Labour Leadership: Corbyn returns to the leadership but party still at an impasse as Labour Right remain defiant

Jeremy Corbyn speaking at a CWU event at Manchester Cathedral in October 2015.

On Saturday, Jeremy Corbyn started his second term as leader of the Labour Party. And yet, despite a second large popular vote victory - actually increasing his already considerable mandate - the Labour Right has already marked out their territory.

Even the night before the vote, Labour MPs where making demands. Amongst them, a demand for shadow cabinet roles that have joint policy setting power with the leader (Sparrow, 2016) and for arbitrary deadlines for leadership reviews that will effectively keep Corbyn on permanent probation (Asthana & Mason, 2016).

For Corbyn's part, he accepted his new mandate with a conciliatory speech. He said it was time to wipe the slate clean, to put aside things said in the heat of the contest and strongly denounced hostility and bullying. He called Labour the 'engine of progress' and called for unity around what the party's factions have in common.

Despite paying lip service, the Labour Right has, from the beginning, resisted Corbyn and sought every means of undermining him. And all the while it has demanded that Corbyn must compromise - which, from their attitude, can only be interpreted as saying Corbyn must do things their way.

To be fair, the leadership of Corbyn certainly has plenty of issues - but none of them really offer the Right of the Labour Party any reflected glory.

Corbyn has displayed poor media strategy - which isn't about playing the media's rigged game, but reaching out to the broader public with a coherent message and making a connection (Jones, 2015; Jones, 2016); and, as Billy Bragg expressed concern, there is a worry that he, and the Labour Party as a whole, are offering 20th century solutions to 21st century problems (Bragg, 2016) - expressed not least in Corbyn's embrace of his party's standard issue rejection of pluralism, saying no to the prospect of a broad progressive alliance.

However, while Corbyn may very well not be the party's saviour, Labour without him has nothing constructive to say. All there has been is whinging, that turns quickly into very public tantrums at the slightest provocation - and even without.

There isn't even any particular effort being made to engage with the positives of Corbyn's short tenure. Rallies where tens of thousands turn up to see Corbyn speak and a tremendous increase in membership and engagement - these things are readily dismissed, when they should be engaged with and used as a platform to reach out into communities.

Trying to reduce support for Corbyn to a 'personality cult', even making comparisons to the supporters of Donald Trump (Manson, 2016), is malicious, untrue and counter productive. It blatantly ignores the fact that many of Corbyn's more militant supporters are part of a long ignored faction and are rallying to support and defend their besieged leader, who's public role represents their fragile reemergence.

It is also to act, untruthfully, as if militant ideologists are a thing that has never otherwise existed, is an invention of Corbyn and the Labour Left, and don't form a loud minority of EVERY political movement. The only difference for New Labour or the Conservatives is that their ideologues wear suits and wield greater media savvy - not to mention both connections and influence.

The Labour Right has, from the beginning, fought Corbyn beyond all reason, sense and seemingly self awareness, undermining at every opportunity - crushing their own party's steadily recovering polling just to take a poorly organised shot at toppling him. All the while, they have failed to make any kind of constructive case for how the leadership should be done differently.

As a challenger, Owen Smith offered practically the same policies. He merely stood as not-Corbyn - an embarrassing revelation of the Labour Right's apparent reduction of all the party's problems to be the result of one old democratic socialist and nothing to do with New Labour alienating most of the country.

And now that their latest, large and embarrassing effort to oust him has failed, they're wedged deeply into a corner. How, after such a deep and prolonged an attack on Corbyn's competence, can they proclaim to the public that they stand behind him?

The next move on that front, from a purely practical viewpoint, is an opportunity for Corbyn to take the initiative. To make symbolic gestures of addressing concerns about his poor approach to the media, for example, so that recalcitrant MPs can say their fears have been allayed and so save face - that is, if he really wishes to lead Labour as the broad socialist-moderate alliance it has historically been.

The only other options appear to be continued destructive civil war, that will simply scorch the earth of the Labour brand completely and render it worthless to anyone, or for one or both factions to leave the party - likely the Right, with the party staying in the hands of the significant emergent Left-wing, socialist and radical democratic, faction of which Corbyn is but the face.

As for Labour's future electoral chances? To say that Corbyn and the Left-wing cannot win is to negate entirely the point of party politics. A party organises around a set of common values and seeks to convince the public of their importance.

The reach elected office, a party must find a way of reaching people who do not know, or currently share share, their values and secure their good will. To suggest it is impossible to convince is to say there is now point to holding a dissenting view, or moving in anyway not driven by the crowd.

If a party isn't to stand with a set of ideals, that inform an attitude to policy-making, then there seems little point to having a party. To say - as Labour MPs have - that the party's duty is just to represent the electorate, is not an argument for how to run a party. It is an argument against party politics.

To run an organised party on the basis of just reflecting your constituency's views, is to run a populist machine designed only for grabbing power - turning constituents into passive actors rather than representing them, and alienating them from power.

For the part of the Labour Right, this is just a deeply-ingrained pragmatic reaction to the iniquities of the present electoral system. At every turn there are conflicts of interest that reduce accountability. An MP cannot be held to their manifesto if they must also represent constituents that didn't vote for them - and if they do, thousands of voices are excluded.

The trouble is that playing the game well, within the iniquitous system, produces power. And that is a seductive lure. However, to express a possibly minority and dissenting view, is not supposed to be about 'winning' power. It is supposed to be about representation.

Politics is supposed to be party candidates, representing the full spectrum of beliefs, being sent by their voting supporters as the people's representatives to an assembly where together they will build a consensus. Where they will build an inclusive compromise that reflects the country as a whole. It is not supposed to be about one party supplanting the system itself, to seize power by convincing enough people it is alive to all of their prejudices.

Adversarial politics offers power at a price. That price is currently tearing the Labour Party in two. One solution is to embrace pluralism, with a number of separate parties with common ideals are willing to cooperate - not least to create a more representative and less alienating system.

However, the most likely (and classic) compromise between the party's factions will be a middle ground between the Left's ideals and the Right's demand for 'electability'. The faction that Corbyn figureheads can achieve that - and success heals rifts faster than anything else in politics.

And yet, this inward-gazing uncooperative party-first attitude, that burns within both Left and Right factions, is unhelpful. While to the two groups squabble over power within and for the party, a plural society goes unrepresented and alienated.

Pluralism is more than choices - it is how we re-engage and build a real civic consensus

Corbyn, seen here speaking at at CWU event in Manchester, rejected the idea of a multi-party progressive alliance at the final Labour Leadership hustings in Glasgow.

The stalemate in Spanish politics, unbroken now by two elections and very much looking like leading to a third election in the space of a year (Jones, 2016), is the most obvious symptom of a divided society. But Spain is hardly alone in that.

