Why we should all vote Labour

Cast your mind back to the 2015 general election. Cameron was Prime Minister, Barack Obama was the President, Britain was at least nominally committed to the European project, we were waiting David Bowie’s new album, Leicester were struggling in the Premier League and we didn't spend all day wonder what Covfefe is. I know it seems like ancient history, so I won’t be offended if you don’t remember this piece I wrote just before the election where I spelled out my reason for voting Labour.

Central to my argument was that we all vote for our local candidates and not the party leader; and my local Labour MP, Stella Creasy, is a good MP, which is a key reason why I was voting Labour. Fast forward to today and it looks more than ever like we are voting in a Presidential race, making a decision between Jeremy Corbyn or Theresa May’s vision for the future of the country.

That is the choice facing us. This election is likely to result in the highest combined vote share for the two parties in decades Lib Dem revival? It ain't going to happen. UKIP surge? Only in Paul Nuttall's dreams, which look like nightmares to any reasonable person.

I know to some people reading this, the decision between the two is like choosing between lovely fresh falafel wrap from a pop-up street kitchen washed down with pint of local craft IPA, or eating dog shit wrapped in a plastic bag. To others the choice is the difference between waking up to a cold shower or a flame thrower. I look forward to these metaphors being expanded in Facebook comments.

We must vote Labour because May’s vision for the future of Britain is a nightmare of rising poverty, inequality and greed. A vision of a nation that shrugs its shoulders towards suffering that we could alleviate by inconveniencing the rich a tiny little bit. The social justice that is common in many of our European neighbours is too much to ask in May’s Britain.

Corbyn has certainly been a less than impressive opposition leader and I have written before about my disappointment with him, despite voting for him in 2015. Surprisingly he has turned out, at the 11th hour, to be a quite an effective opposition campaigner, closing a 21 point gap in the polls to one point. This has been helped in no small part by Theresa May’s campaign, which has not just shat the bed, but burnt it down and then pissed on the ashes.

If the story of 2016 was the surprise success of the populist, anti-establishment campaigns then the story of 2017 is the return of the centre right at the expense of the centre left. This has been true in France and in the Netherlands, and is likely to happen in Germany. Britain looked like it would go down the same route, as May’s Tories triumphed over the Labour Party. Despite my concerns and if the polls hold, Corby could turn out to be the most effective leader of a left wing party in Europe this year.

Corbyn’s leadership could save the Labour Party from the Pasokification that has marred so many Western left wing parties and reduced Benoît Hamon (the French centre left Presidential candidate) to 6% in the first round of the French Presidential election. Gary Young has written elegantly about this here.

Policy reliably moves the dial in elections for more than a handful of hardcore politicos, but Corbyn’s manifesto has inspired praise from some of his harshest critics. It’s a good a platform of sensible policies that are only considered extreme in the minds of the most Thatcher worshiping tabloid editors. Again, this platform is helped by the contrast with the Tories’ platform, based on animal culturally and taking away the homes from people with dementia. I want to live in the Britain outlined in Labour’s manifesto. I really don’t want to live in the one outlined by the Tories.

The rally of support for Labour is more than just policies taken from the playbook of centre left European parties (the sort of things Labour should have offered in 2015). It is because Corbyn has become a symbol for a broad range of people who want things to be different, whether they agree specifically with him or not. Whether they understand his politics or history, Corbyn has become a vessel through which people are pouring their hopes for a different politics. A politics focused not focused on the bottom line of large companies, but on people’s lives. A politics best summed up as: “can’t we treat people a little better?”

If Corbyn represents the coalition of voters who want to make things better, then May represents the coalition of voters who want to make things worse. They want to make this a smaller, more inward looking, selfish and less tolerant country. A country where we don’t care about rising levels of child poverty, homelessness and food bank usage. A vote for the Tories is a vote for a Britain, which would rather kill foxes than help those in need.

Voting for Corbyn will be a compromise for many people. Myself included. The man and his leadership is flawed. However, we are faced with a clear choice: vote for a Labour Party that is at least trying to make things better or a Tory partly that doesn’t believe anything is wrong with the fact that the people most likely to be poverty are those who are in work.

We can't carry on as we are, so that is why I am voting Labour and urge you too as well. We can’t carry on with rising child poverty. We can’t carry on with a struggling NHS. We can’t carry on with low paying, insecure work. We can’t carry on with austerity punishing the poor and the sick for being poor and sick. I want things to be different, so I'm voting Labour.

