I have published a new video this morning. In it, I argue that we might have had fourteen years of right-wing government in the UK, but except for 2015 it's been unknown for a majority of people in this country to vote for right-wing parties in a general election. And they won't this time either, unless you include Labour in that number, which most people don't, as yet. So, when will it be that people will actually get the government that they want? Here's looking forward to 2029….
The audio version of this video is here:
The transcript is:
Most people are left wing.
If you don't believe me, over 40 years, in 11 elections, 57 per cent of people in the UK voted for parties that most people think are left of centre.
That's a majority, by a very long way.
And in fact, it's such a big majority that the UK is, in many ways, the most progressive country in the whole of Europe, beating the Scandinavian countries and Germany, for example.
So why is it that we end up with right-of-centre governments?
Well, the left is, of course, split between unionists and nationalists between those who are relatively moderate - perhaps the Liberal Democrats - and those who once upon a time were more radical. That was Labour, even if it isn't anymore. And then there are of course the Greens.
Whereas for a long time we've only had the Conservatives on the right-wing and therefore they won. But the truth is that is not a genuine reflection of the political will of the people of this country.
The people of this country want government.
They want government that works.
They want governments that lays down rules.
They want governments that deliver fairness.
They want fair taxation.
They want a society that allows everyone to prosper.
They're not in favour of a market-based economy as such. Although, of course, they all tolerate a market. But they expect the government to counter its worst effects. Like sewage in rivers.
And so, we should be getting governments that are left-of-centre.
But we don't. And that's, of course, because of our first-past-the-post electoral system.
In the upcoming general election, Labour is going to win. Nobody doubts that.
They're going to win from what is universally agreed to be a right-of-centre political position. They're not winning from the left.
There is going to be the most enormous void in British politics after the 4th July 2024.
We'll have a very far-right party, and that is Reform.
We'll have a pretty far-right party, which will be the rump of the Conservatives.
We'll have a centre-right party, which is Labour.
And then we'll have a number of other parties, including the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, Plaid Cymru, uh, some of the parties in Northern Ireland and the Greens, of course, all of whom will be on the left. They will become the opposition.
Whether they can cooperate to actually deliver that opposition is the real question.
But the even bigger question is what will happen in 2029 when Labour will, unless it changes its tune very heavily between now and then, have failed? What will those left-wing parties do then? Will they then cooperate to say, no, we will not tolerate any more of this abuse from the right, and it is time that the people of this country to have a free choice to elect the governments that they really want, which are those from the centre-left?
I hope they do, but that's a long-term project, and it's what I'll be working on for the next five years.
Thanks for reading this post.
You can share this post on social media of your choice by clicking these icons:
You can subscribe to this blog's daily email here.
And if you would like to support this blog you can, here:
A properly radical Labour government would favour PR because it would more often make the government properly reflect the opinions of the whole electorate and make the messy compromises that democracy requires. Instead they would rather keep a flawed system that occasionally grants Labour absolute power for a short period (but rather more often requires them to stand around as impotent observers).
It is totally bizarre
I resigned from Blair’s Labour Party after the 2001 GE on a matter of conscience, namely Blair’s kicking of the Jenkins Report proposing a version of PR into the long grass, and effectively thereby opting, or reasons of low, visionless, political calculation, for the backwoodsman option of FPTP.
I really did feel that the issue was that important, having long supported PR – sufficiently important for me to go against my membership of a Party that had been part of my self-expression since I joined in 1988, and which had seen me win election to the L.B..Barnet in 1994, by splitting a Tory Ward, and thereby putting Labour in power in Barnet for 8 years.
I willingly set all that aside to protest Blair’s decision, which I honestly believe in the perspective of history is his worst, and most destructive, decision, even given the Iraq invasion.
Why? First, Blair could easily have won a Referendum on Jenkins in that first “walking on water” Administration of his, so that we might have had Jenkins’s AV+ as early as 2002 (because it would have taken the extra year to implement the change).
Secondly, it would have seen the end of obscenities such as Blair’s 2005 GE victory, which saw him “win” a 60-seat majority on 22% of the total electorate (35% vote x 61% turnout!!) (Interesting side note – Corbyn got 1m more votes in 2019 than Blair got in 2005!!)
Thirdly, there’s a very strong possibility that AV+ PR would have resulted in the break up of the uneasy Left/Right coalitions that the Labour and Tory Parties constitute, making the respective headbanging ERG coup in the Tory Party and the headbanging Neoliberal Zionist coup in the Labour Party impossible, and forcing thr various elements to negotiate in Parliament, as happens in countries with PR.
In other words, the sovereignty of Parliament would have been enhanced, while the ability of a small clique to dominate a Party would have been reduced.
The invasion of Iraq was a crime, but the kicking of Jenkins’s AV+ proposal into the long grass was more than a crime, it was a sin against due process, and, as the experience of the last few years has shown, a poisoning of the well of good governance, leading, as Richard notes, to the 57% who vote for “Left Wing” solutions constantly being created of their hopes.
