While siren voices from both Labour’s revanchist left and atavistic right might seek to find a ‘message’ in the heavy defeat inflicted by George Galloway last week, his victory was an old, familiar and depressing tale with very little to teach the Left about anything.

In 2007, the world experienced the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression. It can escape no-one’s notice that less than a decade after that first financial catastrophe, the far right and far left had spread over Europe. In times of poverty and austerity, scared people turn to extremist politics offering superficially ‘easy’ solutions. Susan Sontag once described Communism as ‘the most successful variant of Fascism, Fascism with a human face’, and Respect is simply the most electorally successful variant of British fascism. While some might flinch at that description of Respect, imagine for a moment the labels that would be applied to a party which told voters that ‘GOD knows who is a Christian and who is not’, and warned its voters that they would have to defend the decision not to vote for its candidate in the life to come? Those are the tactics that were deployed by Respect in Bradford West, tactics that come straight from the playbook of the far right.

The first election with which I was ever intimately involved – where I took the entire of polling day off, where I helped print leaflets and contact sheets, where I almost felt I knew the area as well as my own – was a narrow and painful by-election defeat in Shadwell to Respect. Then, as now, the politics of fear and division were ever-present in Respect’s playbook: voters were told they had blood on their hands if they voted for the Labour candidate. The skin colour of the community that Respect seeks to exploit may be different, but their impact on community relations – voters turn to Respect as much out of fear as loyalty – is just as pernicious and damaging as that of the British National Party.

While there is a temptation for politicos and pundits to declare the unexpected significant – if nothing else to mask the embarrassment from not having seen it coming – there is very little for anyone to learn from defeat to a fascist party in a recessional season.

Labour didn’t lose in Bradford West because it was too left-wing or too right-wing. It lost to a toxic combination of far-left rhetoric and far-right tactics, which will always find fertile ground in areas of economic deprivation and social discord. What it does offer is a series of reminders.

The first is that, all too often, Labour turns a blind eye to the politics of hatred when they are cloaked in the language of socialism. Bigotry is bigotry even when the person expressing it uses the word ‘comrade’.

The second, more importantly, is the dangerous consequences of economic and social alienation upon our politics. Only if people are given better life prospects, improved services, and a fair chance will the seductive promises of extremist politicians be seen for what they are.

While the politics of austerity are in no way the right medicine for the disenchanted communities in which the likes of Galloway do their work, Bradford West’s social ills didn’t spring into being when Cameron and Clegg stood together in the Rose Garden; a free-spending big state also failed to remedy Bradford’s ills. Galloway’s victory is a reminder of the challenges the next Labour government will face, not just in its Tory inheritance, but from its own unfinished business.

Stephen Bush is a member of Progress, works as a copywriter, and writes at adangerousnotion.wordpress.com

Photo: Tom Green