Recent elections in the UK have shown British politics heading the same direction. The two traditional big tents are losing their grip and people are looking for other options. As a result, the broad social cross-sections needed to hold majority power - even under a majoritarian two-party system like first-past-the-post - are becoming harder to build and control.

The questions is, what can be done to avoid such an impasse?

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, the surest path to stability is pluralism. But getting there requires rethinking what is meant by pluralism, away from the simplistic image of a fractured multi-party politics.

The tendency in the UK has been to portray plural systems, with their coalitions between multiple parties, as a system of never ending deal making - in contrast with the direct and little-trammelled power afforded to majority governments by the two-party system.

But that deeply simplistic picture ignores both the necessity for representation and the true building of consensus. Under the two-party system, politics is squeezed and distilled into narrow establishment and opposition positions - politics simplified into two parties locked into adversarial stances that drive a wedge through society.

That reduces politics to a polarised dynamic, with no space for nuance. Worse still, policy has become a professional art, the preserve of a narrow group of think tanks and party policy officers, that usually offers watered down versions of public campaigns - ostensibly to make them broadly palatable.

But trying to stretch a big tent over a broad membership, and expecting them to fall in line behind a professionally crafted policy platform, just alienates people from the responsibility to try to find consensus and imagine grounds for agreement.

It is politics made more efficient, but robbed of its essential character: as a public forum for critical debate on how to shape our common space, where representation and inclusion are the priority not minority voices competing to 'win' the right to direct everyone else from their own narrow perspective.

It is one of the more disappointing elements about the Labour Party that it has consistently failed to grasp this idea - even under the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn talks of re-engaging social movements, but fails to engage with pluralism, with multiplicity, rejecting particularly the prospect of a Progressive Alliance.

Even under democratic socialist leadership, the party is still presenting itself as the self-styled only option, where the ideas of the Left - even when including trade unions and social movements of various and diverse kinds - must still ultimately be filtered through one single political party, pitching for broad public consumption, to achieve political expression.

What a contrast that is to how Barcelona's radical democrats view their task. Barcelona En Comu, not so much a party as a civic alliance, also talk of rebuilding the civic representation aspect of politics, but they are demonstrating it in practice.

Their municipal government is built around an alliance of various movements and parties. They understand their task in the civic space, in the movements and in the squares, is to involve both their opponents and fellow travellers of different parties alongside their own supporters, if they are really going to build a system of political pluralism - representative and inclusive

If Catalunya, the wider Spain and Britain keep down the road of adversarial politics the only result there can ever be is a society where the majority feel disconnected and uninvolved with their own physical and social spaces.

Politics isn't about winning. Its about representation. A plural politics takes as its starting point ensuring that people are able to see their views represented - whether directly through assemblies or a little more indirectly through multiple parties.

The next step is to rethink how these groups then interact. Rather than adversaries, these groups then hold a responsibility to craft, through debate, discussion and, yes, compromise, their various policy themes into a coherent shape that reflects the particular, distinct and plural society from which they have sprung.

Only then can people begin to reconnect, both with politics and with their civic spaces. Consensus is key. Representation is key. Pluralism is not the beginning of division and instability, but the only path to a real and lasting stability.

PMQs isn't fit for purpose. But it is the symptom not the disease

Week after week, the noise at Prime Minister's Questions has gotten louder. The half hour sessions have been drowned in noise growing more inconsiderate, more deliberately vindictive, with each passing week. Having to listen to the Conservative benches braying, on live television, to drown out the questions of the opposition, can be an exercise in masochism.

It seems pretty obvious at first look that PMQs is broken. And yet, it fits so perfectly within the Westminster system. That in itself is a sign of a much deeper problem in the British political system.

The essential trouble with PMQs is that it fits in a little too perfectly with the adversarial political culture in the UK. The two sides, the government and opposition, line up opposite to one another to, supposedly, hold the government to account.

The trouble is that this polemic is bias refined, a subjective contest where the government holds one view and thinks it is right and the opposition holds another and thinks it is right. What follows is a sparring match between the unstoppable and the immovable.

That contest is perfectly fitted to the UK's us-versus-them, first-past-the-post and winner-takes-all politics. Two implacable foes, coming from fixed positions having arguments that by their nature cannot be resolved. The government will do what it will and the rest is theatre.

There is certainly am uncontestable need for the public to see, in the flesh, what it is that each side stands for, argued for, hopefully, eloquently - maybe even persuasively. Yet PMQs is one the very few public moments in which there is an opportunity to enforce upon the government - handed extraordinary power in the UK - some kind of accountability.

However, when you cross the two purposes, the party publicity exercise and holding the government to account, only one of them is ever going to win. Accountability is sunk beneath bravado, noise and petty point-scoring.

In Scotland there has been attempt to début a revised First Minister's questions, changing up the system to provide more time for a calmer session with more interrogation. But even that is limited in what it can achieve.

It cannot escape a political culture of fixed adversarial positions and that is expressed, at its worst, in an exercise that is not supposed to be 'political' being consumed by politics.

Ideally, the process of holding the government to account would be something akin to a committee hearing. The Prime Minister would be brought before them and have to give acceptable answers to fundamental questions: What is your government doing? From where does it derive the mandate for that action?

The government's reluctance to put PM David Cameron into the election debates suggests an immediate weakness to this particular alternative: Would the party political machine ever submit to the Prime Minister and the government being put so clearly on trial? Probably not.

Right now the European Union's democracy is under scrutiny. But Westminster's shortcoming shouldn't be swept under the rug. Winner-takes-all makes a mockery of political representation and the adversary system simply reinforces the alienation of citizens from their government - keeping the real business far from the vigilant eyes of those who would want answers to the difficult questions that could hold it to account.

Spain shows us that to break old status quo and make proportional representation work, we need to outgrow adversarial politics

The Palacio de las Cortes in Madrid, home to the currently implacably divided Congress of Deputies. Photograph: Congress from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

In twenty three days, Spain will go to the polls for its second election in just six months. Its first saw the seats in congress divided between Left and Right in such a way as to make forming a government unlikely (Tremlett, 2016).

Therein lies the challenge of proportional representation. While each political party may be able to make its ideas and its membership more homogeneous, there ultimately remains the need to be able to work amicably with those holding other such 'purified' stances.

Over the last five to ten years, Spain's has seen it political mainstream collapse. New parties of Citizen movements have sprung up, and through the proportional electoral system have found themselves to be collectively a third force, along with the regionalist parties, that must enthrone a new government.

Yet they have found an old social democratic Left, that might make the more tolerable ally, weakened and shrunken and the old conservatives the intolerable but only realistic option. The numbers did not add up and a new election awaits.

In the UK, voices on the Left and Right have considered how the break up of the present political alignment, itself an incoherent and inconsistent series of alliances, might be redrawn with more coherency.

