Labour, polls and the stories we tell ourselves
Alex Smith has an article over at Labour List celebrating the ICM and UKPR polls which show a fall in the Tory lead, and a bump in Labour’s figures, after the by-election victory in Scotland secured the party a few days of coverage. Alex’s says this shows ‘the Tory lead is vulnerable and that the arguments are there to be won’.
I’m not so convinced. Certainly, any party can get a bump in the polls by winning a by-election or by preparing a popular raft of measures to announce for the Queen’s Speech. But the reality cloaked by such announcements as Gordon Brown put in the mouth of Mrs. Windsor is a casts a worrying pall over the optimism of Labour activists on the doorstep.
For a start, the Queen didn’t manage to get past paragraph one without evidence of Brown’s attempt at misdirection. “Through active employment and training programmes…my Government will foster growth and employment.” Neatly avoiding the estimated £350 million being stripped from youth training programmes across the country.
A lot of groups which draw support directly from Labour’s heartlands are earnestly campaigning against this move, which they do by pointing out the fact of the cuts. Labour loyalists can talk all they want about how the argument is still up for grabs, but that’s blatantly not true as it’s our own supporters mobilizing to fight Labour’s agenda, the one behind the rhetoric.
Whatever polling figures say, this disconnection will be reflected come election time. It’s the same with the public sector; almost any public sector employee can tell of unfilled positions, tasks being postponed in order that more important ones can have manpower hours and all set to a cacophony of “We’re coming for the pensions you get, after forty years of paltry wages!”
The Left across the country is gearing up to fight cuts, whoever makes them. And so the rhetoric of Gordon Brown, and the naive belief of the Party faithful that the arguments put forward by Brown are arguments worth fighting for, is made a mockery of. So while Labour consoles itself with propaganda videos of disgusting proportion, and dupes the odd voter on the doorstep, the victory of the Tories is still all but assured because there’s no way for Labour to mobilize the real support that exists in the hearts of many millions of people without basically abandoning all New Labour has ever been.
Meanwhile we need to be asking, what is the cost of these stories we’re telling voters about Labour being the progressive party, party of the NHS etc, even whilst our leaders are preparing to march in a reactionary direction? The cost is the success of the far right; the gap between rhetoric and action leads to disillusionment – and disillusionment finds many willing accomplices in the right-wing media, singing consoling songs of how much better things were way back when…
So it is certainly time for Labour activists to stop talking like this is ‘our’ party, even if we hope that some day it will be. It is time to turn off the music drowning out the reality of war, higher taxes, capless tuition fees, hollowed-out public services and a growing rich-poor divide. If we don’t talk honestly on the doorstep, and give the lie to Gordon Brown, even if urging a Labour vote, then when we come back, we’ll find Tory voters, Lib-Dem voters and BNP voters. Anything but Labour voters.
This has a knock-on effect on those activists beyond the careerist core that hitherto has sustained New Labour, and the die-hard Labour Left; those who go in to this election with false expectations – expectations which are encouraged by Brown’s rhetoric – then they will come out disillusioned, and join the legion of ex-Labour members, depoliticized or members of any of the Left parties which hate Labour’s guts.
Bonus material: Dave’s Wanker Watch spotted this.
Labour always has to tread a file line between being left wing enough to interest its members and right wing enough to be electable.
Though come to think of it, with Brown as leader we’re neither left wing nor electable.
What rubbish. If Labour genuinely had to be pulled to the centre to be electable, then there’d be no point in having a Labour Party. Both the Liberals and the Tories do admirable job in ensuring the centre of the political spectrum is well represented.
But of course your remarks are a pointless truism which has always been in vogue among those who figure on the paltry elections we do have as the final word in democracy. They are not – and if Labour is not simply to another ‘centrist’ party, then it is time to change the stakes.
As a point of fact, all Labour has done for twelve years is plough itself deep into a centrist furrow. So the thesis of electability still doesn’t stand up.
Hadleigh @1
Ah, I see Dave beat me to it. All I had in mind to say was that, quite aside from the wider function of the Labour party, you seem to be saying that leftwing parties are not electable, and to refer you to my recent post here (‘Are the Labour left losers?’) on the electoral successes of the Labour left. Just because the Labour right is fond of saying that only they can make Labour electable, that doesn’t make it true.
Democracy is democratic, so we don’t have to be. Hate to sound like broken record, but leftwards shift will not harm electability.