Voters suffering most severely from forms of economic oppression, and who share fundamental left-wing values, are not voting for Labour and are definitely not voting for one of the parties to the left of Labour.
Voters suffering most severely from forms of economic oppression, and who share fundamental left-wing values, are not voting for Labour and are definitely not voting for one of the parties to the left of Labour
I am going to indulge in a little navel-gazing to argue that we – if anyone even wants to be part of the ‘we’ of the left anymore – need to take a break from blabbering at each other, and ask why our attempts to communicate are such a dismal failure.
The bedroom tax is bad. Raar! Angry! Me! Furious! Today’s left produces an endless stream of tweets, updates, comments and blogposts opining perspectives that, give or take the odd sub-clause, most of its audience already agrees with. Pat on the back! Yeah! It’s outrageous! Morons!
Meanwhile, many of the voters bearing the full weight of economic inequality blame Romanian immigrants and amble off to vote UKIP.
That this marks a catastrophic failure on the part of the left was demonstrated by research quoted in the Guardian a few months ago. It found that 71 per cent of UKIP voters agree with left-wing statements such as ‘the government should redistribute income’ and ‘ordinary people do not get their fair share of the national wealth’.
This was a significantly higher proportion than Conservative (43 per cent) or Lib Dem (65 per cent) voters, and not far behind Labour (81 per cent). Further research found that of the 10 most UKIP-friendly seats in the country, eight are Labour.
So what’s happened? Why are we finding it so hard to reach an audience beyond our own social and digital circles?
Could it be a consequence of what the film-maker Adam Curtis and novelist Michel Houllebecq identified about the movements of the sixties: that they were never really about social justice, they were about individual self-expression, and so not only did they feed quite naturally into the rise of marketing and Thatcherism, but they also created a culture whereby one’s politics are primarily an aspect of the identity you don each day and swish around on the stage of the world?
In a cultural context such as this, it is entirely logical that collective engagement should be relegated to second-place behind simply airing one’s views and splashing around in the warm pool of your own impassioned outrage.
Or, linked but a little different, is it that the left’s struggles have shifted from the grounds of class to focus on sexuality and gender – understandably tempting territory for the middle-class radical, allowing them to feel personally involved and oppressed and so to indulge their own narcissism?
These are of course vital struggles for many. But their inherent appeal has an unfortunate consequence. Those experiencing greater economic than gender-based oppression end up being left behind, forgotten about, and most of all alienated from a left of bloggers, artists, cartoonists and tattooists who spend half the time banging on about their own sex lives, shaving habits, and taste in arthouse cinema.
Or is the old left right after all, and it’s all the fault of New Labour?
To a large extent we’re still reliant on Labour to, bee-like, convey our arguments across the whole of the country. But Miliband’s party of career politicians has no convincing narrative to explain why people find themselves in dead-ends of economic deprivation, let alone any substantive policies that might get them moving again.
Whatever balance of these and other factors is the cause, it has happened, and we should acknowledge it. The left is losing the argument. Voters suffering most severely from forms of economic oppression, and who share fundamental left-wing values, are not voting for Labour and are definitely not voting for one of the parties to the left of Labour.
Most are not blaming flows of international capital for the housing crisis. They’re not blaming inadequate worker compensation for their long hours, poor quality of life and reliance on in-work benefits. They’re not blaming the slashing of subsidised legal aid for their precarious employment situation.
No, as UKIP’s continuing journey up the polls demonstrates, they’re blaming Romanian immigrants and benefit cheats. And the left is failing to counter these arguments.
Perhaps instead of churning out more contempt-laden copy on the latest UKIP blunder or eccentric policy proposal, we should turn our touchscreens to discussing how we can communicate more effectively with those suffering most acutely from the inequities of our economic system.
Toby Hill is a London-based journalist and writer
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176 Responses to “The rise of UKIP marks a failure of the left”
littleoddsandpieces
Politics is dead in the UK. People have no interest whatsoever. 2015 will see the lowest voter turnout in UK history.
No party offers anything but loss to me, including Labour that only offer more of the same Tory policies.
As people do not read policy, they see UKIP all the time on TV and so vote blind.
But UKIP does not offer me state pension payout lost at 60 this year, loss of any and all benefits (never having gained them), 6 years without the food and fuel money of state pension, nor halving the energy bills by not having green taxes on residents that kill 30,000 elderly each winter.
https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/state-pension-at-60-now
But as 15 million did not vote in 2010, this huge non-voting block is double that of any votes for any and all political parties in general elections.
There is a speech tour by UK’s Left Unity Party, of SYRIZA and Podemos, that offers all the little socialist parties, including Labour Left wasting its time in Progress/Balls/Miliband led Labour, could listen to success stories of mergers of lots of little socialist parties and electoral success against austerity by new European parties of the left.
See details on my personal website:
http://www.anastasia-england.me.uk
Leon Wolfeson
Weak. Very weak.
The left *are* being heard. What’s happened is that those voices are not the voice of Labour, which is now a moderate right one. The left are making small parties, are running campaigns…Labour is just nowhere on the scene for those people.
Labour is not “countering” arguments because it has bought into them, plain and simple. They are benefit-bashing right alongside the Tories, for instance.
UKIP is not taking votes in any great number from Labour, and it’s certainly taking even less from the left.
Leon Wolfeson
I disagree.
The left are engaged, but have nobody to vote FOR at national level. Labour has abandoned us.
Other parties are interested only in narrow slices of the left. LU, for instance, is only interested in “socialist feminists” (and other narrow slices) for instance, and don’t bother if you’re Jewish. (And along the same lines, you’d find very few core socialist voters, ignoring the rest of the left is a bad idea!)
And your website (no, not following random links) can’t explain how to overcome FPTP. Which is the key problem we face now. Voting reform has to come first, afaik.
Jacques Strap
Failure of the left to appreciate that immigration is an issue that concerns the majority of people in this country.
GhostofJimMorrison
UKIP is not taking votes in any great number from Labour, and it’s certainly taking even less from the left.
Wolfey you are so far wide of the mark its almost pathetic. Benefit bashing, as you call it, is popular with a huge majority of Labour voters. The left has been lost in a sea of identity politics, single issue fanaticism, and promoting rights for minorities, leaving its core voters to hang.