Like Trump, Blue Labour View
Democracy As An Inconvenience
At the weekend, as the Bonapartists
of Blue Labour met to block Andy Burnham from standing in the Denton
& Gorton By-Election, one of their spokespeople, and original conspirators to put Starmer in the driving seat, using the backing of
various shady millionaires, and their money in off-shore tax havens,
set out how they see democracy. Steve Reed appeared on TV to tell us
that they thought Burnham could not be allowed to stand, because it
would mean an election, also, for Manchester Mayor, and they did not
want to cause the voters of Manchester to be “inconvenienced”
by having to vote!
That about sums up Blue Labour's
Bonapartist mentality. Democracy, even the feeble version of
democracy that is bourgeois-democracy, and involves the mass of the
population only in passively and ineffectually placing a cross on a
ballot every few years, is an “inconvenience”. For the
likes of Blue Labour, the ideal voter is like the woman interviewed
several years ago, who, when told the Tories were to hold another
election, proclaimed “Not another one”. Not a right, not
something to be cherished or valued, or fought for, but an
“inconvenience”, a nuisance that interrupts the intended
torpor of the voters, very periodically, and so unnecessarily
involves them in the political life of the country, that the
bourgeois politicians would prefer they keep out of, so as to let the
politicians just continue on their own merry way, unencumbered by
such things as accountability.
It is a far cry from the fight to be
able to vote that many across the world still face, not to mention
from the ideas and struggles of those that created the modern form of
bourgeois-democracy – social-democracy - in Britain, in the 19th
century, starting
with the combined struggle of industrial workers and bourgeois for
the right to vote, and to do away with the “rotten
boroughs”. It is a far cry from those that created the labour
movement out of which the Labour Party itself developed – the Chartists – who demanded annual parliamentary elections.
Blue Labour have, of course, used
the same corruption of ideas and even of bourgeois-democracy to
justify their refusal to countenance any new vote on Brexit, despite
the fact that every poll, every actual election shows that the large
majority of the electorate recognises that Brexit was a a huge
mistake, and that, if they had a vote, today, they would vote to
reverse it, and to re-join the EU. Blue Labour say, instead, the
voters voted once, and that is it for ever more, or at least until we
deem it advantageous to us, to allow them to vote again! That is not
even bourgeois-democracy, let alone social-democracy, but simply the
Hobbesian justification for absolutism.
Blue Labour supplement their
appalling, anti-democratic justification for blocking Burnham by
other similar arguments, such as the cost of holding the election,
which is the argument used by every authoritarian in history. On
that basis, you would postpone all elections for much longer, so as
to further reduce the “inconvenience” and cost to voters
of living in a supposed democracy! Why not go the whole hog, and,
like Trump, proclaim that because you are doing such a grand job,
there is no need for elections at all.
Blue Labour, also, argue that if
Burnham stood in Denton and Garton, he might lose, but also, they
might lose the Manchester Mayoral election. Again, if fear of losing
elections is justification for not holding them, it tells us a lot
about the authoritarian, undemocratic ideology of Blue Labour. More
significantly, its necessary to ask, why, they might lose
those elections. Its only 2 years since they were telling us what
strategic geniuses they were, and were crowing about the huge
parliamentary majority they had, despite winning much fewer votes
than Corbyn's Labour in 2019. The reason they expect to lose is
that, in that two years, not only has the fraudulent nature of that
election win been exposed, but the policies of Blue Labour, ever
since, in attacking workers, pensioners, the sick and disabled and
poor families has seen their support crater even further.
Compared to Starmer and Blue Labour,
compared to the likes of Streeting, or Mahmoud, or Rayner, Burnham is
popular. If anyone could win the by-election, it is him. If even he
could not win it, the blame for that would clearly lie, not with
Burnham and his brand of mildly progressive, social-democratic
politics, but with the fact that Blue Labour is such a toxic brand,
across the country, that any individual Labour candidate, no matter
how popular, or distanced from it, will be tarred with the same brush
and suffer the consequences. No Labour MP is now safe, as a result
of the toxic nature of Starmer's Blue Labour. They will all see
their voters either sit on their hands, or as with Caerphilly, will
move en masse to more progressive sounding parties, be it
Plaid, SNP, Greens, or even Liberals.
As I pointed out months ago, if
Labour did not replace Starmer and kick out his Blue Labour cabal,
before the Spring elections, it would likely be too late to save
Labour. They will be eviscerated in the local and regional
elections, and, as Burnham himself says, will probably, now, lose the
by-election. If voters in Denton and Garton want to keep out Reform,
they will have to vote for the Greens, and that reality will impose
itself across the country in coming months. It is not, of course,
that either Burnham, or the Greens, or Plaid or SNP, really represent
a progressive alternative. They do not. But, it is an indication of
the reactionary nature of the petty-bourgeois, nationalist politics
of Blue Labour that they appear so.
In the past, the argument of
Marxists was that, even though Labour's politics moved periodically
from Left to Right, and then, back again, the justification for
working within it was that it was based upon the working-class, and
its organisations such as the trades unions etc. But, Blue Labour
has based itself not on the working-class, but the reactionary,
nationalist petty-bourgeoisie. Starmer has neutered democracy within
the party, by expelling huge numbers, and alienating thousands more.
In electoral terms, the large majority of workers no longer look,
now, to Labour, as their natural party, but look instead to these
other parties such as Plaid, SNP, Greens, who present themselves in
the same colours that Labour, as a social-democratic party used to
promote. The trades unions have failed to check that abandonment of
the working-class, and of social-democracy by Blue Labour.
When Labour get smashed in the
forthcoming elections, and as the Greens and other parties appear as
realistic, progressive alternatives, there will be a great temptation
– as happened under Blair and Brown – to focus on these other
parties. It can be seen already, in the support being given to the
populist Polanski of the Greens, by sections of the Left. It is to
again invite disappointment and disaster. The Greens, Plaid, SNP,
and certainly the Liberals, are not the solution. They are not based
on the working-class. Their ideas are not those of the
working-class, and its class interests.
The fact that all these parties,
basically, themselves middle-class parties, based on the progressive, professional middle-class – as
social-democracy has always done – appear progressive, simply shows
the degeneration of the Labour Party as a consequence of Blue Labour.
The SNP used to be called “Tartan Tories”, and it was the
SNP that opened the door to Thatcher in 1979, by bringing down
Callaghan's government. The Liberals, of course, joined Cameron's
Coalition in 2010, rather than support Brown. Within days, they
swivelled from their opposition to austerity to fully backing it, in
government. They opened the door to the Brexit vote.
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