EDITORIAL: If the tide goes out.
| Author | Stafford, James |
Regardless of the outcome of the election on 12 December, there can be no turning back the clock on Labour's transformation into a party of thoroughgoing economic radicalism.
British politics today is simultaneously concerned with everything at once and nothing at all. Under Boris Johnson, branches of government contradicted one another--and themselves--with giddy abandon. For the latest clique in charge of the Conservative Party, shame and consistency are equally off-limits. The basic institutions of our society--schools, hospitals, housing, benefits, high streets--are visibly crumbling. The performative cruelty of the Home Office and the Department for Work and Pensions grinds on. As many of the contributors to our present issue remind us, burnout and alienation are stalking Britain's workplaces--including in the public sector. The urgently necessary street protests of Extinction Rebellion are ignored and shut down, as a country that should be redesigning its energy systems is endlessly told that tightening its borders is the more important priority. Austerity has continued on autopilot, as a deadlocked Parliament has agonised over Brexit.
For a few months after the 2017 election, the pervasive sense of inertia and gloom enabled the Labour Party to kid itself that it was on the brink of a 1997 moment: a dramatic electoral breakthrough, for which the ground was carefully laid in a plethora of policy reports and consultation exercises. The fall of May, the rise of the Brexit Party, the Liberal Democrat surge and the coming of Johnson have destroyed that unearned sense of inevitability. Labour went into the election campaign with a radical and transformative policy platform, but with dismally low poll ratings.
As Tom Barker recently observed on our blog, contemporary politics are 'weightless'. (1) Countless significant and disturbing things seem to happen daily, yet little really changes. There is no way of knowing where and when we might touch down. The auguries certainly were not good for Labour at the outset of the election campaign; but Johnson's apparent strength was also brittle; all that looked certain was the fact that it would be one of the nastiest elections in British history. Instead of falling into despair, confusion and resentment, however, the darkness and volatility of our present moment should inspire us to reflect more deeply on our ambitions and our principles. We write without knowing the outcome of the election. But whatever happens, there can be no turning back the clock on Labour's transformation into a party of thoroughgoing economic radicalism.
A parliamentary majority for Johnson and Cummings, combined with the hard Brexit that Johnson has won from Brussels, would provide the perfect conditions for making Britain into a wholly-owned subsidiary of US monopoly capital. That's why Labour has to beat them at the polls. But it's also why the party can't abandon its recent radicalism. If a rebooted Tory Party triumphs...
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