Tim Montgomerie has envisioned Westminster's political parties rearranged into parties for Solidarity (essentially Democrats), Liberals, Nationals (Conservative Christian Democrats) and a party of the Far Right (Montgomerie, 2016). And Owen Jones has argued that Labour's internal strife may not be curable, with a split into more coherent groups inevitable and ultimately desirable (Jones, 2016).

Spain reveals that this is only the first step. In their incomplete breakdown of two party politics, the adversarial division remain. The old grievances are clung to as a marker of identity. The next step has to be maturity.

If the future of British politics splits the establishment in four parties then at least two will have to work together to form a government - and it may not always be the ideal two. That will require the parties to compromise and cooperate, and to find a way to do so without feeling their identity is threatened.

The attitude of the Labour supporters or Trade Unionists who hissed BBC Political Editor Laura Kuenssberg does not suggest a group of people ready to swap the UK's archaic adversarial politics for a system based on tolerances and compromise (Cowburn, 2016). Neither does the unbearable and vicious braying of the Tory parliamentarians every Wednesday at PMQs.

For the Left, finding a way beyond this confrontational, intolerant state is essential. Achieving progressive aims is only becoming less and less likely to be achievable through the medium of one, monolithic, party.

An alliance of progressives, of different strands, each on their own coherent - trade unionism, eco-socialism, democratic socialism, liberalism, social democracy and other various shades of centrism - requires those on the Left to find common aims, and to work amicably together with other progressives, while tolerating fundamental differences in ultimate priorities.

The introduction of proportional representation and seeing the old establishment parties split can only do so much to improve politics. Without the spirit of cooperation, without outgrowing adversarial divisions, we risk falling back into the same divisive patterns.

The Fantastic Four reboot would be the perfect opportunity to put Susan Storm front and centre as a much needed female lead

The New Fantastic Four. Photograph: Miles Teller, Kate Mara, Michael B. Jordan & Jamie Bell by Gage Skidmore via photopin (license) (cropped)

This article contains spoilers for a number of major comic book story arcs...

Trailers released for Fox's reboot of the Fantastic Four seem to suggest that the new film will stay pretty much true to its previous iteration. It appears that Reed Richards will once more be the heroic protagonist and Susan Storm will again be the love interest.

If that's the case, it will be hard to see the film as anything other than a missed opportunity. At a time when anti-hero jerks are all the rage and when there is a real clamour for female led movies - particularly comic book movies - it feels like a chance missed to revitalise the Fantastic Four. Why not embrace Reed's more difficult persona and make Susan the relatable lead?

In Fox's previous iteration of the Fantastic Four, Reed Richards was made into a kind of lovable nerd, filled with childish enthusiasm for science - and even possessed of a sense of humour. He was obsessive, but not nearly to the destructive levels of the comic books.

This seems to be the result of trying to make Reed Richards the focal point of a Hollywood movie, which appears to invariably demand that the character be made 'accessible' and 'relatable' to the audience. That tends to translate to screen as a male character, exceptional in some way, who despite flaws can be redeemed - much like Wolverine, who Fox put front and centre of the X-Men, making him much less of the violent jerk he is in the comics.

The Reed Richards of the Marvel Comics is, however, a much more detached and obsessive figure. He ignores his wife and children to a significant degree, he can be brash and arrogant, and his utilitarian 'greater good' philosophical approach can take him to some very dark places. In fact, in the mainstream continuity, many of the Reeds on alternate Earths have become supervillains. In the Ultimate Marvel continuity, Reed Richards was written to become an outright supervillain - and one the most dangerous.

Even within the mainstream continuity, it can sometimes be hard to see Reed as anything less than a villain. During the Civil War arc, soon to be translated to screen by Marvel as Captain American: Civil War, Richards creates a murderous android that murders one of his oldest friends, his methods alienate him from his friends and even his wife, and he accepts all of it as willing sacrifices, on his part, for the creation of a better world.

Hollywood clearly has trouble with these kinds of complicated heroic characters. But there are tried and tested ways of making the most out of these characters that can be learned from TV. Two of the most memorable are Gregory House, MD, and Sherlock Holmes. Both of these arrogant, difficult and aloof TV characters are central to their respective shows. But they are offset by much more relatable characters, using different approaches.

NBC's House is written with the eponymous character as the one viewers follow. Yet the writers refrain from trying to humanise him. That job is left to the expectations of the viewer, which are frequently disappointed. He is surrounded by much more human, much more relatable characters, that give him frequent opportunities to rise above his mean, cynical and selfish attitudes. Yet he rarely does.

BBC's Sherlock lets the titular character step back, becoming - like the original Conan Doyle character - the subject of the story, rather than the protagonist. For that role, there is Dr John Watson. John is the viewer's window on the world and the filter by which Sherlock's action are interpreted and grounded. This dynamic allows the writers to pen Sherlock in a way that is unrestrained - allowing him to be a full blown sociopath and jerk.

For the Fantastic Four, there is the possibility of following either of these approaches, or combining them. Reed could still be the subject of the story, but there are ready made possibilities that would allow the writers to make someone else the protagonist, through whose eyes viewers see events unfold. That role could go to Susan Storm.

At a time when there is a significant dearth of female superheroes as leading stars on the big screen, Susan Storm is perfect. At her best she is a leader, a scientist, and the most powerful of the Fantastic Four - with powers on a scale that make her, maybe, amongst the most powerful superheroes.

She combines being a mother with being a hero, and is the voice for ethics and compassion, as a foil to the much sterner and colder Reed. In the Civil War arc she is dynamic, an active participant to who rejects her husband Reed Richard's methods. She saves, and later joins, Captain America's rebels from the destructive violence of Reed's murderous android.

Susan Storm also represents somewhat the journey of women on the big screen. She began as as a crudely sexist stereotype, the Invisible Girl - a passive character who was weak, almost, token powers - who was the attractive obsession of male villains and would regularly need saving.

Yet over time she took on more active abilities and a more active role. In the Ultimate continuity, she was promoted to being, herself, an accomplished scientist.

Reducing Susan Storm, a female character who would be a compelling lead in her own right, back to being the pretty love interest for the heroic scientific genius Reed Richards would be a crude and regressive step, not unlike that taken by the characters written for Jurassic World compared to its much more feminist predecessor.

Rebooting a film franchise is an opportunity to do bold new things. The new movie has already taken the positive step of changing up the ethnicity of Franklin and Johnny Storm, increasing representation. Taking the opportunity to give Susan Storm, the female lead, a story arc that makes her more than just a damsel or a prize would be the next big step. A big part of that would be to embrace a darker and more complicated Reed Richards, rather than attempting to shoehorn him into a conventional male hero role - with all of the typical resulting affects that has upon the roles of secondary characters, particularly when they're women.

