Bronterre News

POOR LABOUR’s problem is that there’s hardly anyone left to vote for it. Partly because too many people have become too prosperous.

  Modest houses once occupied by solid phalanxes of Labour voters now have front gardens concreted over to provide parking plots for two BMWs and are occupied by new Tory voters who now call settees sofas and serviettes napkins.

  Fatten up someone’s pay-packet sufficiently, charm often enough these new-rich with the plausible half-truths and articulacy of Oxford-graduated (not necessarily educated) old Etonian Tory MPs and Central Office speechwriters and they’re yours.

  Thus, once-upon-a-time traditionally Labour voters go the way so many British people yearn to go – up the social-climbers’ ladder and into the arms of the nice Conservative community, a natural part of the journey, as they see it, to the higher social status they crave.

  Labour from now on they see as a refuge for the dispossessed (which they no longer are), for the more or less disreputable and for the frankly unrespectable. They’ve arrived: why would they want ever again to rub shoulders with a band of no-hopers on zero-hours contracts with clapped-out cars and claiming all the state benefits they can get their grasping little mits on?

  There aren’t enough voters who will always vote Labour. Broadly, what’s left are the altruist intellectuals, old-school trade-unionists, a sprinkling of idealists, a few unshakeable lifetime party supporters and Labour members who will vote for the party provided it’s their faction that’s in the ascendancy and may not if it isn’t.

WAKING THE PRONE 50 PER CENT

WHICH LEAVES Labour with two main plausible and, potentially, complementary routes to election victory. One – the harder, the most ambitious and, almost certainly, the longer term  – is to galvanise and win over the roughly 50 per cent of the electorate who don’t vote. This is the huge untapped resource of any party, but particularly of Labour who, despite everything, still genuinely care more about their fellow citizens than do the right-wing.

  This is relevant, because quite a lot of non-voters are people who are considerably depressed, and poverty-stricken, as a result of long-term, probably inherited, economic exploitation allied of course with educational and social disadvantage. To help this downtrodden grouping into political awareness, never mind a hoped-for socialist orientation, would demand nothing less than a thoroughgoing mental and psychological rerouting.

  In the 1820s and 1830s, Chartists were confronted by much deeper and more widespread deprivation, but by a similar perceived split between classes. The big difference, and the terrible irony, is that the right to vote for which Chartists fought, and faced persecution, even imprisonment, is tossed aside by today’s non-voting poor.

  When the 1832 Reform Act failed to extend the vote beyond property-owners, the prolonged shout of protest was that the working class had been betrayed by the middle class, a grievance confirmed by the Poor Law Amendment of 1834, which had the effect of forcing destitute people into workhouses.

  In the run-up to the 1997 general election, and with Blairism appearing unstoppable, the later de facto deputy prime minister, John ‘Two Jags’ Prescott, rashly declared: “We are all middle class now.” For a brief, euphoric moment, it may well have looked that way. But we weren’t. It’s true, however, that there are now enough people who do indeed no longer see themselves as working class as to make the election of a Labour government enormously problematic. 

BREAKING FREE FROM THE SOFA

THE CHARTISTS would be astounded to see today’s successors of 19th century workers superglued to sofas in front of wide-screen television-sets (yes, the word has caught on even with people who are hard up). But their wonderment might turn to rage when they discovered that such apparent trappings of wealth so often occluded existences of near-pennilessness, hungry children, hungry parents, ill-heated, degraded homes and dependence on middle class neighbours continuing to drop cheap pasta and packets of rubbery sliced bread into food-bank baskets at supermarkets.

  Ultimately, the political awakening and firing-up of people who choose not to vote is a tantalising prospect for any party. But it’s not just a simple matter of declaring, perhaps patronisingly, that people who feel cynically about politicians, who are actually downtrodden and forgotten and, in some fundamental way, feel disenfranchised, just need to be electrified.

  The scales need to fall from our eyes. Political parties must urgently admit to themselves, and to the rest of us, the scandal that is the dire and long-term absence of anything approaching adequate political education in schools, the baleful results of which are a widespread lack of awareness of the everyday importance of politics with democracy at its heart, and a consequential insufficiency of political engagement. 

  See to it that, for schoolchildren, politics are kept firmly in the shadows and you ensure that a sizeable chunk of the population will spend perhaps a lifetime alienated from the democratic process, or, as likely, become putty in the hands of an overwhelmingly right-wing media. 

  But for some it’s different. Children of the rich have the huge advantage of so often going to schools where political debate is the norm, albeit perhaps within an assumed rightist establishment bias. Beyond, there’s the prospect for the privileged of PPE at Oxford.

  A parallel part of this imposed political ignorance is keeping the voting age at 18. It should be lowered to 16; people at that age are absolutely mature enough to decide who represents them. But of course opponents of this reform may well be thinking that 16-year-olds are very unlikely to be readers of the Daily Mail or The Sun, and thus beyond the reach of swathes of right-wing propaganda.

  The most immediate necessity, however, is for Labour to throw itself into campaigning for proportional representation, a crusade activated in conjunction with other progressive parties and as part of a formal alliance with those parties, a pact which will have at its masthead a stridently green agenda carrying with it, for one thing, the promise of many new jobs with sustainability at their core.

  Labour’s biggest hurdle, though, is far more fundamental. It must discard once and for all its self-image as the party with all the answers, it must move away, once and for all, from its fascination with navel-gazing interfactional debate and the disabling party splits this dominance gives rise to. This, essentially, is the one thing that, if not disposed of, will ensure perhaps endless defeat at the polls.