There is an urgent need for a new mass movement for people on the left
Dr Iain Maclennan is the new Left Unity contact for Portsmouth. He stood in the recent Eastleigh by-election for the NHA party – here he explains his decision to join with Left Unity
I was born and grew up in Portsmouth and have a home in Gosport, although my wife and I currently stay most of the time in Bursledon caring for a disabled family member. I worked as a doctor in the NHS and the Royal Navy for over 30 years, but retired from active medical practice in January 2013 to become more involved in political activism.
I was an active member of the Green Party from 2005 until 2013 and represented the Greens in Portsmouth North in the 2010 General Election. I was obliged to leave the Green Party in 2013 in order to contest the Eastleigh by-election for the National Health Action Party. For the last few years I have been heavily engaged in resisting the imposition of the Coalition Government’s Health and Social Care Act. My interests include enjoying the diversity of nature and people, promoting healthy and sustainable living, and campaigning for social justice.
There is an urgent need for a new mass movement for people on the left of the political spectrum. My recent experience in the Eastleigh by-election convinced me that it’s almost impossible to change people’s voting behaviour under the first-past-the-post electoral system. Tactical voting and the focus of the national media on the ‘main’ political parties reinforce a self-fulfilling prophecy that only the politics-as-usual parties are electable. But ordinary people have lost confidence in the majority of politics-as-usual MPs, and there is a growing realisation that Parliamentary democracy in its present form cannot deliver fair and justsolutions to this country’s economic, social and environmental problems, the burden of which is mainly borne by poor, working-class people.
Deeply ingrained, capitalism-conditioned stereotyping of ‘the left’ means that any party with the words ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ in its name will be anathema to most people in the UK, relegating it to the usual deposit-losing electoral camps of which I have become a regular inhabitant. Likewise, any party whose name suggests ‘single issue’ is unlikely to be able to command a leading role in change of the scale and urgency required. I think it will be very difficult to turn things around through business-as-usual, party-before-people politics. Forming a new party of the left is an essential first step, but don’t expect it to win
elections by conventional means. The electorate are becoming impervious to campaigning based on leafleting and canvassing. Social media are important but exclude large swathes of society. Realistically the only way to advance radical politics is through large-scale, non-violent direct action, e.g. occupations, major industrial action etc. Anger needs to replace apathy. Scenes reminiscent of the Miners’ Strike need to be hitting our news-screens every day. We need to be prepared to get hurt, get arrested, …even go to jail. The working class vastly outnumber the ruling class – the achievement of socialism should in theory be a walkover. But the challenge is mobilising and organising the ‘99%’, which does require the infrastructure and unifying identity of a political
party.
This is where Left Unity fits in. But the party must not be unity merely in name. Too many parties of the left fall victim to factional infighting and fragmentation – political dogma and personal agenda dwarfing the real issues that the parties should be campaigning on – all the time falling prey to the right’s divide and conquer tactics. Achieving mass consensus is difficult and there will always be matters of detail that individuals cannot agree on. But there are fundamental socialist principles that all reasonable people of the left should be able to unite behind. We must unite and mobilise at a scale and with an energy commensurate with the scale and urgency of the present crisis created by capitalism.
The Left Unity movement clearly has that as its goal, but it needs to go beyond what the Labour Party in the ‘Spirit of ‘45’ achieved. I believe capitalism cannot be reformed, as demonstrated by the gradual erosion of the massive and precipitous social gains of Attlee’s Labour administration, which have given way to the neoliberal betrayal of working class people by New Labour today. To use a medical analogy – as long as we entertain concessions to any vestige of capitalism, they will simply lurk like cancerous cells in the vital organs of society, only to once again multiply and ultimately consume it again.
Reformist remedies designed merely to suppress the malignant effects of capitalism cannot restore society to health – nothing less than radical surgery will do.
Best wishes,
Iain
15 comments
15 responses to “There is an urgent need for a new mass movement for people on the left”
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I think you have convinced me Ian, I’m in…
Iain says ” The electorate are becoming impervious to campaigning based on leafleting and canvassing. Social media are important but exclude large swathes of society. Realistically the only way to advance radical politics is through large-scale, non-violent direct action, e.g. occupations, major industrial action etc. Anger needs to replace apathy.”
