The Alternative Election 2019: It's the morning after, again

The country didn't suddenly becomes heartless overnight. Sorry, I should rephrase that. I don't believe that Britain is (enitrely) a place of selfish, intolerant, poor-bashing Tories. And, really, the statistics agree with me on that.

More people voted for progressive ideas (Labour-Lib Dems-Greens) than voted for the conservative ideas (Tories-BXP), both in the UK as a whole and more narrowly in England. And I'm inclined to believe that the conservative vote was artificially inflated by Brexit, the divisive issue of the day.

For those who see "Getting Brexit Done" as the main issue, it is not a simple matter to write them off as secret Tories voting for privatisation. I'm sure many of them want to save the NHS. I'm sure many of them care about the least well off.

But are electoral system is flawed and our institutions painfully rigged up for hostility to radical progressive change. And last night, that resulted in Boris winning 50 more seats and a majority with an increase in support of just 1%.

More damaging for progressives was that Labour lost 8% of their vote compared to 2017, which spread out across the other parties. Conservative gains where less impactful than - or perhaps rather depended upon - Labour losing votes to other parties.

The stats present a picture of progressives playing the electoral game less well than the Conservatives.

Part of that, but only a part, was Brexit. The Conservatives identified themselves clearly with one polarised side of the debate and got their message through. Labour hedged bets.

But the reasons people voted for Brexit were more complicated than people perhaps like to admit - and Brexit supporters, even in the North, were more middle class than people like to admit.

Sure, former industrial towns in the North voted for Brexit, and then for the Tories yesterday. Yet, as Anoosh Chakelian of the New Statesman wrote, it's a long time now since these places were industrial. I'll be keeping an eye out for a demographic analysis of Tory voters in the North.

However, none of this will be terribly reassuring for those who wake up to the terror of a five year Tory majority.

Those people are on my mind this morning. I think those people were on George Monbiot's mind too when he put together a thread of what we can do next - stressing that community action becomes imperative now, to protect as many people as we can.

And that, I think, feeds how progressives fight back politically.

 Something has to change to make the outcome different next time. I think Monbiot is right, we need to start in our communities. And I think Chakelian is right, too: Labour's problems in the North didn't start with Corbyn and won't end there.

People are terrified by their declining living standards. Others are helpless, their living standards having hit rock bottom with food banks and mounting debts. We need to start organising help for those most in need and maybe find there, or build there, a sense of optimism with which to appeal to the 'squeezed middle', to bring them back into a progressive coalition.

For that, progressive politicians need to get their heads out of Westminster. Labour vs Lib Dem vs Green infighting serves no one but the Tories. They need open, amiable leaders committed, not just willing, to cooperating to offer something optimistic.

And I think maybe more needs to be done on top of that. This can't just be won in Westminster and on social media. There needs to be some tangible movement behind it.

A proper electoral alliance. A proper progressive front. And beneath it all, community action. Municipal movements, rallying individual, concerned citizens together with campaign groups on homelessness and rent, payday lending and benefits debt, on all these cause and more than leave me cold and afraid.

The government for the next five years is not going to represent the majority. Well, nothing new there. But there are plenty of people - the most vulnerable, mostly - who depend upon the state.

We need to do what we can to try and pick up the slack for those people and start building towards winning back the support they need and put that central to our thinking as we move forwards.

The 'new politics' is being put to the test in Spain, where Podemos hopes to show that Syriza was not an anomaly

The Indignados protests in Madrid, in May 2011, that began the decline of the establishment that opened the way for this tight election race. Photograph: Puerta del Sol, Madrid, 2011 by Pablo Garcia Romano (License) (Cropped)

All indications are that the general election in Spain is likely to mark the end of that country's two-party system (Scarpetta, 2015). Following the trend in other European countries, the political establishment is struggling for credibility and that has opened up the possibility of multi-party politics and substantial change.

With four parties running close in a tight race there is a chance, there is a chance that casting a ballot can make a much bigger kind of change than usual. For the Left, this situation presents an opportunity to find out whether the 'new politics', an experiment in decentralised democratic movements, can be effective in practice - the answer to which could have a huge impact far from Spain (Jones, 2015).

To do so, the 'new politics' - symbolised by Podemos - has to prove that it can win, up against a political establishment in Spain that, like most countries in Europe, has settled into a comfortable pattern. After Franco's death, and the restoration of democracy, Spain's political system was been dominated by the Partido Popular (People's Party, PP), founded by followers of Franco, and the Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (Socialist Workers' Party, PSOE).

Yet the cyclical passing of power from one traditional party to the other was rocked by the financial crisis. The struggles of Spain under the subsequent strain of bailouts and austerity, largely implemented by the Centre-Left PSOE (Sanchez-Cuenca, 2015), led to the the Indignados movement. People took to the streets in huge numbers and the scale of their discontent forced Premier Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero to stand down and resulted in PSOE being voted out of office, to be replaced by the People's Party (Tremlett, 2011).

However, while the PP took power, the cycle appears to have been broken by the Indignados movement transforming into two new challengers - parties dependent upon popular movements rather than the old establishment and both, in their own way, standing against the traditional political class.

These 'popular' parties - Podemos ('We Can', on the Left) and Ciudadanos ('Citizens', on the Right) - despite roots in the same movement, have some very apparent differences from each other, evident in the way progressives are split in their opinions of the two movements. Liberals, on the one hand, seem to want to dismiss Podemos as a militant Hard Left faction (Petts, 2015), while on the other side, democrats & socialists talk of Ciudadanos as corrupt capitalists preaching with prejudice and bigotry (Shea Baird, 2015).

Podemos, born fairly directly out of the spirit of the Indignados, enjoyed early success in the EU parliament elections which was followed up in May this year at the regional and municipal elections. Victories were won in Barcelona, Cadiz and La Coruna, amongst others, and most notably in Madrid - where conservatives had held control for 20 years (BBC, 2015).

In these places, candidates backed by Podemos had stood for participatory democracy along with the Left-wing staples of feminism, environmentalism and opposition to austerity. These victories were hailed as a justification of the decentralised approach, with campaigner candidates backed by active citizens who had engaged with people and debated on the streets and in the civic spaces (Colau, 2015).

Yet behind the scenes there is an internal struggle, between two identities, that threatens the 'new politics' image (Ferreira, 2015). One of those identities is that of the horizontal grassroots civic movement, with its citizen's assemblies. The other is symbolised by Pablo Iglesias, the national party's leader, and the faith he places in the power of singular charismatic leaders, particularly himself, and in media savvy (Williams, 2015).

The danger of this charismatic leadership is that it ties the fate and fortunes, ideals and policies, of a whole movement to the personal popularity of one individual - which can have wildly varying, and often fluctuating, results. It also risks reducing a broad popular movement into little more than a fan club, which in turn risks taking the impetus, the momentum, out of the hands of the broader movement upon which the 'new politics' depends.