Polling station image taken by Rachel H and used under creative commons.

Sensible Theresa May must save us from the radical left nightmare Jeremy Corbyn will unleash

Labour has unveiled a crazy left wing manifesto. It was a clear declaration that the party wanted to create a workers’ state, where private property does not exist and everyone lives in identical homes, wearing identical clothes. Chairman Mao himself would be proud.

The manifesto contained lots of radical left ideas lifted straight from the Communist Manifesto, like re-nationalising the railways, abolishing university tuition fees, free child care for one year olds and a rent cap. These are the sort of dangerous, lefty policy programs you see in Communist dictatorships like North Korea. Sensible Labour leaders, like Harold Wilson, will be turning over in their graves.

How was this latter-day Das Kapital received? These policies were supported by extreme left, Trotskyist organisations like the Co-op Amongst the media, they found favour with well known Leninists, like Polly Toynbee, who’s been nothing but an uncritical supporter of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership so far.

If we elect Labour on this platform, it could destroy the stability and prosperity we have enjoyed since the Tories came to power in 2010. Basic human rights, like paying all of your money for a draughty one-bed flat ten miles from central London and commuting for hours to work in a zero-hours contract, could be destroyed and replaced with oppressive domination of the Party, which will control us via world class healthcare and cheap, efficient public transport. Britain will become Venezuela. Only with worse whether.

It is imperative that we elect the Conservatives and Theresa May, who have sensible policies that everyone can agree on like bringing back fox hunting or taking away your home if you get dementia. This is definitely what the JAMs, swing voters and people who work in Tescos, who Theresa May has sworn to stand up for, need.

Theresa May is a politician for all Britain. Unlike Corbyn who only appeals to a few metropolitan liberals who spend all their time in radical bookshops, drinking pints of Sound Wave IPA, eating chicken katsu curry and talking about the next upcoming show at the White Cube Bermondsey.

May sums up the British nation and what we want in a leader. She is patriotic, sings the national anthem, is willing to put petty gripes with Europeans above the national interest, wants to start a war with Spain, wants to take away old people houses and loves to make small mammals murder other small mammals. This is definitely where the centrist, modern, aspirational voter is. This is why Bryon Burger has introduced a new fox meat burger and you can buy riding coats in Primark now.

Corbyn struggles to connect with the average voter, who really respects how May surrounds herself with Tory supporters and activists and pretends that’s the same as talking to the public. They like how she doesn’t take questions from journalists and even locks them in a room to stop them taking pictures of her walking. Refusing to talk to a press that generally fawns over you anyway is what I consider to be strong and stable leadership.

May stands firmly against far left ideas like feeding children, reducing child poverty, supporting carers, investing in the NHS so that it can make it through the winter without needing emergency care itself and providing nurses with the basic dignity of knowing that their rights will be respected post Brexit so that they can continue taking care of the sick and the old. These are the sorts of policies that can ruin this great country.

May has clever ideas for tackling the problems of the 21st century like bringing back grammar schools (we need to find those entrepreneurs from poorer backgrounds, the rest can be fast-tracked to their career to working in an Amazon distribution centre), crippling the economy by storming out of Europe in a huff (if that doesn’t encourage innovation nothing will) and being a beg-friend to Donald Trump (a man who definitely has our best interests at heart). She has the making of a great Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Or possibly the last Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, which is pretty much the same thing.

No sensible person could support Labour with insane, radical ideas like the ones Corbyn proposes. If Blair were alive today (he died of a heart attack two years ago when Corbyn became party leader, what you have seen on TV is a robot that they found in Peter Mandelson’s garage) he would support the Tories as he could not condone a Labour government that had so completely abandoned the centre ground that it wanted to tackle child poverty and secure funding for the NHS.

It is essential that we all vote Tory on June the 8th to stop this Marxist-anarchist-Leninist madness. Britain could easily become a Communist dystopia like France, the Netherlands or Germany. It is essential that the belligerent, posh and slightly xenophobic centre right stops these dangerous radicals with their vision of a fairer and kinder society.

Theresa May picture created by Jim Mattis and used under creative commons. 

