So, today is a new day and unfortunately we've woken up to a Johnson government and a huge blow to the Labour movement. What happened and where do we go from here?
This is my northern, working class perspective.
This is my northern, working class perspective.
So i said last night that the move to a PV forced by the centrists fucked it. I maintain that view. It wasn't the policies or the left direction the party had moved in. The policies were popular. The problem was Brexit and the perception we no longer respected the '16 ref.
You don't have to agree with leavers to understand that to them Brexit already promised a better world and they wanted to 'get it done'. Our policies were obviously about addressing the causes of brexit, but the centreground on brexit fell away ages ago.
Brexit coupled with the neglect of working class northern towns and cities by previous Labour governments meant that despite what Corbyn's Labour was offering, trust was at an all time low, with the feeling that the party wasn't for them - epitomized by backtracking on Brexit
That has everything to do with the neo-liberal policies that were pursued by previous Labour administrations and fuck all to do with being socially 'liberal', so ppl suggesting we need to go back to small c conservative values can do one.
That said, I still believe if we'd had more time and a less hostile press we could have won the argument we needed a pragmatic approach to Brexit. But we didn't. We could have survived one and maybe even won with more time, but we could not survive both. So what now?
I'm leaving the leadership issue for now (except to say we need to stay and fight to secure the project), instead I'm looking at steps for the grassroots.
The world for many has just got a whole lot scarier. We cannot retreat from our communities to lick our wounds, on the contrary, we need to be bigger and bolder. We know who in our constituencies is going to be vulnerable and most affected by a Tory gov.
We need a grassroots Labour movement in our constituencies to engage in and start community projects to care for these people as racism, bigotry, and yet more poverty abounds. We cannot just be an engine for political campaigning, we have to be a community resource.
We also have to buck our ideas up where it comes to the media. We have an alternative left media, sure, but it is mostly for us and largely deals with internal left politics and issues rather than what's going on in the wider world.
They have served us well and helped us to solidify our position, but we need to think much bigger and focus on reaching an outside audience with a properly funded media that provides serious and robust investigative journalism and analysis from a left wing perspective.
That's about it for now but these are the things that stick out for me at least.
