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”
Leon Wolfeson
I am talking about facts. The *facts* of polling tabs, which you reject on ideological grounds as unacceptable. UKIP, factually, very much draw their a supermajority of their support from the “Tory right” and those further to the right.
Then you claim to speak for the left, trying to say we support your right-wing policies. It’s typical lying from you, trying to magic up support for mass poverty and low wages. The former Labour core vote has been left behind by Labour allright – as Labour have repeatedly shifted to the right! (again, fact, policy analysis shows this). And yea, so “terrible” that minorities have rights, in your world.
It’s the usual ranting from you – you’re anti-facts, anti-rights, anti-Britain.
Guest
Failure to be even further right, to support smashing the economy, etc.
You don’t have a “majority” who want to cause far more poverty.
Jacques Strap
Did you read what I said?
Toby Hill
Did you follow the links to any of the evidence I included in the article? My argument draws on some quite in-depth research, which your comment doesn’t really seem to.
The fact is that a worrying number of people who used to vote Labour and who hold broadly left-wing values are being drawn to UKIP. More importantly, many of these are among the UK’s most disenfranchised voters (which is more my point than how Labour-affiliated they once were).
A recent John Harris video in the Guardian makes for sobering viewing on the latter point: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2014/sep/15/ukip-england-east-world-upside-down-video.
We should stop deluding ourselves.
GhostofJimMorrison
“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.”
Spoken like true faux lefty London liberal who has absolutely no fear of losing his job to an immigrant. How can a plumber or plasterer from Doncaster, or a factory worker from Wigan with few qualifications see an Eastern European immigrant as anything other than competition for his or her job? Suppose they should just shut up, the massive bigots, and repeat the lefty mantra “immigration and diversity is good: period”