Ciudadanos, by contrast is much more conventional, supporting small state policies and anti-corruption, and claims to be a centre and liberal party (Kassam, 2015). Its leader Albert Rivera has compared himself to Matteo Renzi, the Democrat in Italy, and to Nick Clegg, the former Liberal Democrat leader in the UK (Shea Baird, 2015). In practice, though, accusations of corruption and prejudice paint a picture too similar to the negative image encircling UKIP in the UK for the comfort of a progressive (Finnigan, 2015) - with claims of patronising attitudes towards women and connections between the party and Far-Right politics

Whatever their differences, both of these parties have found fertile ground and plenty of material with which to express their, and their followers', discontent. Spain's situation, following the financial crisis, has been dire. Unemployment has escalated to around 25% generally and for the young to over 50% (Navarro, 2014), with a lack of job security facing those who manage to find jobs, (Jones, 2015).

Those facts are represented in national polling, which has all four of the chief parties in a close race, hovering around 20%, more or less (Nardelli, 2015). The People's Party have been averaging around 25%, the PSOE at 21%, Podemos at 20%, and Ciudadanos at 17%. The chance is clearly present for the Radical Left to pull off another extraordinary result.

As for deciding on a government in Spain after the election, that is likely to be a messy affair. Neither of the new parties, even where they are close to the old parties on policy matters, is likely to want to become too entangled with the old establishment. Yet Spain's proportional electoral system will demand some compromises.

Ideologically, this election is asking big questions of the Radical Left, that have little direct concern with who governs Spain. Across Europe, progressives will want the election to provide the answer as to whether the 'new politics' is effective in what must seem like fertile ground - even with rivals Ciudadanos crowding Podemos' political space.

It is of course true that Syriza showed that the Radical Left can win, regardless of how you interpret the struggles that followed. Yet that was a solitary win in extraordinary circumstances - or so it might be dismissed while it remains a singular event. Jeremy Corbyn's Labour leadership win added to the Left's tally, but what the Left's experiment in decentralised, democratic movement politics needs is a major electoral victory that can follow up on Syriza's success.

In Spain, without some major breakthrough for Podemos, the PP and Ciudadanos on the Right will probably have just enough votes to keep progressives out of office - meaning more austerity and more status quo. For Europe, Podemos failing to make a breakthrough could make life hard for the 'new politics' movements across Europe, like the one supporting Corbyn, that want to reshape their societies around active citizens, engaged with politics and supporting broader participation and co-operation.

Building a genuine, lasting, progressive alternative in Europe can only be done if parties and movements can reach people and get them politically engaged. Winning elections is only a small part. Achieving substantive changes requires the public to be engaged, informed and empowered in a way that is only being offered at present by the Radical Left parties and their 'new politics'. From that perspective, progressives - whether Liberal, Democrat or Socialist, Moderate or Radical - have an interest in finding out whether Podemos, following Syriza, unlocked a way to re-engage citizens with their democracies.

"We don't pass by" - Jeremy Corbyn lays foundations for compassionate narrative based on renewing belief in public service

Jeremy Corbyn addresses a thousand people in Manchester Cathedral at a meeting organised by the CWU for their People's Post campaign, while several thousand more assemble outside.

Last night, Jeremy Corbyn had a strong message of support for the CWU's People's Post campaign. Yet just his presence alone was a great success for the Communication Worker's Union, as he drew an audience of around eight thousand people to the Manchester Cathedral meeting - the majority of whom were gathered outside for a parallel overspill event.

As part of the week of protests parallel to the Conservative Party Conference, it capped off a successful weekend for the People's Assembly that saw sixty to eighty thousand people assemble to march against austerity.

Jeremy Corbyn opened his speech with another of his recent references to the media coverage of himself, dismissing personal attacks by saying he really doesn't care about them:

"Once you get out of the swamp of personal recriminations people have to listen to the political arguments"

He also praised the politically active young people turning out for events like those this weekend, who he said had been 'written off by the political establishment'.

The focus of Corbyn's speech was on his belief in public service. Along with Dave Ward, the General Secretary of the CWU, there was praise for the post office as a strong force for good that connected people. The was also praise for the grandness of the principle behind the Universal Service Obligation.

Corbyn set his comments within the context of the importance of the public sector's role, echoing fellow speaker Natalie Bennett's sentiment that the private sector is 'no answer' for public sector provision of essential public services.

Corbyn also told the audience, echoing others at the People's Assembly rally on Sunday, that the campaign for the 2020 election starts now, not two or three weeks before 7 may 2020, and that campaigners need to start now to win ordinary people's hearts and minds over to hope. He expressed confidence that he, Labour and the anti-austerity movement would succeed.

The event also featured Kevin Maguire of The Mirror acting as chair; Owen Jones - who looked particularly fired up; and Natalie Bennett - who, looking more comfortable and confident than six months ago, received a warm welcome from a crowd that clearly had a lot of empathy with the Green Party's leader and her message.

Ultimately though, this was Corbyn's moment. This was another chance for him to lay out his new politics, with a different approach that is more reasonable and more democratically engaged with civil society. It was also a chance to lay the foundations for a new and more compassionate narrative, with which to oppose austerity based on renewing people's belief in public service. He summed up that message with the words: "We won't pass by".

The task now ahead for Corbyn and his team now is to maintain the momentum of the social movements that have come together against austerity. It was clear, however, that the majority of the crowd appeared to have turned up to see the new Labour leader and he was met, and departed from the hall, to standing ovations. If Corbyn can pull in near ten thousand people to hear him speak everywhere he goes, estimations regarding his chances of victory in 2020 are going to start changing dramatically.

Anti-austerity 'Take Back Manchester' event tries to prove that the Left is back in fashion

Billy Bragg plays to the crowd of protesters gathered at the start of the the march, which saw 60,000 people walk the streets of Manchester around the Conservative Party Conference.

The tone was set for several days of People's Assembly 'Take Back Manchester' protests at a day long gig on Saturday, organised by Sam Duckworth at the People's History Museum in Manchester. The event was headlined and closed out by Billy Bragg, who saved a rendition of The Red Flag for his encore - an anthem that Jeremy Corbyn's election seems to have brought back into style (Dearden, 2015).

The 'Take Back Manchester' protests, aimed at bringing the anti-austerity campaign right onto the Conservative doorstep at their autumn conference in Manchester (Pidd, 2015), follow an upsurge in activity after the shock Conservative election win. That surge has been given new energy by the election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party (Young, 2015; Kuenssberg, 2015).

Billy Bragg told his audience on Saturday night that he'd been a member of the movement so long, it had become fashionable again. And that's a message that the People's Assembly is keen to impress upon the Conservatives - that the days of austerity are numbered in the face of a resurgent popular democratic Left.

Natalie Bennett addresses the crowds assembled at Castlefields arena at the end of the march.

That message was at the heart of what the speakers had to say to the crowds gathered in the sun at the Castlefields outdoor arena. Natalie Bennett told the crowd that the sun was shining on their movement - in this case figuratively as well as literally, on a beautiful Sunday evening.

Stood on the stage in the sunshine, Charlotte Church told the crowd:

"They can hurl abuse at us and we will fight back. They can scare people into thinking one way, but we can educate people into thinking another. They can claim that protest doesn't work, but we can prove protest has worked, does work and will work for us now."

Owen Jones followed by saying that a broad movement was needed to achieve these things, organised from the bottom up. Mark Serwotka went much further, arguing that the trade unions needed to stand together, as the real opposition to the government, and close to outright called for general strikes.

