Like its far-left cousins, Left Unity will fail at the ballot box
Is there anything more egotistical than starting your own political party? Only founding your own religion, with you as the deity, beats it. From Oswald Mosley to George Galloway, from David Owen to Robert Kilroy-Silk, those politicians who have started parties have planet-sized egos. And like the New party, Respect, Veritas or the Social Democratic party, a new party may briefly sparkle, but inevitably will gutter and snuff itself out.
Filmmaker Ken Loach is the latest egotist to take the trip. In early 2013 he co-signed a letter in the Guardian calling for a new political party to take on austerity and defeat capitalism. Within a few months the new party, Left Unity, was claiming 9,000 members and 100 local branches. On 30 November it will have its official launch with celebrity supporters including ‘Trigger’ from Only Fools and Horses, and the guy who wrote We’re Going on a Bear Hunt.
There has even been breathless talk of Left Unity representing the start of a ‘UKIP of the left’. So what is Left Unity, and how likely is it to succeed as a lasting political force? Left Unity is not the latest spawn of splits among Trotskyists. Trotskyism, famously parodied by Monty Python in Life of Brian, relies on constant splits, purges, expulsions and denunciations in pursuit of ideological purity. Left Unity may contain refugees from the Comrade Delta turmoil inside the Socialist Workers’ party, but it is not a Trot faction.
Nor is it the plaything of the unions. Arthur Scargill flounced out of the Labour party in 1995 after Tony Blair’s reworking of Clause IV to found the Socialist Labour party. It secured three per cent in the seats it fought in 2010, and every one of its candidates lost their deposits. The Trade Union and Socialist Coalition brought together candidates from the trade unions, the Socialist party (formerly known as Militant), the Communist party, and others to fight the 2010 election. Its parliamentary candidates secured an average of 371 votes, or one per cent.
Instead, Left Unity is the creation of trendy lefties, with little practical electoral experience or working-class credentials. Its leading lights, as well as the Oxford-educated grammar-school boy Loach, include academics, actors and the general secretary of that epitome of middle-class leftism, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. For example, its leader in Brighton is professor of poetics at the University of Sussex and author of a book about Marx and poetry. In Cambridge the coordinator is a former Green party agent. In other parts of the country, the local coordinators are drawn from the fragments of the far-left. This is the party for leftish readers of the Guardian, not horny-handed readers of the Mirror.
Despite the obvious failure of leftwing, anti-austerity candidates in the depths of the crash in 2010, Left Unity intends to stand candidates on a leftwing anti-austerity platform in 2015. Its policies might be summed up as 1945-style socialism (near-identical to Scargill’s outfit; so much for ‘unity’ on the left). You might wonder how popular a return to the state owning the commanding heights of the economy might be. The evidence, from the 1960s onwards, is that the party offering more state control is usually destroyed at the polls. The animating idea of Left Unity – that the masses become radicalised in a financial crash – is demonstrably false. Elections from Germany to Australia make the point. Die Linke, the German left party much admired by Left Unity, lost 12 of its 76 seats in the Bundestag in September’s election.
And what about Left Unity’s 9,000 new supporters? On 28 September just 70 of them turned up to a conference in Manchester to discuss the new party. Whatever idealism drove them to attend was soon dissipated by endless sessions on the Left Unity constitution. Whether to be a federation or have one member one vote, whether to organise in Northern Ireland, the role of black sections, whether unions should be allowed a block vote, quotas for women: the 70 comrades from Left Unity managed to cover ground in a single day it has taken the Labour party 30 years to debate. Needless to add, none of these scintillating issues was resolved.
It is always difficult to make predictions in politics, but here are a few: Left Unity will remain a tiny, irrelevant rump. Many of those drawn to its cocktail of simplistic slogans and celebrities will fall away when the dreary realities of life on the hard left become clearer. Its candidates will fail to win support at the 2015 election. None of them will save their deposits. More people bought Royal Mail shares than vote for the far-left. Left Unity will then descend into the traditional far-left post-election ritual of blame, denunciation and walk-outs.
Loach is 77. His prize-winning films, from the 1960s onwards, have raised important issues such as homelessness and poverty, or brought the civil wars in Ireland and Spain to the big screen. He rightly has a place in the pantheon of social-realist filmmakers. Loach’s contribution to cinema will be his legacy. A misguided and doomed attempt to break the mould of politics will not.