AV+ had its faults, and would almost certainly have been replaced with Irish-style STV by now. But it would have broken the FPTP dam, allowing the water of PR to flow freely. Blair’s “sin” had had dreadful consequences.
I came back to Labour when Blair left, in the vain hope Gordon Brown was more amenable to PR! As if!! Had he included PR in his 2010 Manifesto, I suspect the Coalition post the 2010 GE would have been a Lib-Lab one, as many Lib-Dem voters would have voted Labour.
Whether Gordon Brown would still have been PM is a most point – probably not – but the country would have been spared the horrors of the Tory/Lib-Dem Coalition austerity-junkies, who needlessly trashed the Welfare State.
LD’s, SNP and Plaid all favour Proportional Representation.
The Labour membership and conference voted in favour of PR by a clear margin which was then immediately over-ruled by SKS.
He stated it would not be in Labour’s manifesto.
But then that cupboard is bare.
SKS will be governing without any serious manifesto commitments, having sought power for its own sake, and needs to change his mind on PR to comply with his party’s belief.
His personal motivation towards power ought not be the last word on our constitution.
That the whim of a single person can defy the majority of the electorate on how they participate in elections, and that probably as a power kick, demonstrates the pathetic weakness of British democracy.
HI Richard,
as to your question: “So why is it that we end up with right-of-centre governments?”
Public opinion is controlled by the MSM, in the UK. As far back as I can remember they have directed which way the public voted, by attacking candidates, misinformation and censorship. It has got gradually worse, culminating with the political assassination of Corbyn – the most overt display of this.
You may disagree, so might many of your commenters, however, everyone is subject to some form of manipulation – organisations would not spend so much money and time on something that did not work (thinktanks etc.).
If people can be persuaded that a life long anti-racist is suddenly antisemitic, or that Brexit will lead to sunlit uplands, they can be persuaded of anything.
So to answer your question, we end up with right wing governments because we are told to vote for them. We need to tackle the MSM, to stop this.
Regards
I don’t necessarily believe that people were manipulated to vote against their interests. It is hard to know exactly what are your interests. It is something formed by habit.
People can have a false conscious. A person’s way of thinking is always a reflection of the social culture that surrounds them. And that isn’t always reflected accurately in media narratives.
Agree with everything said.
The problem is that labels are used by the media as weapons “far-left” “extreme-left” etc etc to alarm people.
Pathetic, unimaginative but true. The reality is: state capture by neo-liberal interests that set narratives and use labels are weapons. Media (largely owned by neo-lib interests) are then used to portray those that want fairness, justice and liberty as ………”woke lefites”.
The media blessing (papl blessing?) has been bestowed on Labour – tells you all you need to know ref power & influence.
Hence my preference to focus on problems and the policies to fix them.
Agree that simple left-right polarity can be unhelpful.
We know what neoliberalism intends, and the plutocratic (yet unstated) outcomes it has yielded.
However we have no substantive or comprehensive debate on what the left believes.
There are many shades of opinion between the Deep Greens and LINO, much deflected into identity and culture politics, but where are these argued out coherently, and the opposing positions presented as agonism ?
Within Labour there are factions who can articulate both social democracy, and democratic socialism, but where are these debates held ?
Individuals like Owen Jones and Neal Lawson tend to argue issue by issue, and we get a wide spread of generic Opeds by the metropolitan liberal commentariat as a substitute – and most of these commentators don’t have an overview.
A problem solving approach can easily morph into neo Blairite technocracy – which seems to be SKS’s vacuous pitch, being value and almost policy free, and certainly with no coherent political ethical system underpinning it.
That is worrying too, if that is where politics is headed.
Had lunch today with Commission guy (the one that called mandelson a c..t to his face) – we agreed that neo-liberalism is utopian and cannot work.
Furthermore, we know for a fact that key societal systems such as water, sewage, electricity, gas, transport, etc are complex to operate and are mostly monopolistic in nature. This is why govs should own them because they cannot be effectively regulated. (assymetric knowledge). What is then left is the relationship between state-owned service providers, the government and citizens. Should citizens have a direct say in the overall direction a particular state org takes? I think they should & this is where ethics & society start to come into play – tempering the tendancy towards ultra-technocratic approaches.
For possible reasons why we end up with a right-wing government while a significant proportion of voters are left-wing, I can recommend:
The Death of the Left: Why We Must Begin from the Beginning Again
by Simon Winlow and Steve Hall (published Nov. 2022)
https://amzn.eu/d/0f0AmNqR
There are several reviews on the Web
by David Moscrop, https://www.davidmoscrop.com/p/book-review-the-death-of-the-left
At Labour Hearthlands
https://labourheartlands.com/book-review-the-death-of-the-left-why-we-must-begin-from-the-beginning-again/
At Labour Hub,
https://labourhub.org.uk/2023/01/31/the-left-not-dead-and-not-guilty/
Thanks
The reviews are in themselves worth reading
As I understand it, this is based on the fundamental proposition that the left has no constituency. It presupposes that politics is itself now a market; the ultimate triumph of neoliberalism.