The emphasis everywhere was on the power of the popular movement and not without good reason. Without the support of a broad social movement, the new campaign for an alternative cannot succeed. The new leader of the Labour Party cannot succeed.

On Saturday, Billy Bragg told the audience that he believed that the last election proved that the times are still in flux. That there is a world to win. But Bragg followed up with a word of caution. He said that the real enemy was cynicism - which needed to be replaced with hope and the belief that victory was possible.

If the People's Assembly and the trade unions are to build a bottom up movement and have a sustained impact, then Jeremy Corbyn - who addresses the Communications Workers' Union this evening in Manchester - will have an important role to play. Whatever lack of loyalty the parliamentary party has offered him as the new leader of the Labour, the wider social and trade union movements have adopted him as their figurehead.

But Corbyn needs to be wary. Alexis Tsipras has shown perils and difficulties of serving the people's idealism within the depressingly pragmatic political mainstream (Cohen, 2015). If Corbyn can be a lightening rod, the focal point and agent of the wider movements, he could be both the coordinator and the public spokesperson for the movements aims.

Yet, ultimately, it will require the sustained attention, energy and engagement of those taking part to overcome the austerity narrative, because a political party alone in the political sphere is not enough (Rogers, 2015). Only a sustained campaign - debating, educating and informing - can change public perceptions and give people a reason to believe in an alternative.

Corbyn and the Labour Party pass their first big challenge - showing solidarity against the government's trade union bill

Trade Unions led this summer's London Tube Strike over the safety concerns tied up in the extension of services to running 24 hours. Photograph: Tube Strike by Barney Moss (License) (Cropped)

Today saw the second reading of the Conservative government's trade union bill. This was the first debate on the controversial measures, aimed by the government at stopping what they have called 'endless' strike threats. Following a morning on which Jeremy Corbyn's new shadow cabinet had been announced (May, 2015), Labour was in need of an issue on which they could present a united front.

If an opposition, particularly a progressive opposition, has any role at all it is to challenge power and the way it is used. The trade union bill presented the first, very early, opportunity for the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn to do just that. The measures to be debated included an extension - up to two weeks - of the notice required before strikes can be held, allowing employers the use of agency workers to cover striker shifts, and mandatory identification to be worn by picketers with their details to be provided to police (BBC, 2015).

The reading of the bill by minister Sajid Javid met a hostile reception from the beginning, with Caroline Lucas and Dennis Skinner setting the tone. The Conservative position was that their proposed regulations were aimed at stopping a malign minority of trade unionists forcing strike action - damaging to the livelihoods of other workers -  upon the broader general public (BBC, 2015{2}).

Elements of the bill were criticised by influential Conservative backbencher David Davis (Mason, 2015; Casalicchio, 2015). Davis described measures requiring strikers to identity themselves and provide details to police as more suited to Franco's Spain than "Queen Elizabeth II's Britain". Yet during the debate itself, Davis argued that the bill, stripped of its illiberal elements, would tackle one of the side effects of public sector monopoly, that withdrawal of public sector labour means withdrawal of the service - deeply inconveniencing the lives of the wider public.

However, human rights groups have described the bill as a dangerous restriction upon the human and democratic rights of workers that, in particular, makes it 'easier for the Government to be a bad employer' (Ogilvie, 2015). The bill has also been described as a vindictive attack on civil liberties, by Liberal Democrat former business secretary Vince Cable and the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress Frances O'Grady (Taylor, 2015; Cable & O'Grady, 2015).

Through first the Liberal Party and later the Labour Party, trade unions in the UK have sought better rights and protections for people in the workplace. In the early years that meant a mix of support of parliamentary candidates and organisation of large strikes. Yet over the years - though with some periods of resurgence - time lost to industrial action has dwindled to give way to negotiation and under the restraints of increases in trade union legislation (Bienkov, 2015).

The ability of public sector workers to strike, with an impact on the wider public, is part of the right to strike. As private sector strikes challenge the interests of their employers, in the form of their accumulation of profits from labour, public sector strikes challenge the interests of their employer, the government, in the form of their votes dependent upon public satisfaction. With employers holding an unequal power in being able to withhold employment upon which the lives of workers depend, it is not unfair that workers to also be able to withhold benefits from their employer - in fact it is recognised as a human right (Ewing, 2015).

Whatever the differences between the factions within the Labour Party that Jeremy Corbyn has been elected to lead, opposition to anti-union tactics likened to those of dictators - a poignant example of a disturbing conservative trend of attacking human rights, suspending liberties supported by legal aid or social security, and even naming opposition parties as a risk to national security (Dearden, 2015) - provides an easy point of agreement.

If the role of opposition - and the roots of what it means to be on the Left - is to challenge power, attempts to restrict liberty of peaceful protest and civic dissent should be able to unite the Labour Party. Especially since opposition to the bill has been supported across progressive parties, by Labour, Green and also Liberal Democrat MPs - whose leader Tim Farron said that the bill attacked trade unions who stood up "for workers' rights" and protected "against workplace abuse and bullying" (Farron, 2015).

There is no rule against being constructive in opposition. But a majority government has little need of aid in pursuing its agenda. Corbyn's first day has seen Labour taking a stand, showing some solidarity with the trade union movement - which alone is admittedly a small victory. And yet, it is the small victories and acts of solidarity out of which a larger labour movement is built.

Jeremy Corbyn wins the Labour leadership election in a revolution of party members overthrowing the party establishment

Jeremy Corbyn MP speaks at anti-drones rally in 2013. Photograph: By stopwar.org.uk (license)(cropped)

Jeremy Corbyn has been elected leader of the Labour Party with 59.5% of the vote in the first round of voting. In a contest where over four hundred thousand people voted, no other candidate achieved over 20% of the vote and Corbyn won in every party category, including 49% of established party members and 57% of trade union members.

In the build-up, Tom Watson was also announced as the winner of the deputy leadership contest. The MP, who led the campaign to hold the media to account after accusations arose of  illegalities, promised in his acceptance speech to back the new leader and help them to unite the party.

Whether or not the new leadership can unite the party is the big question that will come out of this contest. The remarkable rise of Jeremy Corbyn exposed a rift between the Labour Parliamentary Party and the party's wider membership and supporters.

The contest had been initially dominated by the more right-leaning Blairites and and centrist Brownites, in the form of younger generation candidates like Chuka Umunna, Tristram Hunt and Liz Kendall and older generation members like Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper.

Yet there was a sense that the party's Left needed to be represented in order to have a substantial debate. That was only accomplished with the assistance of MPs 'lending' Corbyn their nominations. And yet those 'lent' nominations opened a floodgate. The popular appeal of Corbyn seemingly gave the Labour Left the confidence to come out in numbers and chance a return to the mainstream.

The future of the Labour Party from here may well have a lot to do with how it organises going forward.

In the run up to today's announcement, with the defeat of the followers of Brown and Blair seemingly imminent, there began to be suggestions that the two groups should unite themselves into a strong 'moderate' faction. United and organised, they would represent a formidable pressure group, pushing Corbyn to adopt pragmatic policies - and there are already signs of ranks closing with members of the shadow cabinet resigning.

The Left-wing faction, over which Jeremy Corbyn has effectively become leader in the last few months, has shown that it is strong in the party, but it remains firmly a parliamentary outsider. Its numbers are spread out across the country, in trade unions and constituency parties.

