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As we watch the world’s largest democracy slide into autocracy before our very eyes, we must be under no illusion: the same thing could happen here.
“We are coming for Labour” threatened Farage as he took his Clacton seat. That threat is growing increasingly real. Hope not Hate’s recent polling shows that Reform UK could take between 76 and 169 seats at the next election, the vast majority of them from Labour. Other polling suggests an even worse picture for Keir Starmer’s party.
The electoral soil is fertile and not just in natural Reform heartlands. The British version of the Trump/Musk playbook is in full swing. From MEGA (“Make England Great Again”) merch flooding eBay and Amazon to the shameless exploitation of national tragedies like Southport, the far right is keeping its base fired up. Farage may have shed his UKIP skin, but as this paper recently reported, he has been photographed with racist thugs, including those who post Nazi insignia online.
Reform’s tanks are well and truly on Labour’s front garden and if it doesn’t act soon then Farage, or another far-right leader, could well be wiping their feet on its entrance mat.
Across the UK grassroots networks are forming to counter the rise of the far-right. Groups that have worked for many years to fight racism on the ground are connecting with others like never before. Democracy groups that had previously focused on the details of democratic reform are now pivoting to the anti-fascist cause.
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But that on its own will not be enough. Labour needs to act and to pivot too. As the American led order collapses and the vultures of the far right circle, there is a rare opening for Starmer’s Labour to both see off Reform’s tanks and revive its flailing popularity. If it doesn’t, a majority won on the basis of the second lowest turnout since universal suffrage began in 1928 could crumble to dust in the face of the populist’s roar. What is missing is a strategy that meets our psychological needs alongside our material ones.
The strategy of economic ‘deliverism’ that made sense while there was still the belief that Biden’s economic record would translate into votes, has been laid bare. No matter how big a rabbit Reeves is able to pull out of her vanishingly small fiscal hat it will not be enough to counter the populist tide of lies and disinformation. And increasing the stake by throwing a third runway and some new nuclear power stations onto the table is unlikely to shift the odds.
With Labour’s back against the wall, it is difficult to make suggestions. In a landscape where 80% of established media ownership is in right wing hands and the misogynistic attacks on Reeves grow stronger every day, saying anything that could feed the tsunami of vitriol is often seen as an attack. Many of us who work at arm’s length and want Labour to succeed know this and so keep quiet. So too do many MPs.
But the risk is now too great.
Labour needs to learn from those it rightly fears. It needs to engage us emotionally with a vision of where we are headed and who we are. What’s more, unlike growth, visions can’t be pinned down to metrics. They make more effective poles upon which to pin one’s electoral fortunes.
We need to understand what’s on offer if we ride with Reeves through today’s tough times. We need to believe that things can really get better.
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Voters know (or believe they know) what Trump stands for and they similarly ‘know’ what Farage stands for. But do they still know what Labour stands for? Do they know what it cares about? The public used to know. Labour stood for the worker, for the elderly, the infirm, the single parent, the next generation, the oppressed. Labour was the party who cared. And it cared in a muscular way. It championed our rights. It stood shoulder to shoulder with workers on picket lines; with those who fought racism and it opposed the performative cruelty of austerity.
But crazily voters are now seeing a Government that appears to put financial stringency ahead of the warmth of the elderly, or the (contestable) needs of the economy ahead of the climate emergency. In terms of messaging, Labour has scored own goal after own goal irrespective of where you get your news from. And its one-word prioritisation of ‘growth’ has boxed it into a corner from which it will be increasingly difficult to emerge victorious from.
We know from the Democrat’s catastrophic failure that good economic policies won’t translate into votes unless they’re also translated into felt experience. What people feel matters often more than what they know to be true. As the authors of the seminal essay, ‘The Death of Deliverables’ point out, ‘Delivering for people on economic issues is an important goal in itself, but it is not an antivenom for the snakebite of authoritarianism.’ .
By failing to clearly articulate a vision of where we are hoping to get to, Labour has left a dangerous gap. Into that opening the far-right are pouring toxic populism; capturing the narrative, belittling the language of caring, compassion and empathy; dismissing hard-won human rights as “woke”, and normalising lying and election interference. This cannot be allowed to continue unchallenged.
As humans, our survival depends upon being seen, mirrored and heard. We are programmed to seek a sense of belonging and to be valued for our own protection. In evolutionary terms, to be isolated and powerless is to face extinction. Forty-six years of rampant neo-liberalism have hollowed out the values, structures and communities which once held us and which lay at the heart of the post-war settlement.
As a result, our basic psychological needs have increasingly gone unmet. We are lonelier than ever and powerless in the face of global forces we can’t hope to control. It is in the context of that emotional hunger, coupled with material deprivation and uncertainty, that the far right’s narrative, fertilised by Brexit and the tech bros has taken such a hold.
However grotesque, Trump and Farage are pied pipers promising their followers a land of milk and honey. If you’re hungry, tired and forgotten what’s not to like about that.
The left’s answer must not be to feed the flames by shimmying nearer the fire with, for example, grotesque footage of terrified migrants being swooped upon. Normalising policies that should have no place in a mature and humane democracy just makes the far right’s work easier for them.
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What’s needed is a real alternative: the values that lie at the heart of the labour movement. They remind us of who we really are as humans. That is where the anti-venom is to be found, hiding in plain sight.
We are not the successors to Mosley’s black shirts, we are the citizens who risked everything during the pandemic, opened our homes to the Ukrainians, acted in our thousands to quell the summer riots after the horrors of Southport. Our narrative has been stolen and co-opted and Labour must help us wrest it back.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast not just in business but also in politics and Labour needs to draw from its deep well of culture and history from the Glasgow rent strikes of the First World War and on to the birth of the NHS.
Labour needs to remind us who we are as a nation. As Marshall Ganz wrote, ‘Movements have narratives. They tell stories, because they are not just about rearranging economics and politics. They also rearrange meaning.”
As the USA abandons its leadership role, Labour has a chance to step up. Now is the time for it to pick a path of heroism. To lead on climate and global collaboration. To unite us against the forces of hate and oppression. We need Labour to both inspire us and remind us that it cares. Show us that the path to greatness doesn’t lie in a mythical nostalgia but in courageous and moral leadership.
Labour blew its honeymoon by focusing on dowsing our post-election euphoric hopes with bleak fiscal warnings. But, there’s still plenty of time to rekindle its relationship with voters.
Voters need to feel heard, seen and cared for. They need to hear Labour say: ‘we’ve got you’. And if it doesn’t offer that warm embrace, there are others who will.