Election 2015: A Shorthand Guide to the 2015 UK General Election

Welcome to our shorthand guide to the 2015 UK general election. This will also act as a master post, a hub from which you can reach our more detailed assessment of the main issues and the policies of the major parties.

• Conservative Party
• Labour Party
• Liberal Democrats
• Green Party and the Left
• UKIP and the Right
• SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Regional Parties
• Party manifesto commitments and the values behind the policies
• What history can tell us about the SNP's future role at Westminster
• Healthcare, public funding and the future of the NHS
• Economics - Austerity, Austerity Lite or an Alternative
• The European Union - is the UK's future in or out

For the first time since 1910, the UK looks like it will elect two consecutive hung parliaments. By denying the two traditional opposing parties the right to dominate, the electorate has opened the floor to a lot of new ideas, from a lot of new parties. Over the next seven days The Alternative will take a look at each of the challengers, in turn, that are hoping to get your vote on 7th May, and over the next month pick apart the big issues up for debate.

The election itself will be fought, once more, under the first-past-the-post electoral system. Voters had the chance to reject and replace the system in a Liberal Democrat backed referendum but - in a low turnout of 41%, about 19m people - the change was rejected by 68% to 32% (BBC, 2011). Voting will take place on 7th May. The votes will be counted as soon as the polls close at 10pm and the result will be announced in each constituency as soon as it is known.

After the counting, the leader of the obvious majority in the House of Commons will be called to the palace and asked to form a government. However, if there is no clear leader then negotiations will begin. There are a couple of options at that point. The first option will be a coalition government between two parties that between them is able to hold a majority. The second will be a minority government, where one of the parties - likely at this point to be Conservative or Labour - will go it alone on an issue by issue basis, with no guarantee that it will be able to pass legislation.

At present, the polls tell us that the Conservatives and Labour look to be stuck in deadlock - both holding around 270 seats, each about 50 short of a majority. With the Liberal Democrats looking unlikely to keep enough seats to tip the balance one way or another, a minority government looks at present to be most likely - for the first time in the UK since the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James Callaghan in the 1970s. The other option would of course be a 'Grand Coalition', where the biggest parties representing the Left and Right formed a coalition with each - something not uncommon in Europe, seen from time to time in Italy and in Germany, where the present government combines the conservative CDU with the social democratic SPD. However, the historical differences between Labour and Conservative supporters would make such a deal almost impossible.

Before all that though, the parties will have to convince voters of their ideas, or - as is more often the case - defend their record.

David Cameron, with so many challengers waiting in the wings to contest his leadership, needs nothing less than to secure a majority for the Conservatives. Achieving that will depend, firstly, upon having convinced the public that austerity was absolutely necessary, and that, secondly, it will produce a competitive advantage in the long run that will be generally beneficial.

On 7th May, the electorate will also pass judgement on the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition, and on coalition government in general. The answer to that question will not come from the success or failure of Cameron, but rather from Nick Clegg and the Lib Dems. Whether or not the decision to enter coalition has been accepted by voters will be seen in how much support, and how many seats, the Lib Dems are able to retain - likely regardless of the policies they put forward.

Ed Miliband, meanwhile, has found himself having to answer to the legacy of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Labour's results under his leadership will go some way to showing us if his party has managed to shake off the disaffection that saw Labour finally lose its majority in 2010, after thirteen years in office. Votes for Labour will also likely reflect a rejection of Cameron's policies - even if Labour have largely ruled out ending austerity (Whitaker, 2014).

These three, the traditional British parties, will this time be facing some new challengers who have a real chance to upset the established order. UKIP and the Greens, representing the Far-Right and Far-Left respectively, are both polling over 5% for the first time at a general election - making that five parties over 5% in England alone - and Scotland looks sure to be swept by the SNP, so comprehensively as to make them the new third party overall in the UK.

But the only reason any of this will matter is if you vote. Not voting is, as Nick Clegg put it on The Last Leg:

"It's like going to Nando's and asking someone else to put in your order, and then you get something you don't want. If you don't vote, you'll get a kind of government you don't want. So get stuck in there and vote."

If you want change, then you need to vote. Plain and simple. Not voting just leaves others to make big decisions for you, about your life, on your behalf. What will not be simple is figuring out who to vote for to get the change you want. Over the next week The Alternative will post a guide to each of the main parties competing in 2015, and over the next month on the NHS, the Economy and the European Union, filled with links to references, to help you make your choice on 7th May.

British voters prefer moderate Centrism... so why are Far-Right groups making gains?

There has been much speculation over the years as to the dominant political attitudes of the British people. That debate has been reflected in the long term efforts of the Conservative Party to rebrand and modernise (Watt, 2015{1}). It has been the driving force behind movements within the Labour Party, such as Blue Labour (Berry, 2011).

The answer is, according to NatCen's British Social Attitudes Survey, that political attitudes in Britain appear to be very particularly Centrist and moderate (NatCen, 2015).

A recent study has shown that voters are Centrists who pull more to the Left, or more to the Right, to restrain the drift of the government in power (Watt, 2015{2}). These drifts to the Right, against Labour in 2010, and to the Left, against the Conservatives in 2015, tell us something very interesting about the electoral chances of the main parties.

The apparently determined Centrism of voters turns efforts to stay in government into a battle to stay in the middle ground, and to keep away the perception of drifting towards more extreme positions. The economic policies of the main parties - as demonstrated by the debates over last week's 2015 Budget announcement (18 March 2015) - despite being at apparent odds with one another, reflect this reality by all fitting tightly within the accepted economic consensus.

There is, however, something paradoxical in all this: the rise of the far right.

It has not happened in isolation. Across Europe and in the United States, Right-wing and Far-Right groups have gained a lot of ground. From the Tea Party in the US, to Movimento 5 Stelle in Italy, there are anti-establishment protest groups springing up across Europe that have a distinct conservative overtone. In the UK and France, Right-wing parties UKIP and Front National have been the main benefactors.

These rising reactions - with their nationalist, religious and cultural overtones - seem to defy the analysis. While UKIP have yet to break through 10% of the popular vote at an election, in France Marine Le Pen's Front National look set to become France's largest party.

It is not impossible, though, to bring these events within the findings of the study. First to consider are the groups and movements themselves which seem to have two components:

• First, an anti-establishment vote, acting in response to the government or political consensus of the day,
• and second, the deep sectarianism to which these movements have frequently appealed.

Taking the assessment of the study as a starting point, it is possible to imagine - as others have done before (Bogdanor, 1983) - the mainstream of politics not as a struggle between Left and Right, but between the Centre and extremisms on all sides.

Most multi-party, majoritarian, political systems feature the Left and the Right revolving around a centrist, moderate (even liberal) core of voters, with those centrists swapping between the two options to Centre-Left and Centre-Right. Wherever these parties began on the spectrum, competitive politics pulls everyone towards a consensus - though not necessarily at the centre.

