{"id":471,"date":"2015-05-14T08:11:17","date_gmt":"2015-05-14T08:11:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2015\/05\/14\/why-vote-for-the-lesser-evil-walton-pantland-2015\/"},"modified":"2015-05-14T08:11:17","modified_gmt":"2015-05-14T08:11:17","slug":"why-vote-for-the-lesser-evil-walton-pantland-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/2015\/05\/14\/why-vote-for-the-lesser-evil-walton-pantland-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Vote For the Lesser Evil? – Walton Pantland (2015)"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<strong>Why vote for the lesser evil?
\n<\/strong>
\n<\/em>
\nby Walton Pantland<\/strong>
\n<\/em>
\nTrade unionists in the UK are horrified at the prospect of five more years of Tory vandalism.
\nWhat went wrong?
\nLabour, and the Left in the UK, had a bad night. While the polls were always close, it seemed that Ed Miliband had a better than even chance of becoming Prime Minister, and beginning the slow and difficult task of putting the country back together after five years of Tory vandalism.
\nInstead, the Conservatives won a clear majority, despite winning only 36.9% of the vote. They were helped by the British \u201cFirst Past the Post\u201d electoral system of a parliament made up of the victors of 650 local contests. This favours the big parties, and resulted in anomalies like 5 million people voting for the Greens and UKIP, but the parties only getting one MP each.
\nWhat on Earth happened? Are people really just a lot more right wing and selfish than we realised?
\nI don\u2019t think so. But the Right led on ideas, while the Left floundered. As TS Elliot put it,
\n\u201cThe best lack all conviction, while the worst
\nAre full of passionate intensity\u201d.
\nAlready there is blame and recrimination coming from the Labour Right. Undead Blairite forces, reanimated by the defeat, have lurched back to a semblance of life, claiming that Labour lost because it moved to the Left.
\nMoved to the Left? I hardly noticed.
\nIn the Blairite analysis, England is a right wing country, and if Labour wants to be electable, it needs to accept that.
\nThere are others who claim, accurately I think, that Labour failed to offer an anti-austerity alternative, and so voters weren\u2019t motivated to support them. Labour\u2019s pledges were an uninspiring and unmeasurable mishmash, an attempt to be everything to everyone.
\nIn the end, too many voters saw Labour\u2019s offer like this.
\nHowever, the problem is deeper than that: even if Labour had come up with some clear left wing positions, they had a credibility problem: people wouldn\u2019t believe they really meant it. It would seem like calculation based on polling.
\nLabour failed to establish a narrative. Instead, it fought the entire campaign on terrain mapped out by the Tories. Labour accepted Tory arguments about the need for austerity, and only promised to make it less painful.
\nWhy vote for the lesser evil?
\nThe Tories developed a grand narrative and stuck to it: the financial crisis was the result of Labour overspending. The unemployed are workshy shirkers who are bleeding us dry. Enterprise needs to be liberated from the dead hand of the state by privatisation. It\u2019s nonsense, but it\u2019s a simple story with internal cohesion.
\nLabour accepted the broad outlines of the narrative, and quibbled over detail. Instead of developing a campaign based on principles, Labour triangulated: they\u2019d announce a policy, see if it resulted in a poll bounce, fine tune, and try again. The obsession with polls meant the party was only ever reacting, rather than setting the agenda.
\nPeople are not politically static entities who give their support to the party that best reflects their views. Despite the election result, England is not a right wing country.
\nBut the Right provided a clear leadership of ideas, and so right wing attitudes hardened. As examples like Podemos, Syriza and Scotland show, when the Left shows leadership, it can carry people with it.
\nLetting your enemies choose the battleground is poor strategy, and it becomes almost impossible to win in those circumstances. Labour had five years to tell a different story. It would have been painful at first, and the media would have attacked them mercilessly. But if they\u2019d stuck to their guns, more and more people would have been convinced.
\nThe Scottish experience is instructive here: the Scottish National Party\u2019s (SNP) performance was quite unbelievable. Huge Labour majorities were overturned. Scottish Labour leader Jim Murphy lost his seat, and campaign director Douglas Alexander lost to a 20-year old politics student elected on an anti-austerity and anti-Trident platform.
\nThis success is based on the perception that the SNP \u2013 a left nationalist party – are to the left of Labour, due to their historic opposition to the Iraq war, support for Palestine, explicit rejection of austerity and of the renewal of Trident nuclear weapons.
\nHowever, in terms of overall policy and manifesto commitments, the SNP are not significantly different to Labour. What has made all the difference, though, is rhetoric: while Labour released a commemorative mug to celebrate their Controls on Immigration pledge, Nicola Sturgeon spoke about the positive benefits of immigration, and pledged to support refugees.
