I would not normally quote a paragraph this long from The Guardian, but it seems necessary to get the nuance of the argument in their lead editorial today:
Some think the party has become too liberal socially and too radical economically for voters. This seems an overreaction. In a paper for the Compass thinktank, Neal Lawson and Grace Barnett suggest Labour ought to drop its tribalism rather than its policies. The electoral map holds out hope for Labour if it could work with like-minded parties. The Compass report identifies two clear battlegrounds emerging primarily in England: one between Labour and the Conservatives, another between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives. There are few constituencies where Labour and the Liberal Democrats are vying for supremacy. Hence Mr Lawson and Ms Barnett's call for a progressive alliance formed from parties given to tolerance, solidarity and greenery — a politics that sets them apart from the me-first, rightwing nationalism of their opponents.
I am aware that some readers of this blog have no love of the Guardian. I am more open minded.
The same is true of my politics. Like many, I have and will find it hard to forgive the LibDems for their coalition years. There is good reason for that.
But at the end of the day there are three lessons to note. The first is that coalitions between the Tories and other parties are what has brought us to this sorry state. Do not forget that with the DUP.
Second, first past the post has not delivered secure or stable, let alone good government.
Third, it is Labour's tribalism that keeps it out of office. And I find that pretty hard to forgive as well.
So before jumping up and down saying ‘why sell out?' I suggest three more things.
First, would you rather the Tories?
Second, would you rather people not have their own say?
Third, are you afraid to try to win the argument for what is appropriate in coalition? If so, why? What's wrong with the argument in that case?
I am desperate for reform. But more than that, I am desperate for democracy.
Surely the time has come for those who are to work together? How bad does it have to get before sense prevails?
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Blaming the LibDems for policies of an elected Tory government (last time elected with a huge majority) seems a peverse example of tribalism in itself. This is particularly true as the price the LibDems put on the coalition was a vote in 2011 that could indeed have transformed British politics, both introducing more diversity, and re-balancing the scales against the partisan two-party system.
Tragically, this was a vote that came before the campaigns needed to explain it. I now regret that I voted against the change from first past the post to an alternative vote system, largely because I didn’t know what it would mean. We simply hadn’t had the national debate needed to explain it, nor to point out the damage which can be done when parties obtain a majority in Parliament, having secured support from less than a third of voters.
If we wish to attach blame we should be looking not at the LibDems but at the two main parties, both of whom see the first past the post system as maintaining their dominance over UK politics. Interestingly RCV Ranked Choice Voting is rapidly gaining ground in some American states. But if we want a transferable vote system to help break down partisan divisions in our politics we need to
1) Have a meaningful debate long before we get to another vote on it.
2) Convince the Labour Party that adopting such a system will not harm their electoral chances in the future.
Today the middle ground appears dead in UK, but the political landscape is changing faster than we realise. What we need is a voting system that offsets the power of partisan politics to give all sectors of society, including the middle, a greater voice in Parliament.
The LibDems could have pulled the rug out from under the Tory’s at anytime. They didn’t because they were only to pleased with the Tory policies. Did you read the orange book?
The alternative voting system on offer was little better. The LibDems were suckered into that and allowing the Tories to campaign against and they enthusiastically supported austerity. Remember Danny Alexander?
Lib Dem members were suckered by Danny Alexander and the Orange Book crowd.
In 2009/10 we were firmly behind proper proportional representation (https://www.macs.hw.ac.uk/~denis/stv4uk/schedule.pdf), but when I spoke to Danny Alexander in the run-up to the 2010 election he didn’t want to know.
For the 4-man (and it was just men) LD negotiating team, “electoral reform” was just a box to be ticked.
How bad for Labour before tribalism ends ? Judging by Scotland it’s probably extinction.
Political Parties and Newspapers can never be sufficiently “pure” for some. I differ…. so am a Guardian reading member of the Labour Party who supports the idea of a broad left Alliance.
That Alliance might fight like ferrets in a sack but at least the arguments would have meaning because they would be in government (I hope). Right now the bickering within Labour is as depressing as it is irrelevant.
Hear, hear.
I lived and breathed the Guardian from when I started buying my own paper at the age of 18 until about 2017 a period of some 37 years – almost dailt without fail ezcept when i was away on holiday. I had piles of them to be able to read back through them as i didnt have time to read it fully or get round to the crosswords.
Yup really was that sad!
