Friday 18 June 2021

Blues Knocked Back On Their Heels

The Lib-Dem by-election victory in the solid Blue Wall Tory seat of Chesham and Amersham was predictable, but none of the pundits or even the Liberals themselves are pointing out why it was so predictable. In June 2016, an estimated 55 per cent of adults voting in the EU referendum, in the constituency, voted Remain. The estimated turnout of 83.6 per cent was the highest in any constituency in the UK, the only higher turnout in the referendum being in Gibraltar.  In the 2019 EU Parliament elections more than 50 per cent voted for parties supporting continued UK membership of the EU, although the turnout was only 42.8 per cent. The pro-EU Liberal Democrats were the most popular party with 31.9 per cent, with the pro-Leave Brexit Party in second place on 30 per cent.  With the Tory/Labour policy of Brexit being torn to shreds as every day passes, of course, progressive voters were going to vote against it, dividing the electorate sharply, once again into progressive and reactionary, Remain and Leave camps.

What it shows is that progressive voters, whether they live in solid Blue Tory seats, in the Labour core strongholds of the cities and metropolitan areas, or in the old decaying urban towns, have no reason to vote for the reactionary nationalist agenda of either Blue Tories, or Blue Labour, both of which look increasingly identical, as Labour collapses into traditional Tory nationalism, protectionism, and conservative social policies, whilst the Tories emulate the Strasserite policies of Oswald Mosely based upon large-scale state spending on infrastructure and intervention.

The tragedy is that the Liberals now appear as the progressive alternative to Labour once again, as they did under Blair.  It is, of course, a delusion.  They offered no real progressive alternative then, as their subsequent coalition government with the Tories, imposition of austerity and so on showed.  They are currently, not even offering up a principled position of taking Britain back into the EU, were they to form a government, something which their current numbers in parliament makes rather impossible to achieve anyway.  The fact, is that the Liberals cannot offer a real progressive alternative to Labour, no matter how reactionary Labour's current agenda and leadership might be, because, although their ideology is indistinguishable from that of the Labour Party, and its dominant conservative social-democratic leadership, the working-class has no means of intervening in the party, via the organised labour movement, of determining its candidates and leadership, or policies.

That, in a parliamentary democracy, where everyone is led to see the only means of influencing anything is by very periodic elections, rather than by active involvement in political activity, it is then no surprise that large numbers of people look at Labour, and see it as indistinguishable from Johnson's Tories, and rather than then getting stuck in through their trades unions, cooperatives, socialists societies, or just their own individual membership, to rid us of the blight of Starmer and his cronies, and their Blue Labour positions, they see their only option being to register a protest at elections.

A look at the results from the constituency over the last 4 elections shows that the writing is on the wall for Starmer's Blue Labour strategy.  In 2017, the pro Brexit, sitting Tory MP, Cheryl Gillan, romped home with 33,000 votes or 60% of the poll.  But, Labour, which appeared as the only rational hope for progressive voters in stopping Brexit, or at least a hard Tory Brexit, came second, with 11,000 votes, or 20%.  The Liberals, however, also picked up 7,000.  Both represented more than 50% more than they achieved in 2015.   UKIP, however, which had come second in 2015, dropped to last place, its vote collapsing from 7,000 to 1500.  2017 compared to 2015, showed the division into two class camps.

On the one hand, the 2015 UKIP vote went to the Tories, as following the referendum, and the Tories commitment to implement Brexit, UKIP was seen as no longer required.  But, all of those Tory voters in the constituency who voted Remain, a larger number than in other Tory seats, as the breakdown of the EU vote shows, recoiled from the prospect.  They switched to the Liberals.  But, Labour mobilised a new progressive, youth vote, as well as picking up some of the Liberal vote, as it appeared the only realistic party of government besides the Tories.

