Boris Johnson's reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist party got bashed in the two by-elections on Thursday, in two very different parts of the country. The lessons of the by-elections are clear, not just for the Tories, but also for Starmer's reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist Blue Labour, which won in Wakefield, but got fewer votes than in 2019, as against the performance of the bourgeois Liberals in Tiverton and Honiton, who increased their vote from 8,000 in 2019, to nearly 23,000.
Neither result is good news for socialists and the working-class, but, of the two, the sweeping success of the bourgeois Liberals, in the latter, is much better than the win for a reactionary, petty-bourgeois Labour Party, in the former, because socialists are the inheritors of the modernising, radical and progressive traditions of the liberal bourgeoisie, whereas the petty-bourgeois reactionaries of both Tories and Labour, are a throwback to the conditions and ideas that preceded them.
As Lenin put it setting out this attitude of Marxists (disciples) to both of those other trends and traditions, of liberals (enlighteners) and petty-bourgeois reactionaries (Narodniks).
“The enlightener believes in the present course of social development, because he fails to observe its inherent contradictions. The Narodnik fears the present course of social development, because he is already aware of these contradictions. The “disciple” believes in the present course of social development, because he sees the only earnest of a better future in the full development of these contradictions. The first and last trends therefore strive to support, accelerate, facilitate development along the present path, to remove all obstacles which hamper this development and retard it. Narodism, on the contrary, strives to retard and halt this development, is afraid of abolishing certain obstacles to the development of capitalism. The first and last trends are distinguished by what may be called historical optimism: the farther and the quicker things go as they are, the better it will be. Narodism, on the contrary, naturally tends to historical pessimism: the farther things go as they are, the worse it will be.”
That is obviously a problem for Marxists, in Britain, today, because we have no option but to work inside the Labour Party as the mass party of the working-class, connected to the class organically, whilst, at least at the moment, under Starmer, and his reactionary Blue Labour regime, its politics have gone from bourgeois neo-liberalism/conservative social democracy to reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalism and jingoism.
That is not true of the party as a whole, whose mass membership continues to be dominated by the former, or even more healthier, progressive social-democratic and even socialist ideas, but the Bonapartist regime of Starmer means that it is the reactionary PLP, in conjunction with its apparatchiks that have control of policy, organisation, and access to the media. In essence, there are two Labour Parties coexisting within the same shell, with one being a small parasite, based in parliament, that is leaching the lifeblood from the other.
It is the mass membership of the party that actually represents the progressive elements, and is in tune with the mass of core Labour voters, as was seen by the rapid growth of that element inside the party, and its implantation in the class, in the period between 2015 and 2017, with it bringing about the largest rise in the Labour vote, in the 2017 General Election, since 1945. Its notable that it was Corbyn's attempt to revert to those reactionary, petty-bourgeois nationalist ideas, in 2019, that destroyed that movement, and decimated Labour's vote, ahead of the 2019 General Election, and that it has been the continuation and intensification of those reactionary nationalist ideas, by Starmer, since 2019, that has seen Labour's electoral position weaken further, as well as having further demoralised its membership. At the same time, it is the Liberals and Greens that continued to be, then, the advocates of those progressive bourgeois liberal ideas, in relation to opposition to Brexit, and so on, that have seen the greatest advance, both in terms of electoral support, and party membership.
That does not take those parties beyond the limitations of their bourgeois liberal ideas, described by Lenin above, but it is, at least, progressive, in comparison to the reactionary petty-bourgeois nationalism of Starmer and Blue Labour.
For Boris and the Tories, there is no saving grace in the by-election results, particularly following their terrible results in the last local council and regional elections, where, again, the bourgeois liberals of the Lib-Dems and Greens made huge proportional advances, whilst Labour languished as a pale shadow of the Tories. The Tory defeats also follow on from huge defeats to the Liberals in Shropshire North and Chesham and Amersham. In Tiverton, the Tories have held the seat more or less for a century. In 2019, the Liberals did not even come second, but were third behind Labour. In 2019, the Tories won with 36,000 votes (60%), with Labour second on 11,600 (19.5%), whilst Liberals trailed with 8,800 (14.8%).