Against the strength of the self-appointed 'moderates', who will still have great strength in parliamentary numbers, the Left will need new methods to support its approach. Following its supporters, that will likely mean shifting the power of policy-making away from MPs and out to activists in the community.

One very notable and troubling issue is the absence of a successful female nominee for either leadership position, with Yvette Cooper coming third in the leadership contest and Stella Creasy coming second in the deputy leadership race. That will need to be addressed. One option would be to appoint a female chancellor. But that will be something to delve into deeper as Corbyn announces his shadow cabinet in the coming days.

Today though, the story is that the mainstream pragmatists have lost control of the party to Corbyn and his more idealistic, popular, Left-wing supporters amongst the party membership. In his acceptance speech as the new Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn spoke of wanting to build a better society. For all progressives, it can only be positive and exciting to hear a leader, elected on a huge mandate, championing a challenge to inequality and poverty.

Clemenceau showed that you can achieve radical change in politics away from the establishment's institutional power

Portrait of Georges Clemenceau by Édouard Manet. Photograph: By Renaud Camus (license) (cropped)

The UK Labour Party's old guard establishment of former leaders and ministers has shown a crushing fear of the task of opposing the Tories when out office - out in the civic space where debate, protest and journalism set the political agenda. Yet history shows that it not only can be done, but that it is necessary to making radical change possible.

Clemenceau and the Dreyfus Affair

Georges Clemenceau, a leading figure amongst the French Radicals of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, consistently found himself caught between more extreme forces. The man who would go on to be 'The Tiger' of France as Prime Minister during the Great War, was caught between a reactionary government and the revolutionary commune in 1871 and then later made a scapegoat, in 1893, for the Panama corruption scandal.

Ousted at the elections that followed the scandal and frozen out, Clemenceau poured his energies into journalism. After a time championing the radical causes close to his heart, he became wrapped up in a slow burning campaign, one that took several years to catch light, in support of Albert Dreyfus' innocence.

The Dreyfus Affair, involved the scandalous selling of military secrets being pinned on Dreyfus, a Jewish captain, at a time of rising anti-Semitism. Several years after a miscarriage of justice saw Dreyfus imprisoned, Clemenceau was presented with evidence by Arthur Ranc, a Dreyfusard journalist, which was seconded by the Senator Auguste Scheurer-Kestner.

Clemenceau used his position as editor of L'Aurore to demand a retrial. When that trial too proved a farce, he was approached by the famous author Emile Zola. Clemenceau published an incendiary letter by Zola - headed as 'J'accuse...!' by Clemenceau himself - as the front page of L'Aurore. It named names and called out corruption amongst the political class in a letter addressed directly to the President.

In one dramatic stroke - which saw the newspaper's readership increase from 30,000 to 300,000 - the outcast Radical had thrown himself in amongst, not only, the supporters of Dreyfus, but also amongst the opponents of anti-Semitic nationalism.

From 1897 to 1899, Clemenceau campaigned alongside others, including Bernard Lazare who had been working to prove Dreyfus innocent since the matter began in 1894, in what has been described as "one of the greatest achievements of French journalism" (Daniel Halevy, in Hampden Jackson, 1946):

"...a close-knit discussion carried on over two years, sustained each morning by an article sparkling with wit, vigour and rationality..."

That journalist-led civic discussion eventually achieved a Presidential pardon for Dreyfus (although Clemenceau thought that still to be an injustice); a sea change in parliament with government and ministers toppling and the Radicals becoming the biggest party, bringing substantial reforms like the separation of church and state, the secularisation of education and the abolition of censorship; and the return of Clemenceau himself to parliament as a Senator.

Labour's fear of impotence

In the present, Labour has been warning loudly of the danger of the impotence from which the party will suffer without the institutional mechanisms of the establishment at their beck and call. From Tony Blair to Gordon Brown (Blair, 2015; Mason & Halliday, 2015), the party members have been urged not to vote the Jeremy Corbyn.

Corbyn, according to some of the party's own MPs, is a purveyor of "crazy left-wing policies" who will leave the party out on the British political fringe and will face internal rebellions from the moment he is elected (Wilkinson, 2015). Yet that attitude from the Labour Parliamentary Party can hardly be considered a safer course. It mimics the very same, deeply unpopular, attitude towards its own membership, as the Eurozone held towards Greece. Embracing the status quo as a party of establishment bureaucracy also did little for PASOK, the main social democrat party in Greece, which collapsed at the election in January (Chakrabortty, 2015).

It also ignores Labour's essential problem - it has never changed 'the political fundamentals in its favour' (Kirby, 2015). Labour has always preferred, instead, to use them in its own service. In doing so, the Labour has forgotten about social power in order to play the best they can according to the rules of the political game (Tietze, 2015) - and so cling to an institutional power that comes with serious restraints, from various sources of pressure, and offers ever diminishing returns.

"Although the history of the Left has produced an extraordinary theoretical legacy, which continues to be the nucleus of almost all radical thinking, it has nonetheless left a trail of extraordinary failures in practice.

I understand the dialectical relation between theory and practice, of course, but we have to admit that in real historical terms this dialectic is terribly uneven, to the degree in fact that it may render questionable a great many of these theoretical achievements, which, if we are going to be rigorously leftist about it, cannot really stand entirely on their own." (Gourgouris, 2015)

When pressed, Labour's establishment figures may point to the danger of leaving the Tories with majority power. Yet their power has depended upon an effective control of the civic debate, framing and directing the discussion in a civic space that Labour has seemingly abandoned (d'Ancona, 2015).

Recovering radicalism

This boils down to an essential point: the importance of the social debate makes the direct pursuit of institutional power almost an irrelevance (Gourgouris, 2013).

In order to govern radically, a group first has to engage the public in the civic space, where is fostered the power to govern and change society regardless of hierarchies and institutions (Gourgouris, 2013). Clemenceau and the Dreyfusards were an early modern example of the power there is in the civic space. For radicals, this means encouraging localised self-organisation, opening up a space for teaching and learning, and fighting against alienation.

Labour has already made one big step in that direction when it chose to, effectively, crowdsource a leadership candidate (Perkins, 2015). But this example of radical democracy in action is only a beginning. In order to be a vital part of the Left, Labour has to accept that it is only a part.

Radicalism requires space for protest and critical dissent, for differences of opinion, for discussion, debate and disagreement (Gourgouris, 2015). The radical Left needs the internal antagonism of multi-party politics, not the domination of a singular power. It needs to be an activist outside of parliament and a disruptive troublemaker within it - not unlike the belligerent Clemenceau a century ago.

It looks unlikely that Labour will be able to muster enough enthusiasm amongst progressives to get over the majority electoral line while it continues to preach the values of the establishment. However, if any of the leadership candidates, of which Corbyn looks most likely, can embrace this kind of radical shift in the party - away from centralism, statism and party leader domination - there is hope of a new, more pluralistic, Left mounting a serious challenge in 2020.

Rainbow celebration needs to fuel fresh momentum in the long struggle to create societies that take consent seriously

Photograph: Rainbow American via photopin (license) (cropped)

In two terms, mired in partisan politics bitterly divided between Liberals and Conservatives, US President Barack Obama has struggled to give his administration a definitive identity. A pair of Supreme Court (SCOTUS) rulings from the past week have certainly helped make that task a little easier.