In 2019, that position between Labour and Liberals had reversed.  As a result of Corbyn's reversion to the reactionary economic nationalist position of Brexit, Labour had pissed away most of the progressive support it had won in 2017, when it appeared to be offering not just a reversal of all the right-wing policies of austerity of the previous 7 years, all of the foreign wars of both Blair and Cameron, but also opposition to the reactionary Brexit that the Tories were offering.  In 2019, Labour collapsed from second position to third behind the Liberals.  Labour lost a third of its vote, whilst the Liberals more than doubled theirs.

Now, the split into two class camps appears complete.  Blue Labour offers no advantages for the reactionary petty-bourgeois voters in the seat, compared to the true Blue Tories.  Its vote has effectively disappeared, falling from 7,000 (12.9%) to just 622 (1.6%).  It even ended up behind the anti-Brexit Greens who came in third with 1500 votes (3.9%).  Labour's progressive voters, obviously seeing no point in voting for a Blue Labour Party as against a true Blue Tory party, deserted wholesale to the Liberals, who increased their vote by 50% to 21,000, and doubled their vote share from 27% to 57%.

Its a big knock back for the Blue's both the naturally Blue Tories, and the opportunistically Blue Labour.  It shows that in seats, where the Tories have in the past picked up the votes of affluent middle class professional voters, alongside the votes of the petty-bourgeois elements that form its core, it is susceptible to a challenge from progressive parties, opposing its pro-Brexit, reactionary nationalism, as that professional middle-class, tends to be economically and socially progressive.  But, it means the Blue Labour strategy in other areas is doomed to fil too.  That strategy grossly overestimates the number of "working-class", "Labour voters", are waiting to return to Labour, if it just listens to them, and accommodates their reactionary views.

For one thing, many of those it targets were never solid Labour voters to begin with, whatever Vox Pops try to suggest.  They are elements that were always reactionary that supported the scabs during the Miners Strike, that bought their Council house when Thatcher gave them the option and so on.  They are elements that were never closely tied into the organised labour movement.  Many of them, even if they were, are not today.  On the one hand, some became from the 1980's, self-employed - the eponymous white van man - and so petty-bourgeois, often precariously so, and deprived, as such petty-bourgeois often are, and the traditional swamp from which Bonapartists, and fascists have recruited their support.  Today, many of them are separated from the organised labour movement, and the working-class itself, because they are retired, their fortune dependent upon a paternalistic state, and its benefits, which makes them easy prey for those who would have them believe that such benefits for them are at threat from immigrants.  And, of course, a large part of the Brexit vote was really just a racist vote against immigrants, rather than a vote against the EU itself.

So, Blue Labour is deluding itself if it thinks many of those people ever were solid Labour voters in the past, let alone its chance of winning them over today.  Its why they adhere to the real thing in Boris Johnson rather than the pale shadow of keir Starmer.  But, also, for ever one such voter Blue Labour might attract, it is going to lose four progressive voters it already had, as the Chesham and Amersham By-Election has again shown, just as was shown in 2019, when in the General Election, and even more in the European and local elections, large swathes of such votes abandoned Labour and switched to the Greens, Liberals, Plaid and the SNP.

The truth is that if I am a progressive voter in Stoke, or Batley and Spen, I have no more reason to vote for Starmer's Blue Labour, than if I am a progressive voter in Chesham and Amersham.  I certainly have no reason to vote for Blue Labour as against the real thing in the True Blue Tories.  At least in voting Liberal, or Green, depending on who has the best chance in the particular seat, I would be able to register my displeasure at the reactionary nationalist trajectory of the main parties in the only way most people see possible in a parliamentary democracy, and that is by voting for one of the anti-Brexit parties, even if they have no chance of winning, or as with the Liberals, even if they no longer openly advocate re-joining the EU.

But, then, after Chesham and Amersham, how long will it be for the penny to drop for the Liberals too, that there are even more progressive vote for them to harvest, simply by making their pro-EU stance, once more a centrepiece of their agenda?


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