However, I disagree with this, while allowing that direct action can form part of a strategy. The key to the disagreement is the issue of engagement with people. Direct Action only ‘involves’ those taking the action and is then communicated to ‘others’ via the media. And of course ‘the media’ will not be a friend. Direct Action is challenging the state, but not engaging people and without the people a challenge to the state (in isolation) will fail.
Iain talks about canvassing as business as usual. Ironically the main political parties have largely STOPPED canvassing. If you talk to people on the door what they say is “they do not see anyone anymore”. They feel alienated and distant from the main political parties. Direct Action seen from a distance with not close that gap.
What ‘newness’ is required is actual door-to-door and direct community engagement, addressing issues which are directly affecting people, in a language which is not drawn from ancient socialist terminology (which is not understood).
There is more, but I will stop here…………
Dave – I’m not saying that canvassing has no place in campaigning – only that, on the evidence of the Eastleigh by-election in particular, the traditional methods of community engagement by political parties are of little effectiveness in changing the way people vote – if they vote at all. The bad behaviour of career politicians in recent times has spoiled the democratic process for ALL parties. People say “you politicians are all the same – it doesn’t make any difference who gets in – you’re all in it for yourselves”. Furthermore, I believe Margaret ‘There’s no such thing as Society’ Thatcher succeeded in cultivating a strong ‘Englishman’s home is his castle’ attitude among many householders, whose increasingly hostile responses to doorstep and street canvassing suggests to me that politics is not something they’re particularly keen to engage with at a personal level any more. It’s not necessarily their fault; it’s the way they have become socialised by Thatcherism. This group of mainly working class people have voluntarily disenfranchised themselves. But your point about scary, ancient, socialist jargon is a very important one – to succeed the new movement of the left must be inclusive and accessible. But in present times elections are fought and won in the media, and the neoliberal parties of all hues predictably dominate the field because, like Premiere League football, you need a massive wad to compete on that gentrified turf. I’m sure Durham Miners’ popular ;-) political pundit Paolo would agree with this analysis! Of course, non-violent direct action is an alternative way of getting media attention, but – I strongly agree with you – we must try our utmost to avoid alienating the people we are striving to getter a better deal for.
Ian,
You are thinking of door-knocking as something that happens within an election campaign. While most political parties don’t door-knock, if you do (as in your campaign or indeed some TUSC campaigns) the response almost understandable that ‘they are all the same’. Because you are “just” coming round for a vote. In this sense the experience is that ‘you are the same’.
What is needed is that the movement calling (I would try to get away from the the term ‘party’), is actually interested in the people and has been calling door-to-door during the previous year, at least once, must better twice.
The conversation on the door, should include “I want to listen to you about your concerns”. We want to represent you, We are part of the community (and indeed you have to be, by being involved in community activities and concerns).
There should also be a strong emphasis that you are not someone who ‘follows the dictates of a party’, but someone who represents them.
This is turning politics on its head – it is ‘the people’ that matter, not ‘the party’. Hence the emphasis is needed to have a flow bottom up. This does not preclude policies but the policies are presented as a discussion with the people not something they are required to support by voting for you. Rather they vote for you as their representative.
Ian, there has been some of us in portsmouth who signed up and haave been trying to get involved and organise a meet-please get in touch.
regards
george
There should be an email link on the LU local groups page shortly. Please email me and I’ll get back to you soonest. Thanks. Iain
An excellent piece… I would add that Direct Action could include going door to door and speaking directly with people. Too much of modern politics is mediated, and as Dave said above, I can’t remember the last time a political representative actually came to speak, either with me directly, or in a local group setting… we need to reclaim public gathering as a good, social, discussive thing.
Excellent piece piece Ian.
There are some good points here, but I’m afraid a revolution is pretty unlikely in this country – at least, in the forseeable future. Any new party will have to be genuinely based in localities, not just parachuted in for an election, as
usually happens and prepared to take up local issues as well as national ones.