The first Supreme Court ruling ensured the continued existence of Obama's flagship healthcare reforms, for the near future at least (Roberts & Jacobs, 2015). The ruling decided that the Federal government could deliver its affordable health insurance plan in all fifty states.

The second ruling confirmed equal marriage as a constitutional right (Roberts & Siddiqui, 2015). That means that in all fifty states same-sex couples will have the right to marry, and that marriages from other states have to be recognised.

These rulings, lauded as successes by Obama (Jacobs, 2015), have been heralded as a triumph for liberalism and individual freedoms, over the conservatism of the established social order. Along with having earlier overseen the end of the ban on openly gay military service (McVeigh & Harris, 2011), these rulings have made civic equality into a major theme of the Obama administration.

Although there clearly is still resistance, some of which has been aggressively intolerant (Butterworth, 2015), people will adapt. But that doesn't mean that the work is over. Combined, these steps have established a new social plateau, which represents a renewed acknowledgement of the rights of consenting adults to live on equal terms with their peers. Yet, those who have won equal marriage will still face discrimination and legal hurdles (Roberts and Siddiqui, 2015; Buncombe, 2015).

Though by themselves these rulings are huge victories for human rights, civil rights and individual liberty, they also represent smaller parts of a broader human struggle, towards the attainment of respect for consent as a central human value.

The ideal of a representative democracy is based around consent. Government by the consent of the governed, laws created with the consent of those who have to abide by them, economics with the consent of the community, and social interactions with the consent of the participants.

Without the removal of coercion and fear, whether from economic conditions in which you cannot afford to get ill or from social conditions where you cannot openly define your own identity due to discrimination, there can be no civic participation on the basis of consent. Without liberty from coercion and fear, there can be no free choices.

To get there, the Supreme Court rulings need now to be the inspiration for the next step (Thrasher, 2015). They are breakthroughs in their own right and just cause for celebration, but that energy and solidarity needs to be poured into renewed motivation to keep moving forward.

The Labour leadership election begins in earnest. But what will the candidates stand for?

With the nominations counted and the candidates confirmed, the 2015 Labour leadership election campaign has begun in earnest. The day was marked with the first televised debate last night in Nuneaton, which had been a prime Labour election target seat where the party had failed spectacularly (BBC, 2015).

For the position of party leader the candidates are Andy Burnham, Yvette Cooper, Jeremy Corbyn and Liz Kendall (BBC, 2015{2}). At the same time, there will also be an election for the deputy leadership. Standing for the position of deputy leader are Ben Bradshaw, Stella Creasy, Angela Eagle, Caroline Flint and Tom Watson (New Statesman, 2015).

The most pressing issues for the leadership candidates will be to address what they believe went wrong in 2015 (Wintour, 2015), and to find answer to those beginning to ask what the point is of the Labour Party (Jones, 2015; Todd, 2015).

Amongst the prospective leaders, Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper most represent continuity with the New Labour project, having both been deeply involved with Blair and Brown governments and regular frontbenchers over the last Eighteen years. Both Burnham and Cooper announced their candidacy with an appeal to the party not to move Left or Right, but to make a broad appeal with an emotional connection to everyday lives (Wintour, 2015{2}; Gayle, 2015).

Liz Kendall was the first, and is both the youngest and most right-wing, candidate on the list, having made it clear that she believes the Labour Party did not 'do enough to appeal to Conservative supporters' (Chakelian, 2015).

The final candidate, who just scraped onto the list, is Jeremy Corbyn, representing the old Socialist Left-wing of the party. His candidature has been commended for opening up the leadership contest, turning it into an open, public debate between the Left and Right on the future of the Labour Party (Kelner, 2015). Corbyn declared his candidacy by mocking the other candidates' obsession with 'aspiration', by declaring his aspiration the close the inequality gap (Corbyn, 2015).

At last night's debate in Nuneaton, all four had their first chance to connect with an audience (Wintour, Watt & Mason, 2015; Watt, 2015). What was most starkly remarkable about three of the four candidates was how very little seems to have changed from the 2015 general election campaign message. The leaders in waiting are still talking about immigration, work as a responsibility to work, of leaving Labour's past behind and embracing business.

There is a growing consensus that Labour is going to need something more from its next leader if it is going to get into government after the next election. A big idea (Robinson, 2015). Conviction (Behr, 2015). The Green Party MP Caroline Lucas even offered her thoughts, proposing that Labour finally embrace multi-party politics (Lucas, 2015). All of these things will factor as decision time approaches for Labour. It awaits to be seen whether the party will the party stay in the Centre-Right, hoping to beat the Tories at their own game, or if they will try to come up with a real, progressive, alternative message?

The UK general election result appears to be no big surprise when seen alongside results from across Europe

The number of seats won aside, the UK general election produced a result pretty close to expectation. The big mainstream parties, austere conservatives and austerity-leaning social democrats - in this case the Conservative and Labour parties - saw their stranglehold on voters slipping away, with liberals struggling to avoid obliteration while a new challenge arose in the form of various anti-establishment parties.

While Britain might see itself as a special case, this pattern certainly isn't isolated to those islands. It has been repeated right across the continent.

Spanish Regional Elections

In Spain, where the ruling Partido Popular - the conservative, pro-austerity party - are struggling with 20% unemployment and trying to suppress separatism in Catalonia, the end of last month saw regional and municipal elections (BBC, 2015). Since the last round of regional elections, Partido Popular had recovered a substantial lead in the polls in many of the regions.

But it was a polling lead that looked large mostly through comparison to a divided opposition. The opposition to Popular was split between the traditional social democratic, Left-wing party, Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol (PSOE), and two rising anti-establishment groups, reflecting trends across Europe.

Podemos and Ciudadanos, the Left-leaning radical and Right-leaning populists respectively, represent a growing, organised, mass movement against the politics of the old order. While Ciudadanos has recognisable party appearance - offering a Centre-Right, fiscal conservative, balanced budget, anti-corruption ticket, kind of like UKIP without the intolerant overtones - Podemos has been built by forming alliances with, and offering support to, local campaigners and regional movements, pouring mass support into decentralised, grass roots campaigns.

Yet their rise has helped to divide the response to austerity, and allowed the conservative narrative to hold its own. But it hasn't all been the result of splitting the vote - the Centre-Left response has been weak or uncertain all across Europe, and so has been displaced in many regions and provinces by the new radical and populist parties.

However, despite Partido Popular polling  fairly well, and the opposition being split between at least four parties nationally - plus a number of regional parties strong in their own provinces - the vote share in the Spanish regional election was even more fragmented than in the UK's general election.

Partido Popular took only around 31%, falling from a previous 46% (Buck, 2015), and the PSOE also fell to 25%. The two anti-establishment movements, Podemos and Ciudadanos, took 14% and 11% respectively, and could well find themselves in government in Madrid and Barcelona (Kassam, 2015). The nationalist and regionalist parties took between them a combined 15% of the vote.