\nThe SNP ran an upbeat, positive campaign. When the Right uses fear, the Left needs to respond with hope and inspiration.
\nIt took time for the SNP to learn this. At the start of the campaign for Scottish independence in 2012, barely 20% of the population supported independence. On the day of the referendum, 45% voted in favour. Last night, 50% voted SNP, with a further 1.3% for the pro-independence Greens.
\nHow did that happen?
\nThe official Yes campaign, lead by the SNP, was initially uninspiring. What is the point of independence in an interconnected world? The campaign didn\u2019t make a convincing enough case for change.
\nWhat changed is that the Left got on board and answered the question: we can use independence to build a fairer society. Autonomous campaigns sprung up: Commonweal, Radical Independence, Women for Independence, Green Yes. The campaign stopped being about nationalism, and became a conversation about the sort of country Scotland could be: the \u201cearly days of a better nation\u201d, as writer Alasdair Gray put it. Independence became a means to an end, a way to escape austerity, nuclear weapons and imperialist posturing.
\nAfter the election defeat, 80,000 people\u200a\u2014\u200apredominantly Leftists\u200a\u2014\u200ajoined the SNP, determined to put their politics into action.
\nThe lesson? Involve people in building a convincing alternative, and they will vote for it.
\nAnd while it\u2019s true Labour were savaged by the right wing press in this election, so was the Yes campaign. Eventually, if your message is consistent enough, people become immune to media attacks.
\nRichard Seymour sums up the problem with Labour\u2019s response well:
\nLabour attacked independence from the Right, from a position of loyalty to the state, to the war machine, and to the neoliberal doctrines of the civil service. Miliband, during the election campaign, tried to reassure middle class voters that Labour utterly ruled out any SNP influence on policies like austerity or Trident. And while the Labour Party tailed the Tories on austerity, while they imitated Tory language on welfare, while they copied UKIP on immigration, the SNP defended a simple, civilised position: no austerity, stop demonising people on welfare, and welcome immigrants.
\n<\/em>
\nUnite\u2019s General Secretary Len McCluskey warned during the leadership contest last year that if Jim Murphy\u200a\u2014\u200aa Blairite on the right wing of the party\u200a\u2014\u200awere elected Scottish leader, it would be a \u201cdeath sentence\u201d for the party. It seems he was right.
\nSo what is to be done?
\nWe need to ask ourselves where power really lies. It\u2019s very easy to get sucked into the vortex of electoral politics, and then become thoroughly disillusioned when our candidates lose. But there are different ways of understanding power in society, and this dramatically affects the way we campaign and organise.
\nParliament is a battleground, a terrain where power is contested. The media is a battleground of ideas. But they aren\u2019t the ones: workplaces are battlegrounds too. The public relations war can be won on social media. Communities are sites of struggle.
\nIn the elite power model, power lies with politicians, corporations and the mainstream media. In order to change society, we need to influence people at the top: elect friendly politicians, get favourable coverage in the press.
\nBut there is also a conception of counter-power, of a people power model. This recognises that we are ultimately ruled by consent, and that this can be withdrawn. Power lies with the people: in unions, social movements, faith groups, local party structures and campaigns, using social media to tell a story instead of relying on the press. Wealth is created by the productivity of workers, not by the genius of bankers.
\nThere is no doubt that a Labour government would be better for workers. But we don\u2019t have one, so we need to fight now, not wait for another chance in five years.
\nIt doesn\u2019t matter so much who the government is if we have a powerful, engaged population. While we face a nightmare at the top, we need to focus on building a movement from below. This means we need a narrative: we need to tell our story about how ordinary people standing together is the only thing that ever made the world a better place.
\nWe need a positive vision. Instead of electoral defeatism, we need to remind people that when we fight back, we start to win. Unions are a lot weaker now than they were a generation ago, but we\u2019re still hugely powerful. Unions in the US have done a fantastic job of raising the minimum wage to a living wage in the Fight for 15 campaign.
\nThe US federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, but several cities have already raised it to $15 because of union campaigning. The Democrats are proposing a new federal minimum of $12, which shows that politicians respond to powerful unions.
\nAnd over in New Zealand, the union Unite has defeated zero hour contracts in McDonalds, Pizza Hut and much of the fast food industry through collective bargaining.
\nLet us not forget the source of our power. Go out and organise the fight back. Build power on the ground and give politicians from all parties something to think about.
\nWalton Pantland works for Union Solidarity International, a solidarity organisation supported by Unite the Union, of which he is a member. <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[60],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/global-labour.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}