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Coming from a rightwing Labour groupscule who organise within the party, have (cough) “Readers’ Meetings” and whose lack of democracy is legendary even amongst fellow centre-right groups, this is all a bit rich – “Hello Mr Kettle, Ms Pot here”. Nor are the centre-right innocent of constant splits, purges, expulsions and denunciations in pursuit of ideological purity. Any perusal of any recent Labour front bench biography in the last 10 years reads like a political thriller of the previous century – alliances, stabbings in the back and suchlike.
*Of course* Left Unity is destined to fail, just as the Socialist Labour Party before it, just as the Socialist Alliance (and Socialist Alliance Democracy Platform), just as NO2EU and a variety of left tendencies and initiatives have all failed. Progress have a point about the pursuit of ideological purity – a few individuals will attempt to win round the entire group to their own peculiar analyses of current issues – but again, that’s not something that is entirely unknown on the centre right, where privatisation of NHS services, unwinnable wars and a variety of other ideological abberations have been pursued in the teeth of contrary evidence and popular support. These individuals – left or right – will split away rather than subsume their differences – and then slag off their former comrades. Plus ca change.
It seems that Left Unity’s main offence is to be middle class, given the amount of criticism thrown their way for their bourgeois origins, academic/grammar school backgrounds, or (gasp) membership of CND – still, makes a change from actually challenging them ideologically, doesn’t it, Progress-types?
I’m still wondering where you get the assumption that “..the party offering more state control is usually destroyed at the polls” Hmmm, I must have dreamed Labour governments in 1964-66, and in the 1970s.
Oh, I thought the crime was to be anti-austerity. And there I was, assuming that Labour opposed austerity policies as not only ineffective in returning to growth but also immoral in turning another screw of inequality. Come on, does the Progress Party support austerity policies or not?
Overall tone here – protesting too much!
If Left Unity is so irrelevant, why bother writing about it? Perhaps because the prospect of a successful party to the left of Labour is the only thing that can undo the decades of damage Progress has done to the Labour Party, the only pull of influence to counterbalance the rightwards shift of politics. Voters deserve a choice. A choice that has been denied them by the acquiescence of Labour to Tory values. Founding a political party to give people a choice is not vanity, it is democracy.
Why not come along to our conference on the 30th November and talk to the real people who are involved and test out whether all your lazy stereotypical labels are correct or not. Does Progress organise any activists or conferences or actually do anything that defends working people? Haven’t seen you on any Bedroom tax protests or on any demonstrations against austerity. Oh but i forgot you actually support austerity in some form…I also find your ageist jibe at Ken Loach at the end particularly distasteful. Since when do we start putting politicians’ ages routinely in brackets next to their names.
brighton left unity is run by a number of people not a leader and the poet you are talking about isnt one of them. I am and i am a cleaner. please edit that part because it is false.
You Blairites need to learn to know your place… in the Conservative Party!
My first response is ‘Blairite apparatchik eejits’. A more measured response is – destined to fail? Maybe. The record of left alternatives to Labour isn’t great but…you have to start somewhere and you have to start with what forces/resources are willing and available. Yes…..Left Unity may be made up in some places of fragments of the revolutionary left. It may have Greens. It may even have professors of poetics and even a film director. But what is important is what it aims to be; and that is a party representing, what I believe is, a constituency in UK politics without a voice. The peopke who want to stop NHS privatisation, the bedroom tax, benefit cuts etc etc. Every Thursday night I watch half the audience cheer the left of Labour representative on Question Time, at work in a hospital I talk with colleagues and patients who bemoan this period of cuts and privatisation. I never have a chat with anyone who thinks a retrenchment of Blairism is a good idea. Now….turning popular resentment at current austerity policies into a coherent left of Labour organisation is a very difficult task as the author states. Left Unity will be a long term project perhaps without any immediate glittering electoral prizes: but the narrowing of political choices that the main parties offer leaves an opportunity open for our organisation. As a film director asked in May…..”if I want to save the NHS who is it I can vote for?” Left Unity hopes to ultimately offer an answer to that and many other questions.
Er, I’m a member of the Labour Party, and *I* want to stop NHS privatisation, the bedroom tax, benefit cuts – do I not count? Is this the sole province of Left Unity ? Infact, I’d hazard a guess that the vast majority of Labour Party members, outside of rightwing groupscules like Progress, want to stop NHS privatisation, and benefit cuts.
Left Unity do nothing other than make a lot of noise – I see no Left Unity work in the local community – I do see people solely using Left Unity to recruit people to their own peculiar tendencies within the movement. Do you HONESTLY think you have a shadow of a chance of winning a single seat and not splitting the vote of Labour Party candidates ?