With the establishment parties only taking 56% of votes, and the main opposition to Partido Popular taking 65% of the vote divided up between three parties and a range of regionalist and nationalist groups, the results of Spain's election tell us that the political establishment is in disarray (Buck, 2015{2}) - with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy expressing disappointment at the fragmented result (Kassam, 2015{2}).

Italian Regional Elections

In Italy, the situation was initially balanced a little differently. At the 2013 election Prime Minister Matteo Renzi's Partito Democratico (PD), which represents the Centre and Centre-Left of the spectrum, became the biggest party on just 30% of vote - though Renzi himself only became Prime Minister after months of wrangling over how to form a government saw two Democratic Premiers, Pier Luigi Bersani and Enrico Letta, come and go.

The PD, which groups together some vociferously socially democratic voices, has under Renzi, considered by some to of the same mould as Tony Blair (Day, 2013), nonetheless imposed elements of austerity on Italy, seeking to make the country's economy more 'competitive' (The Economist, 2015). Those moves have damaged their position, with trade unions striking against 'reforms' to the labour market (BBC, 2014).

Yet over the past couple of years the party has benefited from an opposition that has crumbled. The controversies facing Silvio Berlusconi, the long time leader of the country's Centre-Right movement, has split the Right-wing group into two blocks (The Telegraph, 2013). Berlusconi's own return to the political limelight has been rather less than spectacular, with the former Premier turning to up in support of the wrong party's candidate in Lombardia (Johnston, 2015).

These divisions have left the opposition to the Centre-Left Democrats split up between a Berlusconi rump, the broad anti-establishment group Movimento 5 Stelle (M5S) and the Right-wing Northern separatist group Lega Nord. In recent months Lega Nord have moved, from a fringe regionalist party on the Far-Right, to overtake Berlusconi's group in the polls and in local elections, under their controversially popular leader Matteo Salvini (Sanderson & Politi, 2014).

In the regional election Renzi's Democrats took over 40% of the vote in five of the seven regions. Meanwhile Berlusconi's party struggled, falling as low as fourth in some regions behind Lega Nord, who made huge gains (Kirchgaessner, 2015) - even in areas on the fringes of their traditional heartlands. However, despite Renzi's Democrats winning outright in five of seven regions - including two gains in the south - they lost in Liguria and, when the concurrent municipal reforms are accounted for, popular support for the party was 24%, even as it remained the largest party (Ellyat, 2015; BBC, 2015{2}).

German Regional Elections

For those concerned as to what comes next, the results in German over the last two years look like being an interesting guide - appearing almost to be a couple of years ahead of the European trend. Back in 2013 - in what now seems like an indication that the Liberal Democrats in the UK should have expected their poor performance in May - the liberal Frei Democratische Partei (FDP) lost every single one of their seats in the German Bundestag, down from a previous total of 93 seats. However, in the regional elections held over the last two years there have been signs of a recovery.

Having fallen below five percent of vote, the FDP did not meet the threshold to qualify for Bundestag seats. Amongst the problems the party had faced were many that will be familiar to the UK Lib Dems: struggling to recover votes lost to their former Centre-Right coalition partner (who they partnered with for primarily economic reasons), and being squeezed for votes by their antithesis, a popular anti-EU party, plus faith lost due to a failure to deliver promised tax reforms. Two-thirds of votes the party lost went to the CDU, many whom still wanted the FDP to keep the CDU in check but had lost faith in the party after internal party struggles (Wagstyl, 2013).

After the FDP's federal election defeat, the party suffered further losses: just 3% in the 2014 European Parliament election, 7th place with 3% and no seats in Saxony, 7th place with 2% and no seats in Thuringia, and down to 1% and 7th place with no seats in Brandenburg. Yet by February 2015 the party was polling back up at 6% nationally, and then took 7% of the vote to retain all 9 of its seats in Hamburg, and 6.5% with 6 seats, all brand new, in Bremen.

At the present rate they look on course for 6-9%, from down at 3-4%, by the time of the next federal election in 2017, which could mean a recovery to as many as 40-60 seats - reflecting a recovery to their 2005 position. That should at least give liberals hope that when they are gone, they are quickly missed (The Guardian, 2015), and boost their efforts to restore credibility (Wagstyl, 2014).

What the German results also show is that liberals are not alone in the struggle to restore electoral credibility. As has been seen in Spain and Italy, and with Labour in the UK, social democratic parties are struggling to come up with an electorally successful alternative narrative to conservative austerity. In Bremen, Germany, the German Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) has governed continuously since the end of the second world war and yet even here support for social democrats has weakened (The Economist, 2015).

The conservative ascendancy is not all it appears to be

The struggles of all of the main parties have been largely to the benefit of conservatives everywhere except Italy, which is being governed from the Centre by Democrats struggling for support. But the conservative is not all that it seems to be. The message from voters in Britain seems to be a match for the voices of voters across Europe: austerity has been allowed to limp because the opposition has not yet managed to construct a compelling alternative narrative. In all of these countries all of the establishment parties are teetering on the brink.

Yet, even in the face of the grip of austerity, disillusionment and anti-establishment movements, there is hope for the recovery of lost ground on the Left. But a recovery will require the Left to learn the lessons of the past few years and to adapt to the times by changing its methods. More decentralisation, co-operation, and an end to the mainstream chic of sycophancy towards the established order is essential. Only then can any party on the Centre-Left hope to gain the support of radical movements and find a broad consensus behind a real alternative to austerity.

Building a new progressive opposition will require solidarity and activism, inside and outside of Parliament

The first ten days of David Cameron's new government look like a preview of what we can expect over the next five years. From the moment he resumed his premiership there have been protests against austerity and against his party. The protest group People's Assembly Against Austerity has already scheduled a major protest for June, expected to draw at least 50,000 people, in a show of popular opposition ahead of George Osborne's July budget (Elliott, 2015).

With both of the main, traditional, opposition parties partially incapacitated - through depletion and from finding themselves bereft of leadership - these protests can be seen as an acknowledgement that opposition to the policies of the Conservative's governing majority will have to come through new voices via new means. Even though the Conservative majority is only slim, Tory rebels are most numerous on Far Right issues - which is unhelpful to progressives. That means that the little fights are going to matter all the more (D'Arcy, 2015).

Protests will be one route to challenging the government, though some would disagree. Jacob Rees-Mogg, Conservative MP for North East Somerset - and one man window to the Parliament of the Nineteenth Century - criticised marchers at a protest in Bristol as anti-democratic (Bristol Post, 2015).

"It's not a protest against government policy, its a protest against the election result, so it is tainted by a lack of acceptance of democracy. I think they may have missed the General Election that took place last week, where the country endorsed the Conservative manifesto. I am all in favour of people's right to protest, I think its a very important right, but people have just voted. A decision has been taken which supported continued austerity."

The trouble is, Rees-Mogg himself is missing an important point. The endorsement of the Conservative manifesto is based on only 37% of voters. 37% is itself a poor enough mandate for a majority, even if it wasn't achieved on a two-thirds turnout. That means less than a quarter of eligible voters chose to 'endorse' the Conservative manifesto.

With Parliamentary opposition weak, protesting the iniquities of the electoral system, and demanding that they be taken into account, is all the more important at this moment. So is trying to make other views heard, like those of the 75% who have been disregarded.

