Is “the lesser evil” the best we can get?
JVL Introduction
Perspectives on the General Election (3)
Lorna Finlayson’s thoughtful and thought provoking article, published in January, has become particularly relevant as the election draws near, which is why we are drawing attention to it now. She strongly challenges the view that it is immature to vote other than for the Labour Party an attitude perhaps exemplified in an Observer article by Sonya Sodha (May 26th), which was forensically challenged by Talal Hangari, as we have published here. Finlayson also questions whether a vote for a Starmer led government actually is the lesser evil?
She raises many questions not least that if voting for the lesser evil is the right thing to do: “(w)here was the chorus, in 2017 and 2019, insisting that rightminded people support Labour in order to avoid the greater evil of the Conservatives? No, Corbynism had to be stopped even if it meant letting in the great bête noire du jour of all sensible liberals, Boris Johnson.”
See also the JVL statement Election 2024 – For The Many.
LL
This article was originally published by New Left Review on Mon 1 Jan 2024. Read the original here.
On lesser evilism
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Whether ‘greater’ or ‘lesser’, evil is still evil. Whichever circle of Hell a soul dwells in, it is still Hell. I find that I cannot vote for Labour any more than I can vote for the Tories, because in my view neither party fulfills the requirements necessary to run a democratic nation which, by definition, should care for all its citizens. My criticisms of each Party differ in many crucial details, but the sum total of those criticisms adds up to the same thing, that the leadership of neither party has any real concern for anything other than the maintenance of its own leadership, and that Opportunism has now become a political creed rather than simply a behavioural trait. Who I do vote for, if I vote at all, that’s another matter; but it will be for a more modest and sympathetic enterprise than the two monoliths currently crushing the nation beneath the weight of their self-serving ambitions.
COMPETENCE
I am not sentimental about bourgeois democracy
and I accept that voting usually involves the choice of lesser evils
but there has to be some ethical distinction that does not involve
endorsing one supporter of genocide over another on the grounds
that the previous group of psychopaths were unconvincing, rubbish
and should make way for Starmer’s, who love Israel more deeply
There is more to politics (surely) than the aptitude for murder
This is one of a number of articles which have appeared recently intellectualising the process of how we should approach our choice of whether or not to vote Labour in a few weeks time. But is this how humans make the decisions we have to make every day? Humans are not logical beings; we make decisions based on ‘rules of thumb’, ‘gut feeling’, stereotypes like right-wing/left-wing, half remembered incidents or comments, or even ‘I don’t like his/her face’.
So why not do what you did last time you had to decide who to vote for. Last time my vote for Labour was because Corbyn seemed to be on the same wavelength as me, not because every ‘i’ and ‘t’ of Labour’s policy had been dotted or crossed; he just ‘smelled right’.
After voting Labour at every election since 1964 Starmer will probably be the man who makes me look elsewhere. Sorry Dad!
One brief comment: Para 3: “Corbynism had to be stopped even if it meant letting in the great bête noire du jour of all sensible liberals, Boris Johnson.”
I see no contradiction here. In a country gone completely mad, Johnson was actually seen by all too many as the lesser of two evils.
The minute Blair became leader of the Labour Party I started voting Green. On one level it seemed utterly futile. My view, however, was, however futile it might seem, someone had to start the ball rolling. In 2002 I moved to Brighton!
Is Starmer the Lesser Evil or the the last nail in the coffin of Labour as a left wing socialist party for the Many.. the final win by the Establishment to wipe out Democratic choice as finally the threat of change and a more equal society is finally buried ..
I cannot vote in general elections. Even if I could I would not vote for Starmers party. He crosses too many of my red lines. And I believe firmly that we all deserve the best there is and not any evil. ‘Lesser evil’ in my view is a naff excuse for trying to manipulate people to accept a government that actually should be coming with a government health warning.
I will do a bit of travelling to support a local or regional independant candidate….
There is a very broad consensus, going far beyond the traditional ‘left’, that the present government is an unmitigated disaster. One might expect this to lead to the conclusion that the country would be in a far better state now if Labour had won the 2019 election. So far as I can see however this idea is never even discussed in what one might call the mainstream.