One massive opportunity, however, is that only a small proportion of the potential electorate actually vote for any winning party, especially at local elections. A lot aren’t even registered and a high proportion of those who are don’t normally vote. If even a minority of these abstainers can be persuaded that LU is really different from the others, politics could easily be turned on its head. Forget the squeezed middle, the squashed bottom are the ones we should be looking to!
What we can’t expect is any instant results, however much we’d like to see them…..
Mike from Nottingham
I want to congratulate colleagues on the friendly — but NOT liberal ( i.e. not smarmy and sucky ) — tone of these LU discussions, here and on other strands. Refreshing! We have a long road ahead; a good spirit (and even a bit of humour) can take us a long way.
I would just add one thing in the interests of NOT being exclusionary…nor of assuming that everybody here is familiar with ‘left speak’.
Not in reference to this strand, but a few writers do have a tendency to string together a long list of uncommon ‘lefty-type’ adjectives in very long and convoluted sentences. A common failing of academics and ex-academics, like me.
Your comment, “party before people politics” is spot on in terms of identifying the core problem underlying our broken political institutions. We need to promote a culture within politics is a service not a career. No more than two terms should be the norm for all elected politicians. For that reason LU should not be just another party it has to be about promoting and supporting a different way of doing “politics” and securing engagement. I’m not even convinced that it should be a party.
Excellent metaphor in the last two paragraphs. Completely agree.
Funny how so many people hate the word socialist, but happily partake of roads, libraries, and of course the good old NHS. Good luck, we need a new system we have government by lobby group at present, so I totally agree. The urgency with which we need to deal with global issues of climate change, hunger, disease, and depletion of resources make the present global arrangement of governance unacceptable. Capitalism is failing too many people.
from dave hill
April 9, 2013 at 8:58 pm
Great to see Left Unity getting off the ground in Brighton…
Good to see the involvement in the Sussex University anti-privatisation campaign .. a beacon of hope…(I was there on the demo, as indeed on the 2010 demos against sackings/ dismissals (I’m a former MA student at Sussex Uni, and a former Governor of the University)
I’ve been involved in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition (TUSC) (as their parliamentary candidate in Brighton Kemptown) and, before Blair neoliberalised the Labour Party, turning it into another Conservative/ pro-privatisation, imperialist party, stood for Labour as Parliemantary candidate in Brighton Pavilion…
Now? I’m a member of Socialist Resistance, a small, internally democratic and pluralist Marxist party… but I’ve spent many years, as I guess, have many on the Left Unity lists, trying to bring sections , members, parties of the socialist and Marxist left together with trade unions and organised workers- and indeed, with less vertically organised groups such as UKUncit, the Occupy and tentCity movements.
I think we have to move beyond TUSC, which is not as open to newcomers and individual membership and the adhesion of various socialist / marxist groups as it should be… it is, however, important in the upcoming discussions about the way forwards, for Left Unity to seek a democratic and open and transparent relationship with parties and members of parties such as the SWP and the SP, and to develop a relationship with radical trade unions and their members… as well as broadening to include, as I say above, less vertically/ hierarchically organised groups and movements
actually, in Brighton the Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition was and is a good model in its heyday of 2009-2011 (it still exists and functions, but, for the current period, some oomph has gone out of it… it’ll come back!… ) A couple of features are that it is inclusive and not dominarted by any one group, and, secondly, it was/ is wide-ranging- at one time around 50 groups/ associations/ organisations were affiliated
In Solidarity and Hope for a Left Unity socialist party opposing all the neoliberal parties, and seeking to work for a socialist future…
Dave Hill
Research Professor of Education at Anglia Ruskin University
Activist in Socialist Resistance and in the Trade Unionist and Socialist Coalition. Former regional Chair of NATFHE (HE) the lecturers’ union (now UCU)
Brilliant to see Left Unity starting up in Portsmouth. Having been fully involved in the Socialist Alliance, Respect and as a supporter of the ISN in TUSC I have long sought to work with socialists in this city to try an build a left party involving both revolutionaries such as myself and non-revolutionary socialists. I am also a member of the ACI and in terms of existing left groups I am closest to Socialist Resistance. Look forward to a left unity meeting being organised in the city.