20 Years of Blair: Labour in the Wilderness

20 years since Tony Blair won a huge Labour victory, the certainties that he ushered in are no longer certain. In my last post I outlined the iron law of Blair: that taking a socially liberal, economically liberal, centrist approach, and moving to where the voters are, is always the best course of action. Brexit broke that iron law. The centrist, socially and economically liberal position (Remain, if anyone is wondering what I am referring to) lost.

Previously it was unthinkable to adopt policies that would harm economic growth and inconvenience the private sector. Blair won three elections with this in mind. David Cameron defeated Labour twice using the same logic. Gordon Brown was seen as incompetent on economic issues and Ed Miliband was seen as too much of a risk.

Now the government is enacting Brexit with all the enthusiasm of Nigel Farage arriving at a traditional boozer following a long treck through an area of metropolitan, independent coffee shops. I cannot think of anything that will be worse for the already anaemic economy and more of a pain in the arse to big business than Brexit. Yet the Tories are hugely popular and cheered on vast swathes of the press and electorate - the same people who thought that Miliband was dangerous for wanting to tax a few mansions.

Not that any of this is of benefit to the Labour Party or its left wing leader, Jeremy Corbyn. In my previous post I talked about the need for radical new ideas. It goes without saying that you need to convince people of the benefit of these ideas. Currently Corbyn is doing a poor job of convincing people to vote for a few Milibandish policies.

If all pans out as everyone expects, Labour will be looking for a new leader 20 years after Blair’s huge victory. Doubtless the iron law of Blair will be invoked. But in the post-Brexit world it no longer applies. Voters have lost faith in social liberalism and economic liberalism. The former because of resentment of immigration and a cultural counter-revolution against tolerance and being nice to people. The latter because of the fall out of the 2008 crash and no one feels better off despite a lot of austerity. I can imagine that a Blair-inspired candidate today would be dismissed as “metropolitan middle class liberal” for standing up for these ideas.

This only leaves moving to where the electorate is and (as the general election is about to prove) the electorate is pretty happy with Brexit and the Tory government. Would a Blair for 2017 move Labour towards the Tory Party’s current position on immigration, Brexit, welfare and a host of other issues? I hope that the party members would prevent this. Not least because it would open the left flank of Labour to a Lib Dem onslaught.

So Labour will once again be faced with a difficult choice about its future.. It is hard to know what sort of party leader I should support. One who shares my values? That involves a lot of compromising, as Thomas Piketty can’t stand for Labour leader because he is French and not an MP. One who will win the next election? That person probably doesn’t exist.

Through the last 20 years I have found out something about myself. The politics that I would like are far to the left of the Overturn Window - or anything that is on offer. I feel that to meet the challenges of the 21st century - climate change, broken capitalism, refugees and automation -  we need to be more radical than ever. The world will not be saved by timid alterations around the edges. I am less willing to compromise as the general public cannot see the difference between "Red Ed", Corbyn and myself.

Due to the first past the post system, all left of centre ideologies are locked together into one party and fight over control of it. This has not advanced the cause of any of them. Usually we can live together. But recently we cannot, because there is no clear route forwards. So squabbling has taken the place of progress.

The Labour Party needs compromise and unity. The party is currently weak and divided and this serves no-one. Not the country, the members, or the people who are suffering under Tory rule. We need to desperately to find a way to make peace with ourselves so that the opposition can function. We can still bloody the Tories nose if Labour can be made to work.

So now we at a crossroads. 20 years on from the biggest labour win of my lifetime, and Labour looks further away from government than ever. I'm not willing to compromise, because centrism will not solve the world’s problems, but compromise is what the party needs.

Does this mean I have a future in the party that has defined all my political awareness since I was a child? Maybe the party would be better off without radicals like me in it. Some opposition is better than none and Labour needs to oppose the government, because I fear where 10-15 years of Tory rule could take us.

We can’t go back to Blair, as much as we might like to. Certainly Blair achieved a lot, not least making people hopeful about politics. However, in the post-Brexit world, Labour need something new to win power and to tackle the problems of the country.

20 years on from 1997 gives an opportunity to look back, but we should also look forwards. As Abraham Lincoln said: “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.” I take this to mean that we should keep an open mind about the future.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.