I even helped in setting up a copyright income stream for them (and other papers) in the 90’s – which I sorely regret – but that is another story.
I was forced to face the hard truths when they barred me from comments for daring to point at the naked propaganda of their Syria Campaign PR ‘churnelism’ .
So I feel that i have entitlement to make a considered judgment on what that organ has turned into over the period and certainly this last decade.
I also looked at its history and realised more unsavoury truths.
I won’t go into that any further here except state what I know the Guardian and Observer stand for :
The Establishment & Deep State;
Liberalism over Socialism;
First past the post controlled politics over real proportional representation.
Their support of Zionist nationalism over Palestinian oppression.
In short the perfect model of Controlled Opposition.
As they have censored and hounded out some of their best old fig leaf writers and sidelined whoever currently saves some of their blushes, the rest of their Aegean stable full, churn out daily stink and muck, which I DO track still, though it pains me.
I have restrained from posting here their subtle narrative manufacture and nudge, of their individual reporters reader constituencies, into getting behind the hard BrexShit, over the last weeks.
Their current agenda is as it has always been, to maintain the staus quo, to foil true social democracy and cover that with false liberalism whilst underhandedly pushing the neolib/neocon agenda, across a worldwide (5eyes) platform, under cover of its fig leafs.
That I am sorry to say is my unhappy revelation – so I have learnt to find real and honest information and wait before i trust it.
That is why i read this site and share it widely and just a handful of itger honest learned voices.
My thoughts more or less exactly, and over a similar timeline, too.
Mine too. The Guardian’s treatment of Julian Assange is what killed it for me. His name cannot be mentioned in comments, and they have abandoned him having once profited from his actions.
I think that a coalition of the less crazy conservatives and the rabid Labour right is more likely and sensible policies such as electoral reform will not be on the table
The Labour left tried its hardest to keep a broad church. Corbyn invited them into his cabinet twice, even after the chicken coup. His biggest mistake was appeasing these people who never wasted an opportunity to poison the well, and were then rewarded with peerages by the Tories. Had they not done so we could have had a Labour minority government in 2017. I can never forgive them for that. Austin, Woodcock, Watson, Mann, and a whole host of others, directly responsible for what happened and richly rewarded. Each time they attacked him he turned the other cheek, even as the media reached hysterical levels of smears and falsehoods. Corbyn made many mistakes but this was his biggest. Appeasement never works. All those thousands of young people inspired by a modest socialist package, all those foot soldiers tramping through wind and rain, all betrayed by a haughty elite, who now control the Party with an iron fist, purging any member who questions the direction and anyone who wants a free speech Party. It is impossible for Labour to win an election without Scottish votes and they have no chance of doing so in the foreseeable future. They will never get my time, money nor vote ever again.
Slightly disagree with part of your second last sentence Gordon. It is quite possible for the Labour Party to win a majority at Westminster without any Scottish seats. Is it likely? Probably not.
Gordon, I feel, and share, your pain, particularly after reading your comment on the earlier post this morning. I live not far from Bolsover. Over the past few years we have learned a lot about our communities and neighbours and it has, in the main, not been good. Friends, decent people who would always help others, who’s company we have always enjoyed, have had an unpleasant underside revealed. It can be quite lonely to discover that your opinions are exceptional, and only find a few agreeing voices on Richard’s blog (others are of course available!).
It seems mainly to be an age and location phenomenon. I have sons living in London who describe a different world, so all hope is not lost. But the grip that the media and other “players” have on a large part of the population’s views is very, very strong and shows no sign that it will loosen any time soon.
This is true as well. It is definitely an age thing. Young people were momentarily fired up with Corbyn’s message but are looking around now and wondering where all the hope went. Older people here, with some very minor exceptions, are predominately bitter and racist. I’ve almost given op on the post war boomers (I’m in my 60s). Even some of the old folk we shop for are really nasty in their world view. The ones (not many left) who actually fought in the war were pro-EU. They saw the results of separation and the build up of hate. Some of our children live and work in France/Switzerland, enjoy freedom of movement and love it there. Others live in Sheffield which is much more cosmopolitan and easy. The old pit communities and Red Wall industrial areas were left to rot for so long, by all Parties, they are a mostly beyond hope. I despair.
If we haven’t had a second Scottish independence referendum by 2024 then Labour could certainly buy the support of the SNP by offering one. A not insignificant 50ish MPs for however long Scotland is still in the union (then the government would collapse).
The MPs would still be there even after a referendum win, like our MEPs in Brussels until January this year.