In Britain, and in Europe, the consensus is currently firmly within in the Centre-Right. In the face of the dominant forces driving that consensus - capitalism, globalisation, modernisation - the anti-establishment element of the Far-Right movement fits well within the expectations of NatCen study.

The harder to explain element is how the anti-establishment movement has fed the Far-Right, rather than the Left - as the study predicts. The answer to that lies, again, in comprehending the political spectrum in terms of the Centre and extremes.

With multiple parties, the emphasis is placed heavily upon taking a moderate course so as to have the broad appeal needed to catch the broad range of voters needed for a majority, or to present greater grounds for co-operation in the event of a coalition. While the system forces out extremism, it reduces political debate down to a few digits here and there in a fiscal plan.

In the UK, for example, the closeness of the main parties has effectively shut out alternatives. In 2010 the Liberal Democrats were seen as the alternative, not to Labour or the Conservatives, but rather to Labour and the Conservatives - as the keepers of the establishment. With the Lib Dems joining the ranks of the governing parties, alternative debate is closed down further still.

That exclusivity can breed alienation.

In France, it has been suggested that the concerns of the working class have been ignored - allowing the far-right to feed on their discontent. While the mainstream has focused on the politics of austerity, capitalism, modernisation and globalisation - forces alienating enough - the Left has focussed itself (so the assessment goes) on the plight of 'minority groups', leaving a section of white, working-class, men feeling 'left behind' (Willsher, 2015). The last US elections certainly showed that the Right had become deeply connected to a predominantly white, older and male, Christian voter base. That tendency is also reflected in UKIP's supporters (Goodwin & Ford, 2014).

Herein lies the dangerously effective power of the Far-Right narrative. Rather than a narrative of Right versus Left, it becomes a matter of this section of the people against the establishment - frequently depicted as a detached and privileged minority.

By calling out an establishment that is detached and corrupt, and deriding an opposition as being unconcerned or dismissive of the concerns of the majority, Far-Right groups are able appeal to people beyond those who would normally find the Right-wing brand of tradition, hierarchy and nativism. It feeds on alienation and discontent, and fuels it with stories of the threat posed by immigration and European bureaucracy to the 'traditions' of 'natives' (Skey, 2013).

In short, the very same political system that pushes extremism to the fringes, also fuels it with anti-establishment fodder when it fails to address the common good.

So can the establishment respond?

Both the Conservatives and Labour seem to think that the answer lies in moving further to the Right. Both parties have made efforts to step up their anti-EU and anti-immigration rhetoric (Watt, 2013; Sabin, 2015) and Labour has seen the internal faction Blue Labour argue that the British people are inherently conservative, and that Labour has to accept that and adapt (Berry, 2011).

However, this displays a misunderstanding of the social forces involved. The rising anti-establishment movement is being exploited by Far-Right sectarian, extremist elements, against the civic consensus - but it is not of the Far-Right. Moving to the Right would do nothing but reinforce negative attitudes and confirm conspiracies and suspicions about the motives and habits of the mainstream establishment parties.

The British Attitudes Survey tells us that voters in Britain are Centrist, and that they move Left or Right as a countervailing force to reign in extreme governments. This tells us something clearly: these movements are predominantly against the establishment and the predominant consensus, and Far-Right parties have merely been a way for, some, to express an opposing opinion in a system that has become closed to alternative voices.

An important lesson can be learned from the anti-establishment movements that have leaned to the Left - Occupy, Syriza, Indignados and Podemos. They have all carried a strong and positive message of inclusion and engagement. They have challenged mainstream narratives with the common good in mind, and have sought the decentralisation of government and the devolution of its power.

These ideas have to be at the heart of a reformed establishment if it is to retain its legitimacy as a facilitator of the common good in the face of an aggressive assault by Far-Right groups.

Second jobs for MPs, conflicts of interest and separation of powers

In response to the recent lobbying scandal, Labour took the opportunity on Wednesday, 25th February, to test the government by making a motion in the Commons to ban all Members of Parliament from holding second jobs (BBC, 2015). However, squabbling between the two main parties as to what payments or sources of income are considered a conflict of interest - Labour focussing on consultancies and directorships, the Conservatives on the trade unions - killed the chances of the Labour motion passing.

Under the present rules MPs are allowed to have second jobs, with the majority of those taking advantage being Conservatives - although two of the three highest earners are former Labour Prime Minister Gordon Brown and Respect MP, and former Labour MP, George Galloway (Moseley, 2015). Yet, support is low for MPs juggling their time between public and private commitments (Shakespeare, 2015). There are understandable fears of corruption and conflicts of interest.

These problems are exacerbated by the fact that conflicts of interest are virtually built into the Westminster system of government used in the UK. The Prime Minister is also an MP, the Ministers in the Government are MPs, the Speaker is an MP, the members of the committees are also MPs.

In the Westminster system the executive branch - the government, that carries out the business of state - is formed by members of the legislative branch - the parliament where laws are subject to debate and vote. Theoretically this ties the everyday business of governing to the will of the people as embodied by the parliament, in what is known as responsible government.

In the UK, however, this creates a situation where MPs, elected by constituents to represent their interests in debates regarding lawmaking, are caught between various allegiances, ambitions and duties. They are conflicted between the interests of their constituency and their office, whether just an MP or a Minister in the government; the interests of their constituents, their office and their political party, from which stems the opportunity to take office; and between the conflicting duties of the parliament, to make laws, and the government, to administer and enforce them.

Furthermore, the system creates a conflict of interest between Parliament and the Government. The Government cannot govern effectively without the majority support of the Parliament, and yet if majority support is given the role of the Parliament is significantly reduced. These pressures have, over time, changed the Parliament into more of a factional power-base for Government action, than a body of representatives, itself carrying responsibilities on behalf of electors.

With the private and financial interests of MPs placed on top of these conflicts, inherent to the system, Parliament becomes mired in competing interests. The Labour Party's attempt to ban certain additional roles for MPs is just the latest, with previous attempts at restricting various outside political interests including a government-sponsored lobbying law drawing heavy criticism (Mason, 2014).

In other countries, and other systems of government, there have been attempts to avoid the inherent conflict. The separation of powers has been used, by dividing the functions of government into separate branches - typically known as executive, legislative and judicial - to, at once, ensure that the different branches might hold each other to account, and keep separate the different functions that might result in conflicted allegiances.

That idea of separation, used to address the inherent conflict, might also be applicable to our thinking regarding the public and private interests of MPs.

While serving as Members of Parliament, these elected individuals are representatives with functions, responsibilities and duties, which they carry on the electorate's behalf, in the public service. For the carrying out of their role they are compensated, to the amount of £67,000, plus expenses (White, 2015). The aim of paying these elected representatives is to ensure that they were able to devote their full time attentions to the role, and to ensure their independence.

