The right have differences of opinion too, but are much better at coming together when it matters
Post-election, we’ve seen the inevitable flurry of analysis from left-leaning political pundits, politicians and commentators about why the Labour Party drastically failed to win a majority.
What went wrong, why the party failed to engage voters, and vague suggestions of what to do about it, mainly centred on the need for reflection and new leadership.
Electing the right opposition leader to present a real challenge to the Tories is certainly a priority. But what of civil society?
The community groups, trade associations, charities, NGOs, social enterprises, think tanks, and individuals who don’t agree with Tory cuts that are increasing poverty in the UK, who marched against austerity last weekend to demand an alternative, who want to see a fairer society for all.
What are they doing to improve the chances of power being in the hands of a more progressive government? Unsurprisingly, there are lots of individuals and groups calling for change and action, as well as some actually doing something about it, but not in a joined up way. And herein lies the problem.
Journalist Sunny Hundal published a piece on Labour List last week called, ‘Why the left keeps crashing and burning, and what to do about it‘, claiming that activists on the left tend to lose momentum and let their campaigns fizzle out because of a lack of strategy and planning beyond protests, leading to in-fighting, poor timing and weak implementation.
Hundal makes three simple suggestions for what to do:
1. Build infrastructure and fundraise
2. Avoid clichéd and lazy messaging (a la UKIP) that alienates potential supporters
3. Get young people voting
All good suggestions. So how do we get there? When I tweeted Sunny to ask when he was organising an event or discussion to decide how to put his words into action, he half- jokingly suggested someone else should do the work. But who?
Though Twitter is alive with debate, I haven’t seen a show of hands to take this forward.
Beyond protests – which certainly have their value – we need someone to grab activists by the scruff of the neck, sit them down and facilitate a structured and clear conversation designed to generate a broad agreement on why the movement is failing, what can be done about it, who can do it, and how.
Many of us are familiar with this process when mobilising campaigns and movements, so it seems crazy that we can’t get it together for ‘the left’ as a whole.
From what I’ve gathered, the main problem is that no one is really sure who exactly the ‘left’ is or should be, and don’t feel they have the energy, money or time to tackle the differences that have divided people in the past.
But I think this is where the ‘right’ have always had us. They know the left is divided, poorly funded and thus badly organised. They feed off it.
They also have differences of opinion, as we can clearly see amongst front and backbenchers of the Conservatives and with the rise of UKIP, but when it comes to crunch time i.e. an election, they pool together and unify their messages, presenting a stronger face to the voters.
We cannot let this go on. Mass mobilisation isn’t easy, but with so many savvy digitalists, campaigners, thinkers and organisers around, it shouldn’t be impossible. We just need to take the first step. A discussion: a room, some tables, pens and paper, the internet and a few laptops.
I’m in, and willing to help organise. Who’s with me?
Natasha Dyer is head of the London office, DHA Communications. Follow her on Twitter
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29 Responses to “Why can’t the left get unified?”
stevep
Good article. Precisely what I`ve been thinking and saying for a while now.
Three types of people are needed to build anything: Thinkers, who analyse given situations, solve problems and formulate plans.
: Doer`s, who deal with the bricks and mortar of a situation and get things done.
: Organisers, Perhaps the most important role as they get the thinkers and doer`s together and make them function.
We need all three types, for thinkers aren`t often great organisers or doer`s. ( I`m a tolerable thinker, mediocre organiser and a poor doer.) and vice-versa. It really does need to be done by the young as it is their future at stake, with respect to the wisdom and experience of the older amongst us .
it also needs to be done using the internet to bypass mainstream media and speak directly to a generation much more likely to use social media to get and distribute information than read The Sun or Mail.
The 2015 Dimbleby lecture is a must-see.
https://youtu.be/5uBvapF9nxo
swat
The Left actually enjoys tearing bits out of each other, rather than attacking the enemy the Tories. Its a kind of righteousness mentality, that their particular brand of Leftyism is much purer than the other bloke’s brand of Leftyism. I can only compare it to the absurd situation of Islam where Shiites abhor the Sunnis and vice versa, and Al Quida, the Taliban and IsIs hate each others guts and try to outdo each other.