There seem to be a number of policies that put the people before that of a political party.
“First past the post” (FPTP), versus, a version of “proportional representation”, seems to be one of those policies.
It seems reasonable to assume that any party continuing with FPTP, is in it for themselves.
Late this afternoon the Guardian reported Labour would work towards automatic registration of voters. There are millions not on the rolls. Whether many of the unregistered would turn out, is not certain but It should mean more younger people are able to vote and might do so. They won’t be voting Tory in great numbers.
Instead of abolishing the need for photo ID, they propose making types acceptable. I think better to scrap the requirement.
The Manifesto says about ‘immediate modernisation of the Lords’ to remove hereditaries , impose attendance requirements and reform the appointments. Starmer has said Labour will need more Labour peers. Before the reforms or after? Then they will consult on its replacement.
There will be new arrangements for working with Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
So some welcome changes but more are needed.
Slightly off message but
From James Robbins in New Republic:
USA media dishes brutal truth about Brexit Britain.
“Every decision taken by Tory (and LibDems) governments was a political decision—it did not need to happen that way. Austerity was never the hard logic of dutiful caretakers; it was a political calculation to rescue rich friends and dump the burdensome price on those least able to endure the cost.”
“There is mold in the walls and shit in the rivers, posh butter in the supermarkets has anti-theft tags stuck to it, the trains run on schedule about half the time, the average pub-poured pint of lager—the blood of the nation—is nearing the criminal price of 5 pounds ($6.34), and on May 22 a new general election was announced to the people of Great Britain by a prime minister who is richer than the king.
“Should the polls prove correct—short of a 2016-scale error—the annihilation will be justified. Wage growth is at its lowest level since the Napoleonic Wars. What the Financial Times calls the “rental market” and what the rest of us call “How much of your money someone richer than you takes every month” is stratospherically inflated; rent is about half a person’s average salary in London. Chain stores on British high streets close permanently at a rate of 14 per day, leaving most shopping areas a procession of corrugated shutters, uncollected rubbish, and the sleeping bags of the homeless.
“The precious marvel that is the National Health Service is cracking at the seams; at the current rate, waiting lists will not be cleared for another 685 years. The union for junior doctors, the BMA, has organised 10 strikes and walkouts in the past year for a pay deal that would only bring wages up to the current level of inflation. The city of Birmingham was the first to tip over into bankruptcy; more will follow.
“In 2022, at least 3% of all families in Britain—around two million people—could not afford to eat. Like a revenant from Dickens, Victorian diseases like scurvy, rickets, and scabies are back to blight children.
“Life expectancy has dropped to the lowest level since 2010—tellingly, the year the Conservatives took power, at the height of the recession.”
“These are the bitter fruits of austerity: an experiment in sado-monetarist economics and financial barbarism. Not much unites those five PMs other than the constant ritual tribute in blood to their coiffed icon, Margaret Thatcher. Yet Thatcher, back in the 1980s, did not lie about how brutal the first shock of neoliberalism was going to be. She coldly promised torture before riches.
“Its sequel, however, was pitched by its architect George Osborne, chancellor under David Cameron, as a bit of belt-tightening resembling that most prized memory in the national canon: the Blitz Spirit. Come on, chaps, buck up and give it some welly. The shattering of society into thinner fragments was supposed to be a hardy adventure.
“Midway through this downhill plummet, Britain bumbled backward out of the EU. The wreckage of this four-year disaster can now best be seen as an attempt to escape the harsh bite of austerity.
“Brexit was a retreat from hunger into myth: an embrace of antique fables about British pluck and derring-do, a belief that even without an empire and an industrial base this archipelago might reclaim past glory. Faced with profound turmoil, much of the nation turned to a half-remembered falsehood about their grandfather’s generation, marching along with Churchill. This election is the reckoning Brexit postponed.”
In reply to Sean, this morning: I thought it might be interesting to look back at my under-graduate dissertation on ‘The role of the Newspaper Press on the Politics of the Inter-war years’. not widely published!, but it did contribute to my degree in History at Aberystwyth in 1970. It was disheartening to realise that not a lot has changed…. However, one good news today was that my letter to the local paper-the Cambrian News’ was printed. They had head- lined it as ‘Does money grow on trees?’,( and Richard had said -it was good-) so I hope I have made some small footstep locally in propagating his ideas. Going to a hustings tomorrow in which my question, sent in beforehand, will be whether we ( ie the candidates) should stop arguing about tax cuts versus spending cuts but instead focussing on tax justice.
Brilliant…
I will be at graduation in Aber, very soon….
We are having wall to wall propaganda on the two Tory topics – Immigration and Taxes.
Seems in this week up to July 4th, the BBC all the press are trying to get it into peoples heads that all the real issues: NHS, Housing Incomes, poverty – is all due to immigrants, who will flood in in even greater numbers if Labour is elected.
The road to fascism.
Weirdly, that a something we just said here.
What are the6 playing at?