There are understandable and reasonable arguments for a public representative to be grounded in the working realities of the world outside, or to be able to keep themselves in practice in technically complicated professional fields, such medicine or law (Wintour, 2015). Whatever the fears of the emergence of a class of career politicians, it becomes problematic for those representatives to continue to pursue - beyond some limited practices - their own financial interests while in office.

There must be a middle ground, with some room for compromise and compensation for individual service, that maintains the independence of public bodies. However, while there are no straight forward answers, it is clear we need to keep competing interests separate. As we need to remain wary of letting the powers and functions of government merge, to ensure oversight and avoid corruption, we also need to keep the private interests of individual representatives separate from the public interest which they serve.

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References:
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+ Frances Perraudin's 'Straw and Rifkind deny wrongdoing amid 'cash for access' claims'; in The Guardian; 23 February 2015.

+ 'MPs reject Labour's call for a ban on second jobs'; on the BBC; 25 February 2015.

+ Tom Moseley's 'What MPs do as second jobs'; on the BBC; 25 February 2015.

+ Stephan Shakespeare's 'Voters support ban on second jobs for MPs'; from YouGov; 25 February 2015.

+ 'MPs' second jobs: What are the rules?'; on the BBC;

+ Rowena Mason's 'Lobbying bill passes through House of Lords'; in The Guardian; 28 January 2014.

+ 'Lobbying Bill to become law after Lords rebellion falters'; on the BBC; 28 January 2014.

+ Michael White's 'Straw and Rifkind were loose lipped but MP salaries are part of the problem'; in The Guardian; 23 February 2015.

+ Patrick Wintour's 'Straw and Rifkind scandal renews questions about MPs' outside interests'; in The Guardian; 23 February 2015.

Labour warns against splitting the Left, but there could a greater danger in not taking a risk for a better future

With the 2015 UK general election looming, the Labour Party has begun its attempt to shore up support amongst its fringe voters. With polls suggesting that it will be a close run thing, the fragmentation of support across the Left is a threat to the Labour methodology.

Labour's approach has long been about claiming control of the establishment and propping up it up, in order to use its power in support of their goals. Those electoral aims, of propping-up and shielding, are fundamentally contradictory. They leave no room for external compromise or co-operation that might challenge the establishment they hope to use and so requires, and demands, comprehensive majority support. As David Marquand (Bogdanor, 1983) put it about Labour theorist Anthony Crosland:

"Crosland took the traditional structure of the British state for granted, and failed to see that the centralist, elitist logic underlying it was incompatible with his own libertarian and egalitarian values."

Yet, even as it demands monolithic solidarity from voters, the party continues to be blatant in its hypocrisy by remaining as twisted by internal intrigue as ever. Former Brownites, Ed Miliband and Ed Balls, struggle amongst themselves, with former Blairites, and also with the more socially conservative voices in the party (McElvoy, 2015). They argue as to which populist policy to throw out next, in an attempt to shore up its wavering support (Ratcliffe, 2015), and they argue over what socialist economics really ought to look like:

"In truth, Balls and Miliband do have different visions of what a progressive economy should look like. Miliband has a fundamentally less approving view of the way markets work than many in the Labour centre ground (a whiff of the idealism of an American east coast seminar room is never far off). Balls takes a more pragmatic view that the best way to advance progressive goals is to allow the markets free reign and cream off revenues to use for social gain." (McElvoy, 2015)

In 2010, Labour warned of the risks of a split vote, caused by those who thought of leaving the party to look for brighter alternatives elsewhere. In the run-up to that election, the Liberal Democrats had appeared like a fresh voice, which spoke of an active and hopeful step forward. Labour, in turn, offered only a stable conservation, centred on the establishment - and they lost a lot of voters, though fear succeeded, at least temporarily, in quelling the tide before it became a flood.

Those warnings from the party and from commentators, in the face of a fragmenting political order, have now turned against the Greens. Former Labour minister Peter Hain has called for the party to come up with policy proposals that will allow the party to cover any potential threat to the solidarity of its support that the more radical Green Party might pose (Wintour, 2015).

In the light of the pressures being placed on the Greens, it is unsurprising that a lot has been made of the apparent announcement that its support for a Citizen's Income will not be in its 2015 election manifesto (Riley-Smith, 2015). In an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today Programme, Green MP Caroline Lucas said that:

"The Citizen's Income is not going to be in the 2015 general election manifesto as something to be introduced on May 8th. It is a longer term aspiration; we are still working on it... The Citizen's Income, as I've explained, is not going to be a red line."

Its apparent absence from the Green Party's campaign was revealed over a series of interviews where the policy was heavily criticised with regards to its cost (Findlay, 2015). While Lucas attempted to play down the party's intentions regarding Citizen's Income, other senior Green Party members have reaffirmed their commitment to putting the policy into the 2015 manifesto (Cowburn, 2015).

However, some of those among the Greens, such as MP Caroline Lucas, seem to be responding to the party's election possibilities with pragmatism. They are looking for the party to gain enough seats to take part in a left-wing coalition, and are setting out, ahead of time, where they draw the line for coalition talks (BBC, 2015).

"What we are going to do is to put forward some radical and visionary ideas which this political system needs so badly. What we are also going to do, with a handful of MPs, is to push Labour in particular to be far more progressive."

That means leading with their more modest aims, to give them the best chance of achieving an agreement. It also means learning from Liberal Democrat mistakes and not committing to things ahead of time, which they may not be able to achieve come May.

However, while the Green Party are making compromises to be a progressive force alongside, and not necessarily instead of or opposed to, the Labour Party, Labour continue to be pushed towards their standard, monolithic, pragmatic response: give us your vote unswervingly and we will save people from cuts and inequality.

The SNP too is now on the receiving end of whispered warnings (Rawnsley, 2015). The rise of Scottish separatism, and of the SNP as a left-of-centre alternative, has Labour scrambling to find a response that allows them to protect the establishment they deem so precious to their goals, while wooing back their disaffected supporters.

Labour remain clinging to their hopes of power in a dead system. They hang on to their two-party, us and them, polarised dynamics, and try to squeeze out the rest of the Left, with negative tactics on the one hand, and populist appeals on the other, and warnings of a need to act practically in response to the system's iniquities, even as they fail to press for reform of those same iniquities.

They encourage a resistance to radicalism within the Left, feeding the fear of loss; the fear of losing the ground claimed inch-by-clawed-inch, year-by-painful-year. Those tactics have motivated continued support for Labour, even as they have failed to secure those hard fought victories with constitutional or economic reforms.