By 2022, Starmer's Blue Labour was destroyed. Falling from second to third, on just 1,500 (3.7%), and barely ahead of the Greens on 1,100 (2.5%). The Liberals, by contrast, increased from 8,800 to 22,500 (52.9%), a swing of 29.9% in their favour. Labour's vote fell by 10,000, or about 90%, whilst the Green's vote fell by 1,000, or about 50%. Both were undoubtedly due to tactical voting, but its notable that the tactical voting was in favour of the formerly third place Liberals, and not the formerly second place Labour, which is mortally damaging for Labour's chances in huge numbers of constituencies across the country, and again mirrors what happened in North Shropshire, where Liberals swept from third to win, hoovering up Labour votes, as Labour becomes indistinguishable from the Tories, or even UKIP, in terms of its jingoism, having also ditched the more progressive social-democratic economic policies of Corbynism.
This huge win for the Liberals, in a century old Tory seat, in Tiverton, is in stark contrast with Labour's flaccid performance in Wakefield, a former Labour stronghold, that the Tories only won in 2019, and whose Tory MP, was forced to resign in a sex scandal. Given all of the travails of the Tories currently, and with tactical voting against them, as seen in Tiverton, Labour should have won with an avalanche of votes, burying the opposition parties.
Of course, Starmer came out to claim the win as momentous, but the truth is that Labour's performance, even here, was appalling. In many ways, it copies the story of Macron in France, who was able to win against the reactionary nationalist Le Pen, on the basis of lesser-evilism, but the shaky foundations of which are illustrated both by the abysmal lack of support for him and his politics, as well as his own use of reactionary nationalism to boost his position, a consequence which saw him lose his majority in parliament, with both the Left and Right advancing at his expense.
In Tiverton, turnout fell from 71.9% to 52.3%, but, in Wakefield, turnout fell from 64.1% to just 39.5%. That is appallingly low, indicating the lack of support for any of the candidates, in a seat where neither the Liberals nor Greens have any past record that might have made them an alternative. Again, this large level of support for “None of The Above”, the large majority of voters sitting on their hands, is reminiscent of voters attitude to Macron in France. In 2015, Mary Creagh scored 17,300 votes for Labour with a 61% turnout. By 2017, the huge benefit of Corbyn's Labour Party was seen as Creagh's vote rose by about a third to 23,000, on a turnout of 65.8%. By 2019, with Corbyn having resurrected his past pro-Brexit position, and with the Labour Right having spent four years attacking him, and undermining the Labour Party itself, Creagh's vote fell to 18,000, on a turnout of 64%.
Labour's vote share in the by-election is lower than that of Creagh when she won in 2017, but with turnout that is barely two-thirds of that in 2017. Even compared with 2019, Labour's performance in the by-election looks abysmal, with their candidate Simon Lightwood getting just 13,000 votes, or only about two-thirds of the votes of Creagh in 2019, when she lost, having obtained 18,000 votes! The Liberals saw there vote drop to a third of what it was in 2019, but a large part of that seems to be that the Greens, who did not stand in 2019, overtook them. Again, that is bad for Labour, because in the last local and regional elections, the Greens who have been more vocal in their continued opposition to Brexit, and who are seen as more radical than the Liberals on economic issues, also did better than the Liberals, proportionally.
In 2019, the turnout was 64.1%, and fell to 39.5% in 2022. That is a drop of 38%. In 2019, Labour secured 18,000, and a 38% drop from that would be 11,160. Labour scored 13,166, which is obviously better, but in 2019, Labour lost! Compared to 2017, when Corbyn's Labour scored 23,000 votes on a 65.9% turnout, however, its clearly not better. The turnout in 2022 was down 40% compared to 2017, meaning that Labour's 2017 vote of 23,000 should have fallen to 13,800, whereas it fell to 13,166. So, Labour under Starmer, even in a mid-term by-election, in a seat that has been traditionally Labour, where the former Tory MP had to resign as part of a sex scandal, with Boris Johnson assailed on all sides, attacked by a large part of his parliamentary party, attacked by the vultures of the Tory media, with inflation at 40 year highs, and living standards under attack, could not even perform as well as did Labour under Corbyn in 2017!!!
The justification given by Starmer and Blue Labour for wrapping themselves in the butcher's apron, and careening head first into jingoism and reactionary nationalism, is that they needed to win the votes of the petty-bourgeois reactionaries and bigots that voted for Brexit, and gave Boris Johnson his victory in 2019. But, the failure of that approach was already obvious when Corbyn tried it in early 2019! Despite all of the lunacy and chaos caused by Brexit in the intervening period, despite the idiocy and affect on people's lives from lockdowns, and now of the highest inflation in forty years, it is still failing, as it inevitably must, to win those reactionaries and bigots to Labour, even if, as a supposedly progressive party, it should want them. Labour won in Wakefield not because it won over large numbers of reactionaries and bigots from the Tories, but simply because a large number of those Tory voters stayed at home! Labour cannot count on that always being their saviour.
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