I think Labour is broken and will be stuck in factionalism for a generation.
For many people on the Left (and remember hundreds of thousands of new members joined because of Corbyn) it seems the consensus is that the Left were stitched up, that antisemitism has been used to destroy their faction by bad faith actors and that Starmer would be no better than a Tory.
I don’t think Labour can get rid of more than a handful of those people and I don’t think they can be tamed by suspensions and gagging orders.
I would love it to be solved and frankly I don’t mind which faction wins so long as the party can unite. But I think hopes that Starmer was the leader to do that are looking increasingly strained.
Agreed DunGroanin about the neoliberal Guardian, they too support FPTP and the establishment status quo. David Graebers Twitter post about the Guardian’s appauling misrepresentations is there for all to see.
As a Labour member I too support an alliance with Greens and LibDems ( this is harder) and SNP, held together by a common policy of proportional representation and devolution to the English regions. More democracy and less Westminster.
At some stage Mr Starmer must tell us where he stands on this most important and central issue. Whether he has the imagination to relaunch a Labour party that embraces this and reaches out to the younger voter I simply dont know.
Most fellow Labour members I know, voted for Starmer because he said he would unite the party. Frankly it seems that he has so far failed to do that.
It seems to me that PR and devolution is an issue that can form the strategy that will unite the party. Labour has to stand for something, managerialism isnt enough, we need a vision, we need hope.
Thanks Richard, I turn to your blog for such a hopeful vision, Mr Starmer should bloody well read it and become a visionary leader. We live in hope.
Spot on Paul.
This was Clive Lewis’ manifesto for the Labour leadership election.
https://www.cliveforleader.com/manifesto/
It’s a damn shame he didn’t make the ballot! Maybe he will in 2025..
As Clive identifies, greater electoral democracy cannot happen independently of party democracy.
The obvious contradiction here though is that Starmer and his team don’t want the Labour party to be more democratic, as that would give more power to the left/members. So I really don’t hold out any hope for him to back PR!
The Guardian is right. Labour policy is not the problem. It did well in 2017 with policies that were popular and were to the left. Its subsequent failure can be attributed to several issues that have been discussed endlessly. Here is an excellent summary: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2020/12/jeremy-corbyn-labour-uk-defeat-december-2019-election.
Labour’s tribalism is long-standing. It seems to be a characteristic of the left to prefer warring against itself rather than the enemy. The other parties are also blameworthy. Remember Swinson’s idiotic decision to go for an early election? People want policies they can believe in. The Tories will come unstuck because their offering of near permanent chaos is so exhausting and negative. To do well the opposition parties must find common ground and offer something better. This should be easy. Reforming FPTP would make for a more inclusive politics. Tackling climate change would necessitate the large-scale government intervention that would rebuild faith in the state. This seems so obvious. Yet what stands in for this kind of big thinking is a near paralysis of ideas. There seems an inability to think beyond those bloody “red wall” seats. As if they were the whole of everything.
I suggest that the mere fact that FPTP delivers such an unrepresentative result means that unless we have some form of proportional representation politics and politicians will for ever be held in contempt by most. The only people who remain are the zealots – and they’re difficult to get working together.
The electorate will despise politicians as never representing them because in large part they don’t and politicians in safe seats will forever find it fairly easy to ignore their constituents if not their party – because they can. Those on the right particularly can rely on the lies and half truths in the press and gaslighting generally to keep constituents on side.
(Compare: How many Tories does it take to change a lightbulb? None – they prefer gaslighting)
All this means that our ‘democracy’ is a sham.
Hence, it seems to me why so many despair of and/or ignore politics.
I followed a link to Make Votes Matter and found David Mundell, May’s erstwhile man in Scotland, who expressed so eloquently, without a hint of irony, why FPTP is such an imperative: “The tried and tested system of First Past the Post ensures stability and clear governance, preventing disproportionate influence by minority parties with minimal public support, who typically end up holding the balance of power in PR systems.”
As others have pointed out the Tories won 365 seats on 43.6% of the vote on a turnout of 67.3%. To me that looks like a minority party holding absolute power.
Spot on
There’s a very convincing analysis of Labour’s tribalism and it’s close relative Labourism (a concept developed by Ralph Miliband) in Anthony Barnett’s dissection of Brexit (and Trump), Britishness and Englishness – The Lure of Greatness.
