Why do I raise this now seeing as the Greens have warranted few comment pieces here in the past. The answer is because of the polls. Recent months have seen a slow build up of support for the party. The latest Ipsos MORI poll for the Evening Standard has the Tories take a four-point lead, apparently thanks to a "vaccine bounce", but what interests us is further down. The Greens are on eight per cent in third place, a point ahead of the LibDems and, at first glance, thanks to a direct transfer of Labour support (we're down three, they're up three). But this is part of a pattern of behaviour. YouGov routinely show the Greens edging out the LibDems by a point or two, only for them to switch places again. A bit like the action at the top of the polls. Can we put this down to the normal churn expected from the polls?
Possibly. Possibly not. The polls remain consistent with the polarised politics in England and Wales this blog has long written about, which makes a mockery of the centre ground platitudes from yesteryear. But it could be the beginning of something. Returning to Ronald Inglehart's post-materialist thesis, he argued rising affluence in the post-war period fundamentally reoriented politics. High wages and improving living standards meant the concerns for security and the economistic tussles for better pay were getting displaced by quality-of-life issues, which variously manifested themselves in the counter-culture, the life politics of the so-called new social movements, and later the growth of environmentalist movements and green parties. Inglehart's tracking of value change across Western Europe and North America was certainly onto something, but he underestimated the strength of the labour movement in securing these benefits. There was something else too. As a political scientist operating within the confines of a seriously limited discipline, he did not grasp the proper quality of what was happening: the emergence and growth of immaterial labour. The Greens in Western Europe emerged as a confluence of two forces: a traditional petit-bourgeois radicalism that had fed into left and rightwing politics down the decades, and a section of the rising class of immaterial workers. If Labour was born of an alliance between industrial workers and the professional middle class, the Greens were, at a less numerous level, a compact between new workers, the new middle class, and a section of the petit bourgeoisie.
That said, in the UK the relative weakness of the Greens has been thanks to the Labour Party fairly successfully scooping up these layers, a point reinforced by the depression and shrinkage of the party during the Corbyn period up until 2019. However, after the fallow period comes the opportunity. It is obvious by now that Keir Starmer and the people he listens to do not know who Labour's core vote are, let alone understand them. Or, at the very least, they're gestured to in the most simplistic and distorting of ways, oft referring to them as Labour's young urban base or "graduates". The assumption establishing "credibility" can only be on terms congenial to the mythologised salt-of-the-earth northern home owner with a flag pole in their garden assumes its existing voter base have nowhere to go, and if they do disappear the safe seats stay safe and what is gained are a smattering of Labour leavers in the new marginals. The same logic applies to the removal of the left's influence in the party. If under Corbyn Labour's mass membership added value to the party's campaigning not just by having armies of volunteers knocking on doors but establishing a Labour Party presence in every workplace, community, and millions of friendship groups, rowing back from building social density means disappointed activists and former members work as negative multipliers. The people they convinced to vote Labour and the personalisation the party benefited from by its association with hundreds of thousands of people is under threat. The party goes back to being remote and estranged. And given how conditional and transactional politics has become, this is a recipe for decay and defeat. There is always an alternative to voting, and that's staying at home.
Or voting for another party. No one is suggesting the Greens are set on supplanting Labour any time soon. This is not Germany, and Labour are not the SPD. But consider the party's position. The Greens have an affinity with the rising class of immaterial workers. It is socially liberal, still owns climate change and environmental issues, and by more boldly moving into the new politics of class could cause Labour a real headache. For Labour does not stand to lose some core support in the big cities as per the calculations in LOTO, what's at risk is its core support everywhere. Which is why the Greens' performance at the 2015 election is instructive. It did not capture huge votes in the big cities, but did do (relatively) well with a thousand votes here, a thousand votes there right across the country. Many of these voters came to Labour in 2017 and some stayed on in 2019, but in 2024? Naturally, a great deal can happen in three years. Including the alienation of a significant enough layer of Labour's support, its consolidation around the Greens, and their bedding down enough roots to make the difference in dozens of swing seats. Here's a suggestion: it might be a good idea if Labour did not create this problem for itself.
