Britain: Some ideas for discussion and possible outcomes of the current situation

Roger Silverman

London UK

 

1) Johnson will fail this time to bluster his way out of the scandal. Now that Britain is sliding into unprecedented crisis, his act of roguish buffoonery has become a liability. The "partygate" scandal was always common knowledge; it's only now that is being exploited as the device with which to pry him loose.

2) The Tory party has been ruthlessly commandeered by the parasitic hedge-fund brigade, so whichever of the alternative Tory candidates replaces him will be even more repulsive: Sunak, Truss, Raab, or (most horrifying of all) Patel. The difference is that none of them has Boris' alleged "charisma".

3) Conditions in Britain will rapidly spiral out of control, with soaring inflation of food and fuel prices, tax rises, benefit cuts, etc. People at the lowest fringe will literally starve and freeze to death. We can expect rising rates of crime and new riots like those of 2011... and also a welcome wave of strikes in those sectors suffering from a labour shortage.

4) Desperate to win back the patronage of the ruling class after the shock of the Corbyn phenomenon, Starmer and Evans are hell-bent on destroying Labour as an autonomous political party. Thousands of members have had their membership "terminated" (that's their word for it) without a hearing or right of appeal, and huge numbers have dropped out in disgust. As a result, where Labour under Corbyn was the biggest political party in Europe, membership has now slumped by at least 150,000; party finances have dropped from a record £13 million surplus to bankruptcy; and voting figures in the four bye-elections since Starmer took over have dropped by two-thirds since the Corbyn era.

5) At the next election, consequently, there will be mass abstentions. As in the USA before the era of Obama and Trump, there will be a record low turnout. Nevertheless, due to mass revulsion against the Tories, it is quite likely that they will be defeated by a coalition of Starmerite Labour with the LibDems.

6) A Lib-Lab government will promise very little and achieve even less. As a result, there could well be a spurt in support for fringe parties both left and right (and inevitably, Scottish secession).

7) The bright spot in all this is that while the left may be currently stunned and disoriented, it is far from defeated. What is happening to the Labour Party is that it's undergoing a long-overdue split between its socialist and capitalist wings. This has been inevitable ever since the creation of "New Labour" in 1994, the very first act of which was to call a special conference to delete Clause Four, as a symbolic guarantee to the ruling class that the new leadership was no longer even going to pretend to aspire towards socialism and a new society. Demoralised by successive defeats throughout the 1980s, the membership grudgingly went along with that betrayal. But since the 2008 crash, socialist ideas have revived (so much so that in successive opinion polls 70% of under-40s have expressed support for socialism). It is a split relentlessly pursued by the right, while the left is still stunned and picking itself off the floor. But autonomous left Labour groups are springing up all over the country, and a new national Socialist Labour Network has been founded.

8) Which brings us back to the old question: what about the first-past-the-post electoral system? First, proportional representation would not necessarily solve anything. There are flaws in any electoral system, but there is nothing intrinsically undemocratic about the idea that every locality should have equal representation in parliament - and who should represent it but the person who wins the most votes there? Proportional representation would virtually permanently deprive any party (including a left party) of an overall majority, and would give unrepresentative minor fringe parties a disproportionate veto.

9) So how do we overcome the duopoly of the unaccountable two-party joint Tory/Starmerite dictatorship? The same way that Labour displaced the Tory/Liberal regime over a century ago! The Labour Party was founded by a combination of a spread of local socialist groups like the ILP, and the recognition by the trade unions that they needed independent representation in parliament. That is beginning to happen again now. The Socialist Labour groups are spreading to become a national network. As for the trade unions, they move only clumsily and ponderously (the brilliant cartoonist David Low always represented the TUC as a carthorse), but look what is happening now: the Bakers' Union has disaffiliated from the Labour Party, the RMT (rail union) broke away years ago, UNITE has slashed its affiliation fees to Labour, as has the CWU (postal workers), and others are following suit: UNISON (local government workers), the FBU (fire fighters), etc. In time they could well join forces to create once again a genuine party of labour.