StevenMPagan
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Jennifer Hornsby
The left’s problems must be blamed on a shifting centre of gravity: the electorate has moved towards the right. Why? Largely because of a constant stream of lies and concealment of truth on the part of Tory
politicians and the media they feed (including the BBC, thanks to recent Tory threats). Ed Balls and others assumed an electorate whose mindset had shifted—as focus groups would surely have revealed it had. Even before the campaign, Labour should have worked hard to eradicate false assumptions. How about the simple message: “Over 13 years, Labour decreased poverty and decreased the debt. Then the banks failed. Conservatives now have Britain’s poor paying for corrupt bankers’ greed.” Let’s think what the messages should be, have the organizers determine how to convey them, and the doers get them across.
Bret R
This is not a new problem. The left has been fractured and at war since around the
Hungarian Revolution in ’58 when the simple notion of a peaceful revolutionary road to liberation died.
The simple fact is our job on the left is a hell of a lot more difficult than that of the Right.
The fact is we on the left are trying to change things, to wrench power from the always powerful, to fundamentally remake the world. That makes our job a whole lot harder than the Right’s. They are already in all of the positions of power, they already enjoy all the privileges, they already dictate the agenda whether it be through the laws of the land, the media or the education curriculum. Not just that but they are fighting to defend their privilege. So in effect they are fighting to maintain their absolute power and get to use their absolute power to do so. They just have to hold the line. Resist progress.
The left on the other hand is trying to change the system without having any actual power. We have very few people in powerful positions who can use that power to make dramatic and lasting change.
As to the reasons for our constant divisions. Its important to understand that the Right are defending a world that exists. This world. They can point to reality and say ‘Look, see, this is the way life is supposed to be, because this is the world that exists.’
The left can’t do that because this is the very world we want to change. We’re working from ideas of a world that don’t yet exist, a future world, a fantasy world. This is where it gets really complicated because what we want is change, but change is subjective. One person’s radical reform is another person’s tinkering around the edges. The left is made up of particular interest groups. We’re united by our desire for change but utterly different in what we think must be changed. Each group privileges certain causes and prioritises certain outcomes. Why? Because we all have a different analysis of what is wrong with the
existing system and from that a specific solution. A Feminist analysis will inevitably privilege female emancipation/liberation to the detriment of class based solutions. A Marxist will inevitably privilege a class analysis and its subsequent solutions to the detriment of race, gender, evnironmental and sexuality solutions. There are many such divisions across the left. This means conflict is inevitable.
So now we look to our divided movement. Why can’t we work together? Because Labour has a fundamentally different analysis to the Greens, who have a fundamentally different analysis to the Trotskyists, who have a fundamentally different analysis to the Communists and on and on.
We can’t agree on what the problem is, we certainly can’t agree what the solutions are. We ignore our own traditions failures whilst deeply distrusting the “obviously” failed doctrine of every other group. Everyone else suspects Labour of betraying the movement by collaborating with the Tories and big business. Everyone else suspects the Greens of being Middle-Class Liberal Democrats in disguise, everyone else suspects the Trotskyists of being infighting totalitarians and everyone else suspects the Communists of being nostalgic Stalinists. Its not hard to see why we don’t unite. We don’t trust each other and most significantly of all we don’t agree with each other. Its easy to overlook the last point but it is crucial. What we have in common is a desire to replace the people in power with something else. Where we differ completely is in what should replace it. That is more than a small problem and it won’t be overcome by any amount of shared stage time at a rally, or watered down, shared, temporary manifesto’s that satisfy nobody.
Solutions: find a way to agree where we satisfy everybody or, as is more likely, accept that the left is just too broad a church to find common ground and take more of a “you push at your end and we’ll push at our end and we’ll talk again when the wall has crumbled’ approach.