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12 comments:
this serves labour right , the way labour treated Jeremy was a disgrace and labour do not deserve power .
i have left labour and will not rejoin or be part of labour march .
iI will most proberly vote green at next general election .
Duncan Hendry
Moralism is never a good basis for politics. Throwing your dummy out because Jeremy was treated badly is the infantile politics of the play ground. Voting for the Greens is not the way to change things, which requires persistent work in the Labour party, not based upon cults of personality, but on building the rank and file base, and a struggle for democratic renewal.
At the same time, in terms of voters as against socialist activists, it seems inevitable that the Greens will pick up votes. They had a better position on Brexit than the other parties other than the position Labour nominally held in the referendum. That was setting out the reactionary nature of Brexit without giving any credence to the existing capitalist basis of the EU.
The Liberals have followed Labour into the opportunist and reactionary mire of accepting Brexit, despite it unravelling by the day, and being now supported by only a clear minority. The Greens can easily pick up votes from the Liberals, if they adopt a clear anti-Brexit position, and argue for rejoining at the earliest opportunity. They will also take votes from Labour on that basis too.
They will have a clear basis to take votes from Liberals and Labour in Metropolitan areas, but also from progressive Labour voters in the decaying urban towns (so called red wall), which will probably result in Labour losing large numbers of Council seats in those areas.
But socialists shouldn't base their politics on such short term considerations. The Greens are not going to be a progressive Workers Party. At the moment the route to that continues to run through the Labour Party.
The Greens are the new Liberals, in that they occupy the place for those who want to vote, want to register that they disapprove of the Tories, but don't want to be responsible for unleashing Labour on the country. After they have duly voted to install the Tories, they can then ease their consciences with the notion that if only we had PR then they could just vote for whomever they wanted. It's the fault of the electoral system, not them.
For an object lesson in how to vote, look at the voting in 2019. Brexiteers all went to The Brexit Party forcing the Tories to ditch May and turn into a solid Leave party, and then all switched to the Tories to give them a massive majority. That's the kind of class-solidarity and discipline lefties can only dream about.
What Labour needs to do is to become the Tories of the left; a coalition of views with a Leader who understands the need to give all the various parts a reason to stay inside the tent. But from my current half-way point in 'Left Out', Internal Labour Party politics is about doing the precise opposite, ie eliminating all those who disagree with your faction's comprehensive slate of policies. Labour is full of people who look to win every battle even if it means they lose the war.
@ Duncan Hendry - well, it is part of the job of a professional political not to be constantly outmanoeuvred. I'm reading Left Out, and frankly Jeremy has only himself to blame. He neither did the job of leader, nor did he properly delegate it. Hence he created a vacuum of leadership that resulted in a massive bout of blood-spilling rivalries.
"Returning to Ronald Inglehart's post-materialist thesis, he argued rising affluence in the post-war period fundamentally reoriented politics. High wages and improving living standards meant the concerns for security and the economistic tussles for better pay were getting displaced by quality-of-life issues, which variously manifested themselves in the counter-culture, the life politics of the so-called new social movements, and later the growth of environmentalist movements and green parties."
Goldthorpe et als "Affluent Worker Studies", in the 1960's, I think pretty much demolished that embourgeoisement theory. In the 1960's, the most affluent workers were car workers like those at Cowley, but there was no lack of class consciousness amongst them with their militant trades unionism and their solid backing for labour in elections.
@ Duncan Hendry "the way labour treated Jeremy was a disgrace "
To go on about this, on p198 of Left Out it describes 'Milne, Murphy and Fisher ... arguing over the meaning of what Corbyn said as he sat in silence'.
So, he neither had a policy he could clearly articulate, nor did he delegate to anyone the policy. He simply let all the factions fight it out amongst themselves.
That isn't Leadership.
I always thought Corbyn was a disaster for Labour, and as I read the book I haven't changed my mind, but oddly I am liking him more as a person. He was just the wrong person to be leader.
This space has been made for them by Corbyn, Starmer, and Davey.