20 Years of Blair: Labour in Opposition

In the opinion of Tony Blair’s fans (and probably the man himself) there is an iron rule of politics: Blair always wins. This is partly because he won three elections, but it is also because the essence of Blairism is moving to where the electorate is. The flexibility of Blairism can be seen in his followers’ attitude to government spending. In government Blair invested heavily, but his followers (such as Liz Kendall in her 2015 leadership bid) advocate harsh fiscal discipline. Bear this in mind as our story continues. To see the first part go here.

It was not long after Tony Blair left Downing Street that the storm of the 2008 Financial Crisis started brewing. Around that time I realised that I was completely in the shit. Turns out being in full time education from age five to age 21 only qualified me to answer phones or type addresses into a spreadsheet. Something all my teachers had neglected to mention as they encouraged me sink further into debt.

Getting a job and earning enough to live on was a painful and frequently humiliating experience. I worked for some of the biggest cunts I have ever met, yet felt lucky to have a job at all. The whole thing was underscored with a feeling a pointlessness. When Lehman Brother collapsed, it looked for a while that global capitalism would be over by Friday and the first global water war would break out on Monday.

Meanwhile the iron law of Blair was being tested on the voters. After a mammoth election, that lasted for two days during which I didn't sleep, Cameron rode into Downing Street using Nick Clegg as both the horse and the whipping boy. A centrist, modelled in the image of Blair, had moved the Tory party to where the electorate was: social liberalism and free market economics, with a large side order of austerity. No more luxuries like disability benefits and school construction. This was New Labour without pretending to care about the poor.

It was around this time that I began reading contemporary left-wing commentators, especially the writing of Laurie Penny. Her work was a revelation to me. For the first time, someone I didn't know personally was saying the things I believed in. I was not the one mad person who hated the world out of sense of bitterness. There were others who thought that something was really wrong and we need to do something radical about it.

Penny's writing, among others - too many to name here - opened up my mind to ideas beyond socialism and economic inequality. It was around this time that I became aware of the interlinked nature of oppression and that it is as diverse as people are. I know I was a little late to the party on this one, but at least I made it in the end.

Meanwhile Labour was going through some introspection of its own. Ed Miliband was chosen as leader. A leftish, social democrat had been chosen over a Blairite (his own brother), as a reaction to the long shadow of Blair. There was a belief on the soft left that the financial crash would lead to the rebirth of social democracy and Keynesian economics as an alternative to neoliberalism.

Many people viewed Miliband as annoyingly posh, funny looking, awkward, geeky and thought he was too clever. As I am all of those things, I had a soft spot for Miliband. I thought that he had (some) good ideas and good intentions. His politics were to the right of what I wanted from the Labour Party, but I recognised that Labour was not getting into government on the policy platform of putting those who earned over £500k a year in stocks in Trafalgar Square and letting the public through faeces at them.

University Me was pleased for a chance to go back to Keynesianism and a mixed economy. Miliband was a compromise that both I and (I thought) the country would be willing to accept. Turns out I was wrong on both counts.

The Labour Party (and myself) was struck by crisis when Miliband lost. This was not a moment for social democracy; the cold, neoliberal argument had won out. The iron law of Blair had been proved right again: a centrist with socially liberal, economically liberal views had been chosen over a Keynesian social democrat who wanted a degree of market intervention.

Within the Labour Party, and myself, there was a sense of disappointment in the voters, almost betrayal. From our point of view we had the better candidate; a clever person who had ideas about what could be done to alleviate some of the problems of the post-crash era.

Yeah, he wasn't as flash as Mr PR, Media Personality, but he wanted to make a better country. From our point of view, Miliband was more genuine and had been rejected by voters in favour of a candidate that that was all spin and manipulation. A man who pitted the working poor against the unworking poor, or the disabled against workers or students against everyone else.

This was a turning point. The iron law of Blair looked like it was about to be evoked and the Labour Party would be moved to where the voters were: i.e. harsh austerity and free market economics. No more Keynesianism and intervention. However, that didn’t happen. Jeremy Corbyn happened instead.

Following the defeat there was a general consensus that moving to the right economically was the solution. Then Jeremy Corbyn entered the race to counter this. Pitted against three hopeless alternatives, all of which looked completely unelectable, and offering a change that the party needed after 8 years of soft left policies, he became the favourite. There was also a sense that Miliband had been a compromise; he had accepted austerity and controls on immigration that lots of party members did not want. Yet all the compromise had been for nothing.