Voters continue to point to the dangers of stepping outside of the safe routine for fear that the selfish other might sneak in and conquer. But there is a longer term danger of failing to reach, than in reaching and falling short. While the Left has hidden away in its Labour bastion, it has been suffering a slow creeping loss. The Left allowed the momentum, the initiative, to be taken by conservative and reactionary forces. The Left, in their fear, have succumbed to a slow shifting, slipping, seeping surrender to an agenda set by the Right.

The question is, after 2010 brought a fresh voice against Labour's stable conservatism, will people fall back into Labour's drudging march, or will they keep looking for new hope with the Liberal Democrats, or with the Greens, or the SNP? Or, can Labour finally turn over a new leaf after one hundred years where each radical step has been accompanied by a conservative one: civil liberties with authoritarian policing, public health with privatisation, devolution with centralised control, popular power turned into an obsession with establishment power?

If Labour is truly committed to the best interests of the Left, it has to learn to co-operate. The support for the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems, as left-wing alternatives, represents various kinds of idealist hopes for the future, all of which have been strangled within a political system that the Labour Party has persistently used against these left-wing oppositions to its own agenda.

Labour need to overcome that bad habit and get behind political reform, to reshape politics so that the Left, in all of its wonderful and diversely fragmented forms, can work side by side.

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References:
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+ David Marquand, in Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press, 1983. [Buy Now]

+ Anne McElvoy's 'The clash of two Eds raises the ghost of Labour past'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.
+ Rebecca Ratcliffe's 'Would £6,000 tuition fees be a vote winner for Labour?'; in The Guardian; 16 February 2015.

+ Patrick Wintour's 'Labour needs to be more radical to counter Green threat, says Peter Hain'; in The Guardian; 22 January 2015.

+ Ben Riley-Smith's 'Greens ditch citizens' income from election manifesto'; in The Telegraph; 2 February 2015.

+ Joseph Finlay's 'What Natalie Should Have Said - How to Fund the Green Party's Citizen's Income Policy'; in The Huffington Post UK; 1 February 2015.

+ Ashley Cowburn's 'Green deputy leaders contradict Caroline Lucas: Citizens’ Income will be in the manifesto'; in The New Statesman; 9 February 2015.

+ 'Green leader Natalie Bennett backtracks on terror groups'; on the BBC; 3 February 2015.

+ Andrew Rawnsley's 'Voting SNP is more likely to hand power to Cameron than to Miliband'; in The Guardian; 22 February 2015.

Australia's leadership challenge is just the latest embarrassment for the two-party majoritarian system

Last week Australian politics found itself thrown into crisis, as once again the position of Prime Minister was turned into the subject of an internal party squabble. Tony Abbot, PM and Liberal Party leader, has had his leadership challenged following collapsing ratings in the polls (Jabour & Hurst, 2015).

This is just the latest embarrassment for the old two-party system. That system - which revolves around two monolithic groups, with machine politician leaders, using cheap popular appeals and sound bites to build workable majorities, or to struggle over control of them - in the end merely demonstrates its own weakness.

By centralising power around individual figures, the focus is put on the squabbles for control over the establishment. Those squabbles, over often marginal differences, only leads to an increasing detachment from reality that alienates voters and shuts down open political discussions. The disaffection of voters and the narrowing of choice reduces politics to little more than a stagnant and unstable popularity contest.

This is not the first time that Australia has faced this particular kind of crisis (Howden, 2015). Both major parties, Liberal and Labor, have had a number of so called leadership 'spills', where the party leadership is challenged, over the last half decade. The Labor Party suffered through four contests in just four years, as Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd repeatedly clashed between 2010 and 2013 (Phillips, 2012; Pearlman, 2013).

Coming into power on the back of that Labor Party squabbling, the Liberal leader Tony Abbott was elected offering stability (BBC, 2015). And yet, even if Abbott survives this challenge, his time as leader is limited. His rivals are circling and his authority, or popularity, has been undermined (Massola & Kenny; 2015).

In his desperate attempts to ward off those challengers, Abbot has been telling the same old story, warning Australians, and his own party, to be wary of turning leadership into a Game of Thrones (Pearlman, 2015). But it's a tired tale, used to justify centralised and unchallenged leadership. Justifying centrality and authority, not on their own merits, but as a ward and bastion against chaos.

It is the same story in the UK, where a free political choice is suppressed by the two major parties, Conservative and Labour, who cling to power by scaremongering against third parties, warning against split votes, hung parliaments and coalitions (BBC, 2010). These methods are justified as a practical and necessary response to the iniquities of the electoral system, and yet they persist in their refusal to pursue the meaningful electoral reform needed to make politics more representative - all to protect the fragile balance of their system. And so far those methods have worked.

However, the two-party system is fracturing all over the world. The squabbles over power and the suppression of alternatives should, by now, simply act as a reminder that the majoritarian two-party system simply does not offer enough accountability or representation.

These leadership squabbles simply emphasise the detachment from reality suffered at the highest levels of power. In Australia, both Liberals (who in Australia are conservatives in everything but name) and Labor, and in the UK, both Conservatives and Labour, all of the mainstream parties are guilty.

These parties support a system that hands power to one person, who is surrounded by a small group that represents just a fraction of the population, and has been tightly whipped into an ideological line. People are alienated from control over political decisions. Even parliaments and assemblies are regularly cut out of the process.

There is a great danger in structuring the stability of our institutions around any one individual and the power they can muster in support. It has frequently become the means by which an isolated elite make serious and impactful decisions - affecting real people's lives - in ivory towers detached from reality.

We need to find new ways to govern. We need more choice, more representation, and governments that reflect the whole electorate not just the loudest minority.

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References:
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+ Bridie Jabour & Daniel Hurst's 'Australian prime minister Tony Abbott may be deposed after party revolt'; in The Guardian; 6 February 2015.

+ Saffron Howden's 'Australian politics: Why is it so tumultuous?'; on The BBC; 8 February 2015.

+ Liam Phillips' 'Labor leadership challenge - Gillard vs Rudd'; in The Sydney Morning Herald; 27 February 2012.

+ Jonathan Pearlman's 'Julia Gillard defeated by Kevin Rudd in leadership challenge'; in The Telegraph; 26 June 2013.

+ 'Australian PM Tony Abbott 'will fight leadership challenge'; on The BBC; 6 February 2015.

+ James Massola & Mark Kenny's 'Supporters say Malcolm Turnbull will run against Tony Abbott for Liberal Party leader if spill motion succeeds'; The Sydney Morning Herald; 7 February 2015.

+ Jonathan Pearlman's 'Tony Abbott faces 'Games of Thrones' showdown'; in The Telegraph; 8 February 2015.

+ 'Election 2010: Cameron warns over hung parliament'; on The BBC; 17 April 2010.

The 2015 UK general election leader's debate might not happen. But is that a bad thing?

