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 Alternative General Election 2019: Progressive parties need to settle their differences

This is another election that will come down to a simple arithmetic: how can progressives prevent another Tory government, led by Boris Johnson as Prime Minister. That simple arithmetic is given a crudity by the fact that most of the progressive parties do not get along.

It's a particularly extraordinary factor in British politics, when you consider how close our progressive political parties are to one another - in their concerns, in their approach, in their policies. Those crossovers continue into this election.

Progressive Goals

All of the progressive parties share a commitment to tackling the climate crisis, with emissions goals set for the 2030s. The features vary, but include tackling energy costs for households and funding the reorganisation of the energy sector and industry to reduce pollution.

Lifelong learning is also a common feature, committing progressives to spending more to enable people to retrain during their working life, and adapt better as the economy changes.

Across the progressive parties is also an instinct to ease the burden that comes with welfare, including, in some form or another, a trial scheme for a basic income.

And of course, tackling the housing crisis is a key priority for all of them, with each making their pitch for how many and what kind of homes they will build.

As ever though, the parties have their differences. What primarily divides the progressive parties are their jealous priorities - and also their deep seated dislike for one another's approach to politics.

Priorities

For Labour, it is what they call real change - the role that public ownership could and should play in giving people a fair chance at a good life. A possibly expensive policy objective that has riled up a lot of people within and without the party.

For the Greens, it's the climate emergency. The centrepiece to a manifesto with some big commitments is £100bn to reach emissions targets by 2030 - much more ambitious than those of the other parties.

And for the Liberal Democrats, they have made "Stop Brexit" their slogan, and to the annoyance even of some of their own supporters, almost the single issue for which the party now stands - even when they might make meaningful pitches on welfare or education reform.

None of these priorities ought to rule out cooperation, but the mutual antipathy between the parties and their memberships always makes things difficult. But imagine if they could cooperate?

For now, see for yourself how close the two biggest progressive parties get in their manifestos, which we breakdown in these articles below:

Labour manifesto review, 'Real Change';

Liberal Democrats manifesto review, 'Stop Brexit';

and then contrast those with the manifesto, and the record in government, of the Conservatives, 'Status Quo';

How badly do you want the Tories out?

This election has all the makings of another two horse race - however much Jo Swinson may be hoping for a Canadian Liberal scale landslide shift. This country's two-party system is just too hard to crack without extenuating circumstances, and the Lib Dems have made too many people mistrustful.

Which makes Labour's determination to stick to it's majoritarian big tent attitude - even in the Corbyn/Momentum era - all the more absurd. Yes, Britain has a two party system. But it has many more parties, that all gain votes and all have devoted supporters who at times are openly hostile to the big two.

Not working in alliance with the third parties, and not working to break up this inequitable electoral and parliamentary system, is a ludicrous act of self harm by the Labour Party - which clings to the remnants of power, mostly expressed these days in the one-party-state level of control it holds over some communities.

Not that other parties have been displaying much of an appetite for unconditional cooperation. The Lib Dems have been trying to oust Corbyn, or deny him the Premiership, as their price for working with Labour. Meanwhile, the SNP want a second referendum on Scottish Independence as their price - one that is too high for most English parties.

That's not to say there has been no cooperation. Working in a small progressive alliance, the Lib Dems, the Greens and Plaid Cymru will probably be able to pick up some crucial seats among the sixty where they are working together. Taking seats away from the Tories, but perhaps also taking seats from Labour.

Labour need to be on the right side of these political alliances if it wants to get into government. The balance of support, in England in particular, means that Labour depend upon tactical voting for them against the Tories, and voters elsewhere leaving the Tories for parties who have a chance to oust them where Labour are outsiders.

Like at the last election, it may be left for ordinary voters, campaign groups and local party associations to work out the cooperation that the national level party leaderships can't if progressives are to oust the Conservatives and their damaging era of austerity and government-by-press-release.

And the damaging era of Tory rule must end. It's been a disaster for the most vulnerable, with the return of Dickensian poverty. Austerity is bad and there is no end in sight under the Tories.