I supported Corbyn because I wanted change in the party. I agreed with Corbyn more than any of the other candidates, but supporting him was still a compromise. This was not the move to the left I wanted, but neither did I want Labour to move to where the voters were on austerity, or as I call it: ruining the lives of the poor and the disabled.

The Labour Party led by Corbyn is now in a dismal state, trailing in the polls and likely to lose many seats in an election that comes 20 years after Blair’s historic win. The iron law of Blair appears to be holding. So if it is always true, then why have I always supported the Labour Party’s decision not to choose leaders modelled on Blair?

The iron rule of Blair does not mean that centrist policies and moving to where the electorate is are the right thing to do. In the last few years I have gained a new appreciation for how fucked up the world is. Everything from inequality, to the environment, to child poverty, social care, wage stagnation and worsening public services.. These issues cannot be tackled by a centrist modelled on Blair. Blair had huge political authority after his 1997 win and he could not solve these problems. We need radical change.

The problems outlined above require us to re-examine our thinking across a range of issues. The current tool box of economic policies and political rationales are insufficient to face the challenges of the 21st century. We need radical new ideas in economics, the environment and politics, but also new ideas about how we relate to each other and the world around us. We need to think about value in terms of more than money. We need to think about different people’s experiences. We need these soon before the water rises too far and our society becomes riven with division and hate.

I do not see these radical ideas coming from Corbyn and his ilk, although once I thought they might. I see now that I was wrong about that. I also don't see them coming from politicians who are unwilling to challenge the electorate, especially when the electorate has shown it does not care about rising child poverty and looming environmental destruction. If they did then the Tories would be 20 points behind in the polls.

I can see the appeal of the iron law of Blair. The hope that a moderate, flexible, charismatic leader could save us all. The French are currently hoping the same thing, we’ll see. how it works out of them. If you listen hard enough you can hear an echo of “things can only get better”.

In reality only some things got better - and that progress was quickly undone by the current Tory government. If we follow the iron law of Blair we won’t be able to save ourselves from ourselves. Now, we need to challenge the way things are and not accept them.

It was only a few months after Corbyn became leader that a grand re-ordering of politics took place. It owed something to Blair’s time in government more than we think, but stretched back further into our history. This huge change has broken the iron law of Blair. In the next part I will show why.

Ed Miliband image created by owen_lead and used under creative commons.

20 Years of Blair: Labour in Government

This week it will be the 20th anniversary of Tony Blair's 1997 landslide victory, the largest Labour majority of my life so far - and likely to remain so. Lots of people on the left still look back at it with misty-eyed reverence and think of it as a magical moment of political perfection, only giving a cursory consideration to how everything went downhill from there. Here’s a prime example.

I remember the 1997 election clearly as I was 11 years old at the time. I didn't really understand the politics, or the reasons behind the huge victory, but there was a sense that something epochal had happened. There was optimism in the air and the sense that things would be different; that we had turned a corner as a country.

I joined the Labour Party when I was 18. At the time, I guess you could say I was a Blairite. Although at the time I thought Limp Bizkit were really cool, so approach the opinions of teenage-me with caution. I had grown up under New Labour and it is difficult to overstate how dominant the ideology of Blair was in the late 90s/early 2000s.

If only it could have stayed that way, Blair’s many fans today must think. If only people had not grown dissatisfied with Blair and New Labour. If only Blair had remained the youthful, dynamic politician doing headers with Kevin Keegan and not become the self-styled messiah of globalised tomorrow that we saw at his third victory speech. If we could have stopped time around 2001 then all the terrible things that have happened since might not have occurred.

It was shortly before Blair’s third electoral victory that I went to uni, where I promptly became a long haired, weed smoking, Levellers listening, ‘Introduction to Marx’ reading socialist. At the time I claimed that I was a Communist and wanted a workers’ state, where the party controlled everything. Aside for wearing a hammer-and-sickle T-shirt, what I was really in favour of was the post war consensus: social democracy, the welfare state and redistribution. Maybe with more taxing of the rich and nationalisation of banks than the average Keynesian, but that was broadly what I believed.

Basically, I believed in a more even distribution of wealth. I was certainly against the free-market consensus of Blair and his fans, and neoliberal economic dominance. This was a crucial change for me. This was the point when I realised that the establishment was not a benign force that looked after everyone's best interests, but a group with interests of their own that need to be opposed.