The Liberal Democrats decided, by a large margin, that they'd rather go after disaffected centre-right Remain voters who dislike Johnson and Brexit, but whose fear and loathing of Corbyn made most of them vote Tory anyway in 2019. Though Davey is struggling to make headway, I believe this is politically speaking the right thing for them to have done, as the sort of people Moran wanted to appeal to will probably never forgive the LDs for the coalition. They are now the bedrock of the Greens.
Davey could thus advance in outer London, Eastleigh, and maybe the south-west, Starmer in the red wall and Wales, and the Greens in large cities and some of their suburbs; though I don't expect the Greens to do well in this electoral system, their gains will be at Labour's and particularly Starmer's expense.
Scotland I expect to solidify behind the seperatists, which is saddening but is the consequence of the Tories and Brexit; I expect little will change as Labour are associated with Better Together and the betrayal that Shameron carried out on Brown and Darling in '14 and '15.
Of course, the main factor in all the above is how well Johnson holds up! We need to know that before we can begin to guess at any other factor.
Sometimes, I do wonder if people do bother reading posts before jumping in to comment.
@ Phil
"Sometimes, I do wonder if people do bother reading posts before jumping in to comment."
generally no. A quick skim to see if there is likely to be anything interesting in those comprehensive and well articulated paragraphs, and then I just pile in against other commenters.
"Inglehart's tracking of value change across Western Europe and North America was certainly onto something, but he underestimated the strength of the labour movement in securing these benefits."
This is back to front. The strength of the labour movement was a function of the rising affluence, not rising affluence a consequence of a strong labour movement. To argue the other way around is to take the standpoint of subjective sociology as against scientific, materialist sociology. It is rising affluence as a consequence of a strengthening economy that reduces atomisation of workers, enhances a sense of strength, facilitates collective organisation and so on, which is also manifest in rising living standards.
That is the conclusion of Marx's analysis in which things like wages and living standards are not at all purely a consequence of subjective conditions such as whether workers feel like being more militant at this time rather than another, but are determined by objective economic laws and material conditions. Workers organisation in the 1890's and after, as in the 1950's and after strengthened because economic conditions in those periods improved, and brought rising affluence. For a tie, after those conditions ceased - 1920's and 1970's - workers militancy continued, but now increasingly failed to bring any rise in wages, and then turns into apathy and defeat.
As Trotsky put it,
"But a boom is a boom. It means a growing demand for goods, expanded production, shrinking unemployment, rising prices and the possibility of higher wages. And, in the given historical circumstances, the boom will not dampen but sharpen the revolutionary struggle of the working class. This flows from all of the foregoing...
the industrial revival is bound, first of all, to raise the self-confidence of the working class, undermined by failures and by the disunity in its own ranks; it is bound to fuse the working class together in the factories and plants and heighten the desire for unanimity in militant actions."
"That said, in the UK the relative weakness of the Greens has been thanks to the Labour Party fairly successfully scooping up these layers..."
As a Green, I really don't think this is true. The relative weakness of the Greens is almost entirely down to our electoral system. The most common response when out canvassing for the Greens is, "I'd love to vote for you, but I can't...".
I also find analysis of Labour's core a little simplistic. Surely the problem is that Labour has no easily defined core? It is a broad church with at least three distinct cores that sit awkwardly alongside each other.
Again, the logical conclusion to me is that if we don't want to consign ourselves to decades of Tory rule, electoral reform is needed so that the left-of-centre majority of British voters is actually represented in our politics and Government.
I also support the principle of democratic reform. The FTP system is democratically unsupportable. Its the equivalent of ballot rigging. However, betting the farm on it is fantasy, because it isn't going to happen. No party that wins a clear majority by FTP is going to voluntarily change the system, and undermine itself. No party thinking it may win the next election by FTP is going to vote for it. Its a pious wish.
The only way that PR would be introduced would be if a truly progressive social-democratic or better still socialist party was making leaps forward, on the back of a widespread social movement pushing it forward, meant that the existing bourgeois parties - Labour, Tories, Liberals et al - saw it as a challenge to capital, and so introduced PR to try to prevent it obtaining a working majority.
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