Even if the government mandate and majority had been strong, opposition still plays a tremendously important role in the majoritarian system, scrutinising the government and holding it to account. When majorities are this slim, it takes a lot of power away from central government and gives it to Parliament - which means more power to constituents through their MPs. In that case, protesting would still be a viable and useful means of applying pressure.

The pressure being applied by protesters on the street looks likely to be assisted by resistance to the Conservative cuts from within their own party. The Tory-led Local Government Association (LGA) has cross-party agreement against further cuts, warning of the devastating impact that more budget cuts for local government could have local services and communities (Helm, 2015).

Led by Cllr David Sparks, the LGA has claimed that local government has cutback as much as it can with the reduction in funding of 40% since 2010 (Sparks, 2015). Sparks, as Chair of the LGA which represents 375 councils in England and Wales, added to that warning with a call for more power to devolved away from Westminster.

Back at Westminster, the SNP are claiming that they will be the main opposition to Conservative government during the next parliament, on the basis that they offered something significantly different - unlike Labour (The Guardian; 2015). It is important, however, that they have at least noted opposition is something that they cannot do alone. Angus Robertson, leader of the SNP MPs at Westminster, mentions that they will be prepared to reach out across party lines.

While the Liberal Democrats have previously shown how small parties can lead a strong opposition - particularly under Charles Kennedy's leadership when they opposed entry into the Iraq War (BBC, 2004) - they could only bring principled resistance and offer backing to popular pressure. They could not stop or change government decisions alone.

Labour, traditionally the voice of the workers, and the Lib Dems, the traditional voice for civil liberties, are at this moment both weak and rudderless. The absence of a strong liberal voice in Parliament is already being missed by some (The Guardian; 2015{2}).

If they, the SNP and other Parliamentary progressives are going to maintain an effective opposition to the Conservative agenda, they will have to pull together. They will have to reach out, not just across party lines, but also to local government and to the public to build a strong and co-ordinated activism.

They will need to oppose the government with protest and public opinion, build strong arguments to tackle the methods and underlying reasoning of the Conservative policies, and construct a compelling alternative progressive narrative. Against a majority government, all of these elements will have to come together to put pressure on where it will be most effective. That cannot be achieved without solidarity between progressives.

The Future of the Left begins today: If the Centre-Left parties get the foundations right, then the momentum is all in their favour

No sooner had David Cameron returned to Downing Street as a second term Prime Minister, than London was already playing host to anti-austerity, anti-Tory marches and protests (Tapper, 2015). In London, and in Cardiff as well, with chants declaring that 75% of the people did not vote for this Conservative government, there was a sneak preview of things to come - mass activism from the Left.

In the face of these protesting oppositions, the Conservatives are striving to show themselves to be the representatives of continuity and consistency (Watt, 2015). The Left, by comparison, has no real political continuity to speak of. However, that might not be a bad thing.

For both Labour and the Liberal Democrats, the two biggest UK-wide parties of the Centre-Left, the spectacularly bad night they endured over 7th and 8th May was a pretty definitive rejection. But in that rejection, wherein both parties where very clearly broken by the result, there lies an opportunity. This is the threshold of a brand new day.

The key at this moment are the right foundations.

One of the big criticisms aimed at their parliamentary leadership by the Liberal Democrats' membership was that the approach to coalition was wrong from the beginning. Too eager and too easy. The damage done, by being seen as the party of coalition and complicit in Neo-Thatcherite austerity, the party could not recover.

However, the scale of the Lib Dems' defeat has, at least, served them by drawing a line under the last five years. They veered off from the expected script and they have been punished severely. That defeat presents the Lib Dems with the opportunity to rediscover their radicalism - their passionate campaigning, for political reform, for civil liberties and civil rights (Boyle, 2015).

David Steel, former leader of the old Liberal Party, placed the blame for the Lib Dems' poor result upon that apparent eagerness for a centre-right coalition. He argued that going into such s coalition meant abandoning 'radical progressivism' in favour of the pragmatic centre (Cowburn & Boffey, 2015).

Recovering the party's radicalism will require the election a convincingly left-liberal leader from amongst their rump. The current favourite is Tim Farron, as other possible candidates like Norman Lamb may have been too close to Clegg to be seen as representing enough of a shift to a towards distinctly liberal, rather than a Coalition, position (BBC, 2015).

If the party can find the right leader - and they can apply and embed the lessons of the last five years - there is optimism that the Lib Dems could recover (Wintour, 2015). There is even talk of the party reclaiming their position as the alternative opposition to Labour, able to work with them and others on the left.

Following the lead of the Green Party MP Caroline Lucas (Cowburn & Boffey, 2015), there is talk of co-operation between the parties of the progressive Left: first in the form of a pro-EU alliance and then maybe as some sort of electoral pact, along the lines of the old Lib-Lab pacts, by 2020 (Black, 2015).

Achieving those kinds of agreements will, however, require Labour to greatly reduce their aggressively jealous and belligerent attitude towards the other parties on the Left, that leads them to fight vindictive battles rather than fight the Conservatives.

At this election, that attitude led the party into a fight on three fronts: trying to stop the flood of voters leaving them in Scotland for the SNP - seen to be more conventionally Left-wing; trying to take back voters from the Lib Dems who were being punished for not being Left-leaning enough; and trying to fight the Conservatives head-on-head, on Tory-defined issues with Tory-style policies.

The Labour response was to put out a mix of messages and policies that left quite a puzzle as to what the party's values actually were - all over the place across Left, Centre and Right. It certainly wouldn't have helped that Labour tried to mimic so closely the Conservatives' own rhetoric, raising the question for voters: if you say Tories are right about all the main issues, why should anyone vote for you instead of them?

The debate has begun again - a particular long term internal struggle for the party - as to whether the party was too Left-wing or too Right-wing to be electable in 2015. According to an analysis of the election result, Labour did well in seats that were 'young, ethnically diverse, highly educated, socially liberal' and had a 'large public sector' (Ford, 2015) - probably helped by the lack of competition from the weakened Lib Dems. The trouble is that they bled voters in every other direction.

They lost white working class voters to UKIP, which the Blue Labour movement had warned would happen if the party did not cater to working class conservatism. They lost voters in Scotland on socialist issues, like the 'NHS, public services and redistribution'. They cannot even count on squeezing social liberal voters from the Lib Dems at every election. However they also lost out, particularly notably, amongst the wealthy, ambitious middle Englanders.

Former leader Tony Blair has staked out the New Labour case, claiming that the Centre-ground is the place for the Labour Party (Helm, 2015). Blair argued that if the party wants to achieve equality, its needs to do so without being seen to punish the ambitious - it needs to present a comprehensive vision of a society inclusive of those at the top as well as those at the bottom. Chuka Umunna, a potential Labour leadership candidate, is amongst the most Blairite of the new crop of hopefuls. Umunna's vision matches Blair's - a big tent Labour Party, able to house the poorest and the richest, which can take voters away from the Conservatives directly in those middle England constituencies (Umunna, 2015).

While there is always going to be some thinkers looking back to Blair for evidence that Labour can be broadly electable when positioned at the Centre, a task made all the more easy by the probable slight shift of the Lib Dems towards emphasising their Centre-Left credentials, that isn't the only thing the party needs.