Uni was great, with lots of free time, booze and weed. Waking up 2pm and going to bed at 4am. I frequently forget other aspects of what it was like: the anxiety, the stress of exams, not having money, being hungry and listlessness a lot of the time. That’s nostalgia for you. Perhaps I could have spent it more productively, but I had a good time.

Blair’s premiership was rapidly going to pot at the same time. An Ipsos-MORI poll taken on 25th of April 2007 showed that 66% of people were not satisfied with his leadership. This is what happens when you go from blowing the winds of change to being the epitome of the establishment. Blair had become synonymous for everything that was modern and a bit rubbish, summed up by so many Peep Show jokes.

There were lots of events along the way (like the Iraq War, which I am glossing over because if I get started on that we’ll be here all day), but in essence people got sick of Blair. His personal satisfaction rating went from 80% in 1997 down to 28% when he left office in 2007.

Blair gave way to Gordon Brown at the point where New Labour had really lost its shine. Brown's dour Scotsman act might have been suited to leading a Jacobite rebellion against the hated English bastards, but in the mid-2000s it looked about as out of touch as John Major's evocation of cricket greens had in the 90s.

Plus, the Conservatives had found their own Blair: David Cameron. It is important remember how completely mired in shit the New Labour project looked to everyone at this point, beset by endless fuck-ups like leaving NHS data on a train or cabinet ministers exposing briefing notes to the press.

Much of today's Labour Party looks back on this time with the fervour that UKIP supporters look back to the 1950s. The past they are remembering never really existed. Blair was always just another politician, in a specific time and a place, not an iron law that can be applied to all of politics. The way the party looks back on those heady early 90s years, when rock stars wanted to be seen with its politicians, is the same way I look back on University: all the freedom and possibility, none of the wasted opportunities.

After I left uni, my politics became more left-wing and more grounded in my own experience. Outside the comfortable bubble of student life, I had to deal with working long hours for barely enough to cover my rent, so that I could enrich a boss with the temperament of a grumpy chimpanzee that had been roughly shaved, forced into a suit, filled with coke and given too much power over objects it barely recognised as people. I also had to confront spending most of my wages to live in a matchbox that was cold, leaked, had a wasp nest in the roof and had a bathroom that once exploded.

I have led a pretty privileged life and there are certainly people have endured worse working and housing conditions than me, plus added racial, gender or sexual discrimination. I acknowledge that I have been lucky and there's no need to get out a tiny violin for this middle class white bloke in London.

The real world is cruel when you stop living on Britpop nostalgia. The confusing mix of things I believed at uni give way to a more concrete understanding of the problems many young people face. Leaving uni and entering the real world didn’t make me a greedy Tory, keen to kick everyone who gets a handout. It made me angrier, more convinced that something was fundamentally fucked up about all of this, and that we need to do something about it.

The Labour Party might never have been the vehicle to achieve these changes. But it certainly wasn’t by the late 2000s. Blair was gone, but the party was the establishment in service of the establishment. It was not interested in the sort of change that would make people's' lives better. That's why, in 2010, in a fit of Nick Clegg mania, I voted Lib Dem. However, it didn't last because everything was about change for me, the Labour Party and the country.

In the next post I will look at my journey through the Labour opposition years and the legacy of Blair's time as party leader.

Tony Blair image created by Matthew Yglesias and used under creative commons.

A depressing beginning

On the same day that Theresa May announced the 2017 general election, my Labour Party membership was renewed. This was not deliberate, the money comes out at the same time each year by direct debit, but it brought a sense of certainty to me about the immediate future. The election is happening, I am in the Labour Party and Jeremy Corbyn is our candidate for Prime Minister. It was a day to acknowledge facts, because facts are stubborn things that, if ignored, go away, get friends, and come back to do you over.

Another fact to be acknowledged is that the outlook for Labour is terrible at best. The atmosphere amongst some of my Labour-supporting friends is like that in a trench before a World War One advance: eventually we will have to put our heads above the parapet to be shot down.

A poll published a few days before the election was called put Labour 21 points behind the Tories. There is little doubt in anyone’s mind that the Conservatives are going to win a thumping majority. Speaking as a citizen of London, the level of smugness coming from the home countries is palpable.