Of course it is perfectly legitimate to argue that however bad this government is one led by Jeremy Corbyn would have been even worse. This is not what is happening however. The comparison is never made, and there is no discussion at all of what a Corbyn government might have been like. Given that this is what over ten million people voted for in 2019 this does seem rather surprising.
In considering what is the ‘lesser evil’ we first have to identify the options. Narrowing the list of options is the best way to control the process, as of course the Labour Party leadership has demonstrated in its manipulation of the Parliamentary selection process. The argument that a government led by Starmer might be even worse than one led by Sunak is quite a strong one but we should not allow ourselves to get bogged down in this comparison. We do have to keep alive an understanding that there are many possibilities available far better than either.
No way will a vote for either of the front runners be good for the U.K. Both are, to my mind, like the main states of the EU, completely subservient to the needs of the State Department of the US, ie. The Military Industrial Complex, and its profits from continuing wars, ie. ‘Evil’. And, if the compliant media told the truth, instead of the constant lies, omissions and propaganda it peddles, they would never be voted for again.
George Galloway might not dot the ‘i’s and cross the ‘t’s, for everyone but his Workers Party seems to be the one to go for if possible.
Yet again, JVL is slow on the uptake, as are many of the comments, which seem to make the typical mistake of romanticizing ‘old labour’, which was apparently left wing and socialist, completely forgetting the imperialism of people like Atlee and Wilson, or even the elitist Fabians.
I may be ‘slow on the uptake’, but I’m not sure I can see any great attempt to romanticise ’Old Labour’ in what has been written. I see people who want to get rid of the present government, but are not sure that the Labour party in its present iteration will prove to be any better. Instead of treating what Atlee’s Labour government did as a list from which one can pick out and complain of the things they don’t like, it might be better to treat it as a bundle and make one’s judgement on the contents as a whole. It put in place many of the things in our society which we are struggling to retain and which the Tories are trying to dump, and which some of us are not sure that Starmer will do much to defend. I would add that the economic commentator William Keegan noted that Corbyn was far less radical than Atlee.
The lesser of 2 Evils is likely to last a decade or two if Labour wins.
My view is, we should campaign against Starmer, in the hope that he has such a bad election, he’s forced to resign and proves that moving to the right doesn’t work twice, it’s where Blair took us. This is more likely to get Labour to move back to the Left. Without doubt Corbyn would be PM and life in Britain would be much better for the Working Class, his policies doubled the Membership and if the Traitorous PLP MPs and the Traitors at LP Headquarters hadn’t worked to stop him winning, he would have been PM and proven that Socialist Policies are good for the Working Class. PS his Policies were so good, they won Starmer the Leadership contest. His Ten Pledges were all Corbyn’s Policies and Starmer dropped every single one of them after he became Leader.
Even better would be, if Andrew Feinstein beats Starmer in the General Election.
@Les May – The articles and much of the comments on JVL are replete with the idea that Starmer, not the Labour Party is the problem, and this is usually underpinned by the myth that Old Labour was actually a left wing and socialist party, either said directly or implied. Atlee might of given workers here a few concessions, but he was an anti-communist, and imperialist, and the Labour Party as a whole has acted against the aspirations of the working class.
Alas, it’s time to get real about Labour and move on.
I first heard the argument that Labour had ‘betrayed’ the working class in 1961 from my Marxist friend the late Harry Dawson. I was still too pleased at having moved out of our damp, gas lit ‘2 up 2 down’ into a Council House and at being able to continue my education to age 18 even though my Dad had been in hospital since 1953, thanks to Labour’s 1948 National Assistance Act, to bother to argue with him.
Not sure how Labour have “betrayed the working class” when it was never really for us, or at least only for the upper section of it, as observed by Lenin. Labour have never had a problem with capitalism and imperialism, just who the personnel are.
I did a precis of Lorna’s excellent article here + added some comments of my own in THE LEFT LANE last week.
https://theleftlane2024.substack.com/p/cant-we-do-better-than-lesser-evilism