As January sees the campaign for the 2015 UK general election begin in earnest, so too does it see the negotiation over possible televised debates become more intense. Following the impact of the 2010 debates between Prime Ministerial candidates, there are obviously those who want more of the same this time around.

A group including YouTube, The Guardian and The Telegraph have proposed to expanding the format with a digital debate between the five main UK-wide parties (The Guardian, 2015). However, all of the proposed debates have already resulted in a lot of squabbling.

The rise in polling support for UKIP and the Green Party has seen demands for the presence of their leaders on the podium alongside those of the Conservatives, Labour and the Liberal Democrats (Hodges, 2014; Morris, 2014). Yet, the presence of reactionary right and radical left parties at the debates are only likely to make the bigger parties less interested in the debates happening at all - no one particularly wants to be upstaged (Rentoul, 2015).

In fact, those in power see so little reason to voluntarily put themselves on the same platform as those claiming to offer even slight alternatives, let alone drastically different approaches, that the debates may not even happen at all (Rentoul, 2015). UKIP and the Greens may want in, but Cameron and the Conservatives, it appears, do not (Watt, 2015) and without the sitting Prime Minister the debates would struggle to be considered representative.

From one perspective, being denied the opportunity of seeing the five UK wide parties debating would be a disappointment. Politics in the UK already struggles to engage with voters, is already too remote and inaccessible, without then cutting off one main focal point through which the majority can stay in touch.

However, the short format of a couple of hours of television makes it difficult to ensure depth of discussion and analysis of the ideas presented. The ideas and critique are reduced witty or snide one-liners, jabs aimed at the subjective weak spots of an opponent.

Informative analysis - something needed to keep the people, who ultimately have to make the choice, well informed - can be given much more space when offered in other formats, like newspapers (print and online) and blogs. If done well, and presented well, they can even reach as wide an audience, if not wider, through the internet than might engage passively with a couple of hours of prime time television.

Whether or not we want to see the political parties debate their ideas, there are still some things to consider about the format. Do the televised debates increase visibility and engagement enough to make up for its fairly limited approach to analysing the facts? Or does it just present grandstanding populists with an opportunity to score cheap points with simplistic sentiments, and so to distort the facts and the argument?

We must be wary that, in seeking to increase the visibility of politics and in attempting to reach out to engage with people, we do not lose the depth and complexity of analysis required for the making of sound decisions.

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References:
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+ 'An invitation to UK party leaders digital debate'; The Guardian; 9 January 2015.

+ Dan Hodges' 'Nigel Farage is desperate for Ukip to join the cosy Westminster clique'; in The Telegraph; 14 November 2014.

+ Nigel Morris' '260,000 people sign petition to include Green Party in election debates'; in The Independent; 12 November 2014.

+ John Rentoul's 'I agree with David Cameron – there will be no TV debates'; in The Independent; 11 January 2015.

+ John Rentoul's 'Footnote on TV debates'; in The Independent; 11 January 2015.

+ Nicholas Watt's 'Cameron is running scared from TV election debates, says Ed Miliband'; in The Guardian; 11 January 2015.

Support for the Greens and the SNP is forcing change on the British Left

If the years since the 2008 economic crisis have shown us anything, it's that people are discontent with the old order. In the UK, as well as elsewhere, governments have struggled to manage sinking economies and it has led to crashing confidence in central national authorities (Nardelli, 2014).

In Britain this has shown itself in the slow but dramatic collapse of the two-party system. Across Britain voters first switched, in modest numbers, to the Liberal Democrats, as the largest left alternative to a Labour Party that had become a towering behemoth of establishment power (The Guardian, 2010).

That switch created the first true multi-party system in Britain since the Second World War. However, when the Lib Dems gathered too little support to achieve much other than mildly shackling the Conservatives in a coalition, their voting support fractured (Kirkup, 2014). Failing to defend certain of their key policies from Conservatives depredations have sent supporters fleeing to find new havens.

In Scotland, the SNP have been the main beneficiaries of the Lib Dems being sucked into the whirlpool of mistrust of establishment political parties, and of voter's loss of trust in Labour  (Carrell, 2014). The SNP have established a reputation as a more than just a single issue separatist party, and have attracted a number of left-wing voters looking for a new left alternative, with policies like nuclear disarmament, free higher education and progressive taxation (Brooks, 2014).

Across the rest of Britain, the Green Party has been slowly building support (Walsh, 2014). The party has persistently set itself apart from the other main parties, supporting policies like the citizen's income. Green parties are organised right across the European continent, and are close to being the first truly federal European party, but have yet to make the big breakthrough in the UK. In 2010 Caroline Lucas became their first MP (BBC, 2010), and since then they have begun to poll at similar levels to both UKIP and the Lib Dems.

The rising support, for both parties, is breaking open the old system. That break could well be a blessing for the British Left. The Greens and the SNP are opening a space to the left of the British mainstream, and it's a space where progressive ideas can make themselves heard. It is also the opportunity to reshape the left in a less centralised way.

Plurality, many voices and many perspectives, is the lifeblood of debate and is at the centre of progress. The Labour Party has tried to force those different groups to unite into a single faction with one voice, but in doing so has only strangled and frustrated the political left - even as they have achieved great steps forward. The emergence of a multi-party system, and the much needed democratic reforms that will allow it to thrive, should be seen then as an opportunity to be embraced.

Britain has seen elements of a multi-party system before, but not since the Second World War. The loss of multiple parties was not really to the benefit of the left, even as Labour managed to gather left-wing voters around itself. It meant an end to co-operation between social democrats and liberals that weakened both movements (Bogdanor, 1983).

The opening up the left by multiple parties could pull Labour back leftwards, and force it to embrace co-operation with other leftist groups. The fear is that a system with many parties will lead to division and therefore weakness - but it doesn't have to. If you can find common ground and find a way to present an allied front, you will be able to work together.

There is room on the left for the Labour Party, the Liberal Democrats, the SNP, the Green Party, the Co-operative Party and more, so long as they, and especially Labour, can learn to co-operate.

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

+ The Guardian's 'General election 2010: The liberal moment has come'; 30 April 2010.

+ James Kirkup's 'Only third of 2010 Lib Dem voters will back party again, poll suggests'; in The Telegraph; 7 March 2013.

+ Severin Carrell's 'Labour faces massive losses to SNP at UK general election, poll shows'; in The Guardian; 30 October 2014.

+ Libby Brooks' 'Who are the new members of the Scottish National Party?'; in The Guardian;13 November 2014.

+ James Walsh's '7 reasons why people are turning to the Green party'; in The Guardian; 14 November 2014.

+ BBC's 'Election: Green Party gain first MP with Brighton win'; 7 May 2010.

+ Vernon Bogdanor's 'Multi-party politics and the Constitution'; Cambridge University Press; 1983 [Buy Now].

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.