British political parties have been barking up the wrong tree for several centuries. They’ve been fighting a sterile battle over whether ideologically economics should be “Libertarian economics” or “Collective economics” when in fact they should be balanced between the two. They’ve got themselves into this dead-end debating mess for the simple reason they’ve failed to understand the human invention of money can only be reliably collective and therefore “collective reliability” is a necessary pre-condition for the creation of a market and in turn a market a pre-condition for the operation of capitalism. Here are two extracts from a paper which help explain this concept of money having “collective reliability”:-
“Debt is particularly safe for money-like use if it is short-term and backed by collateral or a sovereign’s taxing power. The short term will reduce risks due to changes in monetary value or interest rates; a party can count more surely on receiving the value she anticipates. Debt backed by collateral imports that security for the lender; Tri Vi Dang and his co-authors call “debt-on-debt” the safest form of privately produced safe assets. As for publicly produced safe assets, sovereign debt is backed by the public’s revenue-raising capacity, an even deeper pool of value in robust economies than finite collateral can offer. (Sovereign debt can actually be conceptualized as “debt-on-debt” insofar as a government bond is ultimately funded by the debt owed the government by taxpayers.)”
“The definition of safe assets is remarkable for another reason, one that follows from the cash premium they offer. As we have seen, safe assets get safer the closer they get to sovereign money — and they are valued for that increasing proximity. In other words, safe assets, like the official unit of account, hold value because of their liquidity as opposed to their value for consumption or production. In fact, the amount of value held by money depends on the degree of desire that holders have to make transactions; a surfeit of money relative to demand for it lowers its value (raises prices) through inflation while a lack of money relative to demand for it raises its value as deflation lowers prices. That quality — the fact that money (or its cognates) holds value given the liquidity it offers relative to the number of times it is deployed in transactions removes money forever from the status of a sister commodity. Money is clearly a different phenomenon, not an asset from a closed set of tradeable entities. It must hold value on another basis.”
The extracts are from this paper:-
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3557233
The following paper shows how easy it is to undermine money’s “collective reliability” through muddled political ideology:-
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3635059
Coalitions, ey?
The SNP MPs at Westminster worked their tails off, opposing Brexit for the common good, not only of Scotland but for the rest of the UK. When the other parties voted with the Tories to allow Brexit to go ahead–based on a referendum that was supposed to be advisory and was never thought through–the SNP started working to mitigate the consequences of Brexit. They are still trying to obtain damage limitation. But they are woefully outnumbered, because of the size of the Scottish population versus England’s. (Roughly 5 million to 55 million.) The contempt they receive daily from their counterparts from other parties at Westminster is telling, isn’t it.
Being proved correct isn’t popular among those who got it wrong from Day One. Is it?
Yes, the SNP want Scotland to be independent (and seeing the mess the UK is determined to create for itself, well…what other choice is there?.) But the SNP MPs have taken their Westminster duties seriously, and have been working ALL ALONG to turn this mess around for the whole of the UK. They have begged for support for Brexit-related bills they’ve initiated. And do they get support from Labour, Lib Dems, etc? Don’t make me laugh.
And yet it’s the SNP that constantly get accused of tribalism, isn’t it? We’re fed up with trying to cooperate and form coalitions. Nobody wants to know. The words ‘hell mend ’em’ spring to mind.
It’s Labour I am targeting – but in Scotland they are the least likely to hear
I don’t think the word Tribalism is a good description of current disagreements in the Labour Party. ‘ my shaman is better than your shaman’ is not the same as clear policy differences between those who joined when Corbyn became leader and the Blair/Brownists.
Despite previous differences of opinion many of us still believe that the the policies put forward in 2017/19 were necessary steps in what has to change. I find the Guardian currently staggeringly hostile to any real change.Those of us who have read the Guardian since childhood are dismayed at the progress it made under the previous editor has been reversed by the current editorial team.
I am using tribalism to describe the boundary Labour draws around itself to insist there are no other acceptable political parties, and to deny any member the chance to associate with another party. It also describes the party’s insistence in standing when it has no hope and so harming those who might beat the Tories. It is not an issue referring to internal disputes. They are not my business.
Having spent many years studying The Bleeding Obvious it seems to me that the fundamental failure of all parties is, irrespective of how they do it, to produce an economy that creates jobs that pay a wage that will support a family.
Simples as that annoying Meerkat says.
Clearly something we conspicuously fail to do at the moment & I dont see it as a clear priority in any of the mainstream parties.