One thing missing, or at the very least lacking in clarity, is the Labour Party's purpose. The search for a new leader can only do so much (Williams, 2015). What the party needs as much as anything else may well be the heart that the Lib Dems said they'd bring to the Tories. They need some sort of coherent vision that connects the party's soul (its values) with its head (the practical way in which those values are turned into policies suited to the times).

The decision ahead for Labour, between being part of the Left or the main party of the Centre, will have ramifications for voters and parties elsewhere. The performance of the Greens and the SNP show that Left-wing politics remains popular - taking 9% of the vote and seats between them, which is a strong showing even when you consider that many Left-wing voters will still have clung to Labour. Yet trying to reclaim their Left-wing voters will mean some stiff competition - and in the process giving up the Centre-ground contest.

If Labour sticks to the centre, they will have the potential to appeal to voters without stepping on the toes of either the Greens or the Lib Dems. But doing so means accepting the continued decline of its own Left-wing which will ultimately begin to believe that their are other options out there. The key for a Labour Party at the centre is to understand that you can be there with your values intact - you can accommodate a place for everyone within your vision of society without sacrificing ideals and principles.

For both Labour and the Lib Dems, the policy priority now seems to be returning to devolution and decentralisation, of both government and the economy, and comprehensive political, electoral and constitutional reform. The pursuit of that task will be helped by a positive thought: the immediate electoral future of both Labour and the Lib Dems looks bright... if they can resolve their issues and develop their visions.

As Cameron - digging up his One Nation Toryism (Nelson, 2015) and appearing magnanimous in victory, with praise for his opponents and appeals to the whole of the UK as one nation (White, 2015) - stood in front of Number 10, the old establishment found itself unexpectedly propped up, if only for a little while. But Cameron's grace in victory covers the fundamental weakness of his and the Conservatives' position. Cameron, the Conservatives and the Westminster establishment have on their side continuity and momentary stability. But that is all constructed around toxic attitudes towards welfare and the poor for which they no longer have the Liberal Democrats to hide behind.

The Left is not able to claim any sort of continuity. But what it has instead is time to construct, with care from the ground up, the ideas around which to build a new consensus. Combined with the spirit of political co-operation, best represented by the Green Party's Caroline Lucas, the Left now has all of the momentum. That momentum is leading to the completion of that which the advent of coalition government began - the comprehensive progressive reform of the British politics.

Gender Inequality, Laissez-faire and Positive Action

Last week, in the run-up to International Women's Day, there were efforts made in Germany to tackle inequality between the genders in the workplace. While a new law was passed for gender quotas to be introduced to the boardrooms of large companies (The Guardian, 2015), there was still ongoing resistance to legislation aimed at exposing, and ultimately undoing, gender inequalities in pay (Osborne, 2015).

The fact that these moves are necessary in a wealthy and developed country like Germany - or in the UK where the Liberal Democrats have been pushing for similar moves for some time, particularly in the face of a failure of the Conservative 'voluntary' reporting system (Wintour, 2015) - highlights the scale of the problem. Quotas, in turn, represent the practical response to the continuing inequality (Saul, 2015).

And yet, resistance remains to levelling the playing field. There is an insistence in the Western world upon trusting in laissez-faire - removing the obvious formal institutional obstacles and letting the world right itself. That attitude is not helped much by gender quotas being considered an imperfect solution (White, 2015).

However, the world is uncomfortably unequal. In the face of plain unfairness, the simplistic, and false, answer to the struggles of others is victim-blaming (Burkeman, 2015). There is a determination, witnessed in the wider struggle against inequality, to shift the responsibility for unfairness from the established order and those who benefit, and to turn it into blame to be placed on those who aren't succeeding (Seabrook, 2014).

The facts are pretty clear: matters can't just be left to right themselves (Topping, 2015). It was true for the poverty and desperation in Victorian England that led to the collapse of the old Laissez-faire economics, and made way for the gradual rise of social insurance, pensions, welfare and the public healthcare. It is true now tackling gender inequality. The world needs a helping hand to combat problematic institutional biases (Dudman, 2015).

The feminist rallying-calls of public figures like Emma Watson is a reminder of how to tackle these great challenges (HeForShe, 2015): positive thought and positive action, in the pursuit of progress.

In the pursuit of social progress, the old ways of thinking have to change. The 'let alone' attitude is not good enough, particularly when the solutions of negative liberty - simply keeping people free from outside interference - don't, and can't, bring meaningful equality of opportunity, or offer the people the path to the better, and more fair, lives they want.

There is a pressing need to demand a more positive liberty. Affirmative action, in this sense, is about acting to make the principals of fairness in a free society a fact. That burning heart of feminism, is the same one that beats in the breast of all struggles for equality and fairness. Quotas may not be a perfect solution, but they are a positive and practical solution in a world that is imperfect and unfair.

Spain's Podemos party signals the rise of a new political left

Since the financial crisis erupted in 2008, Europe has seen a rise in co-ordinated leftist movements, such as Occupy, getting people out onto the streets to protest against the conservative economic orthodoxy.

Despite being highly visible, those campaigns, for welfare before wealth and people before profits, have found little traction inside the political mainstream. The failure of mainstream political parties to reflect public priorities in policy has led to collapsing support for those parties, and a corresponding collapse in trust in the political institutions (Nardelli, 2014).

However, that has began to change. In time for the European elections, while the world was justifiably worried about the rise of the far right, a new party emerged in Spain. Born out of the Indignados movement, which saw as many as 8 million people take to the streets across Spain in 2011 and 2012, a new party was formed, called Podemos (Jones, 2014).

Podemos, meaning "We can", marks an important transition. The leftist activists and protesters are shifting from campaigning to political democracy, from protesting to developing policy - trying to turn ideas into action (Pope, 2014). It is a beginning of a fulfilment of the promise shown by leftist campaigns across Europe.

People have shown they are active and engaged. But they're unhappy, and are now they're taking to proposing the solutions themselves, because the establishment hasn't listened, and hasn't reformed to suit the needs of the people.

That disaffection has elsewhere only fed the parties of the far right, who only offer narrow and restrictive responses to poverty and suffering. Those groups, like UKIP, do not break from political orthodoxies and fail to offer positive alternatives. Only the anti-establishment libertarian democratic group Movimento 5 Stelle, of Italy, has succeeded in taking popular support away from those far right groups... so far.

The rising polling strength of Podemos is a positive answer to that right-wing populism, and ought to be a huge boost to those on the left, from progressives to socialists to liberals. They are championing the causes of the left: poverty reduction, the basic income, reducing dependence upon fossil fuels, promoting small, medium and local producers and enterprises along with some sensible public control.

They represent the ideals of the left, backed by a popular movement, bringing activism and political policy together to challenge mainstream methods and orthodox ideas. That is a cause for hope for anyone who is looking for a better future, one oriented more towards people and their needs, than to endless, monotonous, accumulation and consumption.

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Reference:
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+ Alberto Nardelli's 'A crisis of trust - and the rise of new political parties'; in The Guardian; 6 November 2014.

+ Owen Jones' 'Viva Podemos: the left shows it can adapt and thrive in a crisis'; in The Guardian; 16 November 2014.

+ Mike Pope's 'The rise of Podemos and its People's Assembly'; on OpenDemocracy.net; 17 November 2014.