Fear Not?

Reclaim Opposition

UKIP like the BNP is not a progressive opposition but a regressive one. It appeals to the basest of motives and it drives its message by fear on the one hand and self-interest on the other.

UKIP like the BNP will leave a national void when it implodes. Its support is sporadic and chimeric, and sure if nobody is standing ready to take its place it might drift back to vote UKIP but it is not a core vote, it is not a solid electorate behind it.

Counter to the apparently accepted logic that this vote has abandoned the progressive left, I believe they have simply abandoned parties that were not talking to them, not speaking for them.. But don’t read this message wrong. People don’t want racist policies, they don’t want apartheid, these are just fallback positions built on fear when there is no positive agenda with which they can identify with.

Much of this post-election disaster is going to try to focus on policies, on how right-wing the parties will need to be to win votes, on how much self-interest they must now build in. And all of this is WRONG!

People do not vote for UKIP because they are racists. At the same time, I will not say most people are not in one way or another racists deep down. I am saying that if you give them a believable message of hope they will overcome and bury their racism. They voted for UKIP because they could not see a positive message that they believed from elsewhere, so they fell back on fear. But give them hope, give them a positive message, then they will vote for the progressive left.

Forget what so-called experts say. Voting is down to 3 factors

1) belief

2) fear

3) anger

A positive message from a progressive left party can capture all three of these. Look at the SNP. Their campaign was not about independence but about what the SNP could do for Scotland with a strong representation at Westminster.

What the progressive left have to do is to rebuild, come back as strong as possible as soon as possible, uniting people around a message of hope in opposition and working together to oppose the regressive right-wing agenda now on the table.

But they have to do it now, in 2015-2016 or they will have let the Tories make it harder. Fight, unite and win. That is the only formula.

Winds of Change
May 18th 2015

2016 or Bust

2020 is 4 years too late

 

The idea that the Liberal Democrats suffered such a swingeing and brutal defeat on the 7th May and should now spent time rebuilding and working up to fighting back in the 2020 general election has two massive flaws – 1) it will be too late, and 2) the country will be completely screwed by then.

Lib Dem policy cannot be to sit back and complain, however valiantly, for the next five years. It has to be to fight for a vote of no confidence and the collapse of this Tory government. Only that will justify their opposition now. Anything else can smell like sour grapes after the coalition was junked.

I am not a politician or a party member. I will say that after a decade supporting the SDP and twenty years supporting the Lib Dems, to me the idea of joining a party still smelt like an abandonment of my right to choose who I vote for up to the moment of drawing my X. I fight for what I believe, I give great support for who I believe in, but the idea that I have to join to prove this, I never found acceptable. I don’t hold my position to be one that should apply to others – everyone should make up their own mind, and I am very happy to see the influx of thousands of new members for the Lib Dems. But I won’t be one.

What I am though is a voter, and an activist, even if I am an activist for policies, for opposition to policies, or for what might be termed general themes. I am also an observer, and in the General Election of 2015 what I observed was both horrifying and fascinating. Everyone knows that Tories lie, it defines them, but they lied so well! And what was the slogan of their coalition partners whose leaders had stated they wanted to go back into coalition with them – vote for the Lib Dems or you get the Tories. Is anyone surprised that this was crap? As for Labour, Ed had a lot going for him but whoever was running his campaign was not one of those things!

For the record, I voted Plaid as a progressive centre left party which had convinced me that they are not about Welsh nationalism but about Welsh people.

But at heart I was always a Lib Dem, first as an SDP/Alliance supporter and after the invigorating conference in, I think, 1994 a Liberal Democrat supporter. But I was not only alienated and disappointed, I was disgusted and enraged. I could see the logic of the coalition, the idea that the Lib Dems would be an ameliorating influence on the Tories, and maybe they were. But not enough. The town I live in has been devastated, its people demonised, its charities destroyed and its economy wrecked by coalition policies, policies which the Lib Dems voted for and which Lib Dem politicians like Alexander trumpeted as good for everyone, when everyone I knew was sufffering from them. My uncle voted UKIP but thought Alexander was a decent Tory politician at heart. That shows how far from the base of the Lib Dems the coalition had become.

But that is recrimination and the point is to look forward, but looking forward has to see a return to the decent left-wing ideals that the Lib Dems in the 1990s and early 2000s espoused, or it will be a betrayal of what their core base is, or should be. Never should I have been alienated by a party that I had supported in one form or another for 30 years. I might not be a “typical” voter, I doubt anybody is because like “average” such an idea is created from a statistical amalgam. But I have always voted for a strong social democratic tradition, and it is this tradition I saw destroyed after 2010.

Rebuilding this may well take five years, but I fear that even under an inspiring leader like Tim Farron may be it will be too late. The Lib Dems have to act as soon as possible, on an issue of maximum importance and they have to act in concert with other parties, and work to explain in clear language why it is an issue of maximum importance.

The Human Rights Act is this issue. The Tory press will portray its defence as wishy washy or pro-criminal or pro-terrorist and there will be the instinct to duck and dive, to speak in mealy-mouthed compromising language, to say this bit is good, this bit is bad. But the Lib Dems must work as part of a progressive alliance to defend the whole, and to work to protect the whole. So what if a criminal is deemed to have a right to a family life? Why the Hell should he not? So what if we can’t torture terrorism suspects? Call people out on being pro-torture!

Unless the Lib Dems seize the initiative and work in concert with the other progressive parties on an issue of immediate concern, then it will be 2020 before they can even begin the slow climb back. If they act now, it may only be 2016.

Winds of Change
15th May 2015