only be won on the centre ground. But, as the old Labour firebrand Nye Bevan once said, those who stand in the middle of the road tend to get knocked down. That’s what happened to the Hillary Clinton campaign in the USA. It’s what happened to the Remain campaign in the UK. It’s what happened to the Liberal Democrats and New Labour.
The politics of centrism – or the third way as it has become known in recent decades – has long underpinned the ideology of the US Democrats. It gradually took over the British Labour Party in the 1990s. Its essence was to fuse right-wing economic politics with left-wing social policy on issues like race and gender.
It is an idea whose time has passed. It thrived for a period of 15 years, from the first half of the 1990s to the second half of the 2000s. It blossomed under the economic conditions prevailing during these years. Uninterrupted growth encouraged the delusion that capitalism could deliver prosperity ad infinitum.
People believed, as they had done in the 1950s and 1960s, that next year would be better than this year, and their children’s lives would be better than their own. I thought the same for my own children.
It also thrived at a time when traditional industries were disappearing to the Far East, and trade unionism in the private sector was being all but destroyed. Individualism replaced community and collective action. Popular culture – from the X Factor to The Apprentice, from the National Lottery to the Kardashians – reinforced the dream that instant wealth was within reach of us all.
Jimmy Reid once said of the labour movement leadership that there were too many people at the top whose ambition was to liberate the working class, one by one, starting with themselves. That philosophy is now universal.
And it’s been embraced by much of the political left, which has all but abandoned any attempt to challenge the economic power structures in society.
I’m a feminist and have zero tolerance of racism. I despise Donald Trump and voted Remain. But I fear that the progressive left across much of Europe and the USA has become more and more detached from the broad mass of the working class. They may as well live on a different planet.
Take Saturday morning’s Guardian. Ingredients in its top recipes include black garlic, white miso and toasted caraway seeds – all unlikely to be found in your local freezer shop.
Its travel adverts include a £17,000 cruise from Sydney to London via the Philippines, the Maldives and the Suez Canal. Its fashion adverts include a £300 pair of shoes and an unremarkable red beanie hat for £80 – which is more than a week’s Job Seeker’s Allowance.
Much of the progressive left is seriously disconnected from the millions of people struggling to pay their bills and feed their children. It talks in a different language. Try out words like intersectionality, post-structuralism or hetero-normativity in a working-class pub in Dundee or Glasgow and just watch people’s eyes glaze over.
Some people might draw the conclusion that the left should respond to the Brexiteers and the Trumpeteers by toning down our opposition to racism, sexism and homophobia. No . Exactly the opposite – instead of narrowing and diluting our progressive politics we should be expanding and strengthening them.
Let’s start with class. It’s a word that mainstream politicians avoid at all costs and causes embarrassment if uttered in polite company.
At the heart of the third way politics pioneered by Bill Clinton and Tony Blair was the idea that we live in a classless society. “The class war is over,” said Tony Blair to rapturous applause at the 1999 Labour Party Conference.
Anyone who still believes that class no longer matters really needs to see I, Daniel Blake, the searingly brilliant indictment of poverty in the 21st century made by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty. For millions of people, this is real life.
WE NEED more than mournful laments about the existence of inequality to work out real solutions. You cannot seriously tackle poverty without also tackling wealth inequality. We are living in a time where We need to be clear what we stand for and whose side we are on.
All our mainstream parties suffer from an infatuation with big business. These are the wealth creators, say our star-struck politicians – a disrespectful insult to the millions who spend half their waking hours working to produce and distribute the goods and services that we all consume.
The third way has failed and paved the way for Brexit and Trump. Blair might have won three general elections and Clinton two, but that was back in what looks, with hindsight, like a golden era for capitalism. There is no centre ground now.
The SNP has managed to bring together an impressive coalition that spans the political spectrum. But tensions are inevitable. The Yes campaign was an example of a social movement that succeeded in inspiring people living in poverty to get out and vote. But we can’t just turn that on and off like a tap, while standing above the economic divisions in our society.
The left – and I include both the SNP and Labour in that camp – needs a strategy that fuses progressive social policies with a clear commitment to, in the words of an Old Labour manifesto, “bring about a fundamental shift in the balance of wealth and power to working people and their families”.
For those obsessed with electability cast your mind back five years and say hand on heart whether you imagined Donald Trump could be elected President of the USA; Britain would vote to leave the EU; a far left party like Syriza would take power in Greece; Jeremy Corbyn would be elected twice over as leader of the Labour Party; Marine le Pen would be tipped to win the French Presidency; Scotland would come within five percentage points of declaring independence; and the SNP would win 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies.
Then start to think differently.
http://www.thenational.scot/comment/carolyn-leckie-electability-no-longer-requires-holding-the-middle-ground.24705