Left Wing Music

One article answers another

…why could a national party explicitly claiming to represent the working class not win and then retain the support or more of the working-class electorate than it did?….how was it… that so many who were neither wealthy nor privileged had been recruited to cause which was not their own?

W.G. Runciman gives some possible reasons:

Family tradition, residential milieu, local history, gender, religious denomination, age and work situation… loyalty to king and country… by no means all… [the] ‘working-class’ thought of themselves as such.

The assumption behind this list, and the previous quotation, is that the Labour Party was the authentic representative of the workers. To a degree true, no doubt; but is it all the truth:

Kingsley Martin…. Explained that he conceived his typical reader as a male civil servant in his forties… (Eric Hobsbawm on writing on jazz for the New Statesman)

A left wing newspaper, for civil servants. This sounds right and, I assume, reflects the influence of the Fabians on the formation of the Labour Party – Socialism transformed into a middle class career.

This is picked up later in Runciman’s article:

But the suspicion of socialism among working-class Labour supporters was pervasive and long-standing. Some of it was directed not against socialism as such so much as against middle-class intellectual socialists.

And the genuine insight:

But just as what united Conservative voters was not conservatism but hostility to socialism, so hostility to capitalism was what united Labour voters.

If he is correct, people often vote against a party rather than for it – because they are concerned with bigger enemies (big business, radical movements…etc). This suggests that talk about manifestos and particular policy options is beside the point – people are not going to vote for an issue but against some power they feel oppressive. That is, to be popular parties have to represent some coherent worldview, and it must choose its targets wisely. It has to appeal to resentment; and it must offer the hope of salvation.

With the decline of ideology within our main political parties, and their political convergence, where does this anger go? To fringe parties? On the whole they have not been successful in winning votes in Britain – something very important that needs to be explained (the First Past the Post voting system is only a very partial explanation).

No, the anger is directed at the political system itself – both parties are viewed, correctly, as handmaidens to Big Business and the Establishment. With no one to vote against (“because they’re all the same”) significant numbers no longer vote at all. Politics has become the enemy.

Yet the old adversaries are still around (Socialism has disappeared, but not so radical politics), though the distribution of power has changed substantially – a radical movement in Britain has no chance governing the country; while Big Business is the king of all. This is reflected in people’s attitudes: Socialism is an old ghost, replaced by multi-culturalism and immigration as the new icons of hate – a demand satisfied by the right wing press. We still dislike the bankers and corporations, but the electorate feels helpless – now that politics is denounced and despised.

What of the future? Chomsky draws some parallels with Weimar Germany, where ‘the centre did not hold’. That is one option. Another is the re-enchantment of politics, through the creation of new parties, and wholesale political change… the promise of Italy in the mid 90’s transformed into Britain’s milder political climate?

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