Labour wasn’t radical enough
JVL Introduction
In the aftermath of the General Election and to help us all take stock, we will post a selected handful of the interesting/insightful analyses now pouring out on all sides.
Here Adam Ramsay, co-editor of openDemocracyUK, argues that the problem was neither Corbyn nor Brexit.
Rather: “The problem was that Labour ran a campaign with a ‘retail’ offer when voters wanted empowerment. They asked people to trust the political system to transform their lives after the Tories had been waging war on trust in the political system. They failed to drive a debate about radical change to the British state, to rage against a system designed to deliver elite rule.”
This article was originally published by openDemocracy on Fri 13 Dec 2019. Read the original here.
Don’t blame Corbyn or Brexit: Labour failed to rage against the hated political system
Any leader challenging power will suffer character assassination, and Brexit is just the latest manifestation of a deeper problem – one that Labour didn’t address.
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Corbyn is a light that will never go out: a man of integrity, decency and kindness focused on social justice. His own party, the median the Establishment could not tolerate him succeeding … at any cost.
His dignity, hard work and idealism are already his legacy.
Very insightful. I think that the ‘consumer shopping list’ problem with the manifesto was epitomised by free broadband. In the office I work in, in a ‘red wall’ constituency, it was referred to, but as a joke. It, together with the muliplicity of ‘offers’ undermined the essential and far more substantial parts of the manifesto. I could see the logic and tried to argue in favour but it was an uphill struggle. Not quite the ‘Edstone’, but definitely misconceived. Making a big deal of ending universal credit would have had more effect.
Adam is right to spotlight the issue of credibility as the deciding factor in the election. When people said both sides are telling lies (when it is demonstrable that only the Tories were lying) what they meant was that they didn’t believe Labour could deliver on its promises. Adam is spot on to point to the absence of real challenge to the political status quo. I would wish to add to that the absence of a real challenge to the economic consensus (centred on the question of what fiscal credibility means). But these are not issues which can ever be done and dusted in a three week GE – or even a three year leadership tenure. The right wing of the party will lead with this credibility issue and take it as an imperative to return to “the centre”. If that is the lesson learned, the Party will lose my support (perhaps an added incentive for them?) But they should not go that way without answering the question, in what way can Labour then avoid going the way of the LibDems and TingeUK?
Best analysis I have seen to date.
If labour is ever going to win it must be visibly socialist. So socialist that no one can mistake it. When it appears in the media it must present working class representatives at every opportunity including the disabled, the minority ethnic & women. It must highlight the evils of unemployment, precarity, homelessness & illness. It needs to show how socialism eradicates these. The arts support this & the groundwork has been done for years. Boys from the black stuff, Cathy come home etc. All viewers loved it. We have to purge the party of Blairites. Otherwise we risk failure to make clear we have changed completely. We must change completely