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What next for the weakened British left? [1]

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Date: 2023-08

For four solid decades, the UK has been run according to an economic orthodoxy that claims to trade equality and sustainability for prosperity and dynamism. The result is that we have neither.

Instead, the UK is on track to be one of the worst-performing major economies in the world this year and has the worst rate of growth in productivity of any G7 country. Privatised infrastructure, an underregulated labour market and our governing class’s addiction to austerity has meant the latest inflationary crisis has torn through British society. Our health system, utilities and public transport are more expensive and worse performing than our European neighbours’. Wages are at 2005 levels, and falling. Three million food parcels were delivered by the Trussell Trust last year, a 50% increase on 2019 and an almost 5,000% increase on 2010.

The job of the left is to turn the social crisis into a political one – to make the rich afraid rather than the poor despondent. On paper, the response has been strong. In the past year, we have seen the UK’s largest wave of industrial unrest so far this century, waking whole sectors – most notably the NHS – after decades of slumber. A series of wider campaigns, from Enough is Enough to the energy bill non-payment campaign Don’t Pay UK, had the potential to mobilise millions. But more than a year on from the RMT strike that marked the beginning of the resistance to the cost of living crisis, the social movements have failed to materialise. Through a mixture of attrition, lost strike ballots, and Rishi Sunak’s “final offer” of around 6% for the public sector, the strike wave is falling back from its high-water mark.

Whatever tools the left needs to break through in the current moment, it evidently does not possess. Our governing class is yawningly out of touch and wracked by crisis, but politics itself is stagnant. The pattern of our age is that hard-right governments enact radical change and the opposition fails to overturn it. Just as Tony Blair affirmed Margaret Thatcher’s legacy, Keir Starmer promises to retain even the most extreme Conservative policies on immigration, protest crackdown and benefit caps. The stasis of our politics seems immune to reason: our rivers are full of sewage, public support for water nationalisation is at 74%, and yet the obvious solution remains taboo. As we enter the most crucial period for mitigating climate collapse, politicians row back on green spending commitments.

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This period of ideological and political stagnation long predates the UK’s precipitous economic decline and has become deeply ingrained, with the Labour Party and much of the left-wing mainstream media impervious to change. Corbynism has come and gone like a tide, leaving little in the way of organisational infrastructure or even collective spaces for political activism. Trade unions and social movements struggle, even in the current context, to find a foothold. In the space of just three years, the left has not just been defeated or pushed back, but utterly marginalised.

Yet the British public is angry with its political class and hungry for change. Economically at least, it leans heavily to the left. Public opinion is now overwhelmingly in favour of public ownership, wealth taxes, and radical action on climate change. There is a new generation of trade union activists and a heavily divided political landscape. The coming period will be unpredictable and should provide fertile ground for left renewal.

Neoliberal over-reach

What we are witnessing is the result of a particularly sharp experience of neoliberalism, which has left behind two contradictory legacies.

The UK’s neoliberal moment went further than in any of our European neighbours, with a stronger and narrower political consensus. While the early 2000s saw the strongest-ever electoral results for the French far left, the formation of the German Left Party and the rise of the Scottish socialist and green parties, Westminster’s electoral system allowed neoliberalism to continue unchallenged. New Labour became its standard-bearers, championing still-deeper privatisation of the NHS.

This virulence of neoliberal policy-making meant that by the time the 2008 financial crisis hit, the UK was more dependent on its banking sector than any other major economy and led the world in financial deregulation. Utilities and most public transport were privatised. Our social housing had been stripped away and rents were unregulated. A war on the power of organised labour gave employers a whip hand over workers. When austerity arrived, the UK was second only to Greece in real-terms wage decline and whole new areas of the state (the Post Office and universities) were sold off or marketised. The current inflationary crisis is the culmination of these policies: the British earn less, pay more and enjoy crumbling infrastructure and public services.

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[1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/what-next-for-british-left-labour-strikes-unions-keir-starmer-jeremy-corbyn/

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