‘A Government That Crushes Dissent and Eliminates Hope Will Never Prosper’

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Apparently if you’re awful enough to cut the legs off one side of a spider then it walks round in circles. It’s this image that sticks in my mind as a tiny faction of the Labour right looks to sever the link to anything that can discernibly be called left wing in the party.

The latest manifestation of this operation to separate Labour from the left was the recent suspension of the whip from five MPs, four for voting against the Government and then Diana Abbot for refusing to back down on comments she made about the structure of racism.  All this on the anniversary of seven MPs being suspended just after the election for voting against two child benefit cap and now chiming with the launch of a new left party.  

Pundits and commentators have tried to make sense of this oddly timed and weirdly focussed act of looking tough.  Why these four and not the actual effective ringleaders of the disabled benefits revolt?  And why respond to that revolt by agreeing to change the legislation and say you’ll begin to listen to backbenchers, but then arbitrarily begin summary expulsions?

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Clearly an internal row has been raging inside Number Ten, and the crackdown kings have won. With tough votes coming up in the autumn on issues like special needs in education, the two-child benefit cap and the budget itself, markers are being put down. In anticipation of further revolts, the leadership are attempting to show that they can and will crush dissent.

But this isn’t just some flash in the pan internal squabble in one political party.  It’s a fundamental insight into the very substance and style of UK politics. 

Machiavelli wrote that the successful Prince, by which he meant leader, must be both feared and loved. Labour strategists, in the total absence of any love, have doubled down on fear.  It’s a brutal and crude form of politics.  But they’re not alone.  It echoes the Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings approach to Brexit dissent within the ranks of the Conservative party when scores of MPs had the whip withdrawn in the run up to the 2019 election.  It broke the Conservatives as a broadly based party of the centre right and ended four years later in them receiving their lowest share of the popular vote since 1832.

But further echoes of this approach could be found even among those who have left the party, as the build-up to Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana’s fledgling left-wing party saw dissenters simply deleted from WhatsApp groups. The urge to impose and not negotiate outcomes is not a question of being left or right, indeed an old anarchist slogan claims that ‘inside every socialist, there is a policeman waiting to come out’. 

As such the internal discipline and intolerance to difference, is part and parcel of the mood to crush external opposition. Witness the absurd and frightening designation of Palestine Action as a terrorist organisation. There is an enemy within and without and in the framing of Stuart Hall the crisis is something to be policed not solved. In cinematic terms think of modern political leadership as more Reservoirs Dogs when they turn their guns on each other than Field of Dreams – build it and they will come.

Two big things are going on here.  The first is that the more the party system fragments, the greater control people in those parties try to exert, such that fragmentation in the country goes hand in hand with hyper factionalism within the parties. Labour is now suffering from unprecedented levels of the narrowest kind of factional dominance.  But the increasingly bitter fight in the Greens for leadership control in that party and the fact that all progressive parties now more rigidly sanction members who look to work across tribal lines to defeat the right, demonstrates a broader trend of discipline over dialogue. 

The second is that as it stands, our broken democracy cannot perform its primary function, to represent the will of the people.  Just last week we saw the refusal of the Government to countenance a wealth tax, to bring water into public ownership, or to take meaningful steps to protect the people of Gaza. Instead of pragmatically rebuilding our democratic and economic systems, the Government looks to crack down on any and all who want outcomes that are just and humane.

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Eventually the only people who will benefit from the politics of intimidation are those who are opposed to democracy and want an authoritarian future.  It’s little wonder that more and more of the public are simply not voting or prepare to roll the dice and try a strong man who tells them who to follow and who to hate. 

As the left academic Jeremy Gilbert writes in a new book called The Starmer Symptom Labour’s unpopularity is based on the fact that “there simply is no possible project available to a British government that does not involve either allowing life to get worse for a majority of Britons or making a genuine challenge to the privileges of certain powerful social groups”.

Early in Labour’s rule Wes Streeting pronounced that “no hope was better than false hope”.  It was dismissed as a jokey throwaway line, but it’s become the motif for a Government whose modest goal isn’t pragmatic realism but the crushing of any and all hope.

Thankfully the human spirit is made of sterner stuff. Hope can never be fully crushed.  It springs up every Saturday as people march to end the horror in Gaza and it could be viewed on the back benches of the parliamentary Labour Party who refused to vote to make the lives disabled people even worse than they are.  Hope is in every community and every space where human beings treat each other with dignity and respect and do their bit to build a future in which all humanity can survive and thrive. The flame can flicker, but if we never give up, they can never win.