For years I believed that the radical left could win power if it was given a chance. If a major political party adopted a genuinely left wing approach of standing up to the people who fuck us all over, rather than shaking their heads and accepting the fucking with a little less glee than other parties, then why wouldn’t people support it? The only obstacle to this was voters’ support for being fucked over, aka accusing anyone opposed to the status quo as “anti business”.

Today the iron rule that has govern politics for decades is broken. It is no longer electoral suicide to be labelled ‘anti-business.’ I cannot think of anything that would be worse for UK Plc (I physically shuddered writing that) than Brexit, i.e. the top priority of the Tory government. The cocaine and Champagne cocktails must really be getting to the bosses of the capitalist class if they are throwing their lot in with the Tories on this one. For the first time in my life the voters are willing to put other priorities ahead of what’s best for people who are already really wealthy - but the left has never been further from power.

Meanwhile Corbyn, the great white hope of the radical left, is himself adopting policies from Ed Miliband’s leadership. If the Lib Dems can come back from their 2015 hammering by adopting the unpopular position of being anti-Brexit, and Scottish Tories can come back from near extinction through supporting Unionism despite Scottish fervor for independence, why can’t Corbyn use this apocalyptic moment to stand for something really radical? Like everyone who votes Labour gets to personally kick a banker in the nuts? What does he think he has to lose?

There is also the issue that Corbyn has failed to reform the party to ensure greater debate and internal democracy. The Labour Party needs reform if it is going to be able disagree with parts of itself without self-destructing, however, the entire Corbyn project is invested in one person. Socialists who chided Miliband for being too moderate are championing the same polices under Corbyn. Why? Because it’s the person that they care about more than the policy.

All of this is mainly the fault of Corbyn himself. As leader he bears responsibility for the party and the movement that he heads. It is an understatement of the century to say that opportunities have been missed in the last 2 years.

Corbyn has become of the focus of the left in British politics today to the point where the idea of Corbyn was become divorced from the man himself. From people who wanted politics to be a bit more genuine to anarchists who wanted radical new powers for local communities, all of these hopes have become bound up in one man.

This is partly because, in 2015, we were desperate to take anything that wasn’t Tweedledum, Tweedledee and Tweedledipshit (I’ll leave you to work out who is who). Three candidates whose reaction to the awfulness of the 2015 defeat was become either more awful, or more boring than cream-coloured wallpaper. There seemed to be no viable alterative to Corbyn as a means of change - and in June, there will be no viable alternative to the status quo at all. We have failed to build a movement for change, and have instead adopted one individual as a symbol for so many different fights against the establishment.

There are a lot of good, passionate, interesting people supporting Corbyn because they want change. I mean this in terms of politicians, journalists and ordinary people. Many cannot see his flaws, because he has ceased to be a person and has became a vessel for everything we want to be different. Now some of us are taking a look at that vessel and have seen that it was never fit for purpose, but it is too late.

All of this leaves me depressed about the future of the country and the left. The Conservatives will be in power, with a huge majority and can use Brexit to remake the country as the rainy version of Singapore where the unemployed dance for the amusement of tax dodgers, and being caught not wearing union flag underwear carries the death penalty.

What happens to the left, post Corbyn? A lot of people will collapse into complete cynicism about politics and try their best to destroy the Labour party through infighting in retaliation for it being not good enough to deliver all their hopes and dreams. Some will search for a new vessel and repeat a process that is doomed to failure from the start. The smart people will look to build the movement that we needed and desperately lacked in 2015, however it will be against a backdrop of utter hopelessness.

The Labour Party is in a terrible state. By glancing down the thoroughly unrepresentative sample of the people posting in my Facebook feed, I can see that support for the party is at an all time low. I have already seen former Labour supporters talking about voting Tory, because what the world needs is more cynical, middle class, centre-right people. Many more saying they will vote Lib Dem, because we also need politicians with the moral fibre of used toilet paper.

The likelihood of all the awful things happening in the year future seem as certain as the fact that a general election will take place in May or that I will have some craft beer over the weekend. These events are moving toward us at a steady and unstoppable pace as inevitably as one day following the next, or Brewdog taking all of my money. For now the facts are that an election is coming, Corbyn is the Labour leader and I am in the Labour Party. Depending on what happens in the next year I might not be renewing my party membership. All in all, this is certainly a depressing beginning to a campaign.

Picture of Jeremy Corbyn taken by Garry Knight and used under creative commons.