Labour's crisis could be the opportunity to create a Progressive Alliance to unite against the Conservatives

Unless Boris Johnson has his way, the next general election is likely to come much sooner than planned (Walker et al, 2016). Upon resigning, Prime Minister David Cameron called for a new Conservative leader to be elected in time for the party conference in October.

That would put a new election in November, at the earliest. Yet that timetable has been pushed up - maybe due to pressure from other EU members who want the British exit resolved soon. The new aim for electing a Conservative leader now seems to be September, which could put an election as soon as October.

With the Tories split, with the country split, and with some clear rallying points appearing - not least a sudden sparking of pro-European sentiment and campaigns pushing back at intolerance and ethnically-charged abuse - it would seem to be a golden opportunity for Labour and for progressive parties in general.

A progressive alliance - a pact focussing the electoral efforts of progressive parties from Labour to the Greens to the Liberal Democrats against the Conservatives and UKIP, rather than each other - is surely more likely now than it ever has been. The situation is critical and need for solidarity is great.

Yet at precisely this point, Labour's Right-wing decided it had tolerated Jeremy Corbyn's leadership quite long enough (MacAskill et al, 2016). In a matter of hours, Labour had fallen into so deep and disreputable a mess that party supporters of even the most deep convictions where sleepless with anxiety that the party's complete ruin was imminent (Jones, 2016).

So divided is Labour, it seems now that the two sides are reduced to squabbling over who gets to keep the name and history - even as the party itself appears to be little more than a hollow and decaying husk.

If the MPs successfully topple the leadership, with Angela Eagle appearing to be the challenger (BBC, 2016), it would alienate the membership and almost certainly trigger an exodus. The Left of the party waited too long to put its candidate forward and is unlikely to want to wait around through another Blairite New Labour experiment (Hinsliff, 2016).

However, despite the doom and gloom, it could be that a Labour split could be exactly the catalyst that is needed for the Left. For a long, long time the Labour Party has dominated the progressive wing of politics, squeezing out any alternatives and campaigning forcefully for themselves as the only progressive alternative - a power obsessed position that make an pact with other parties unlikely.

Yet Labour has now learned some stark lessons. Its connection with its old heartlands has been shattered, possibly irreparably. It chance of winning a majority has been drastically cut by its loss of support in Scotland. And the trust between the party's wings seems to have been broken. In such realisations lie the fire and motivations to finally push on and make positive changes, if it can be seized.

If the Left and Right-wings split, these lessons must surely lead to an electoral pact between them to avoid immediate competition that would only inflict further damage by splitting support in the constituencies (Jones, 2016{2}). Such a pact could form the ideal base for a broader progressive alliance.

With the Momentum movement, Corbyn and whatever MPs remain his allies, and the trade unions rallying around, for instance, Left Unity - a party almost ready made for such a Left Labour breakaway - and the Labour Right as something along the lines of  the Democratic Party in Italy or America, or New Democrats as in Canada, the argument for getting the main progressive parties cooperating would be impossible to ignore.

It would be much easier to imagine Left Unity and the Democrats being convinced to work alongside the Liberal Democrats and the Greens towards the common goal of defeating the Conservatives in England than would convincing Labour to put aside its majority ambitions - it might even be convinced to work with Plaid Cymru in Wales and the SNP in Scotland.

The Liberal Democrats and the Greens both campaigned strongly for the Remain side in the referendum, with the Lib Dems in particular seeing a boost in support, identifying themselves closely with the post-referendum pro-Europe outpourings (Chandler, 2016) - with its Lib Dem Fightback now seeing membership rise to 70,000, higher even than in 2010 (BBC, 2016{2}).

Both parties have shown themselves willing and able to work with other parties on the Left. In Wales, the Lib Dems are currently in coalition with Labour and the Greens have been arguing since the 2015 election for the building of a progressive alliance to end the damaging splitting of the progressive vote that helps Conservatives win (Lucas, 2015).

In the aftermath of a disastrous 2015 election and a country-dividing referendum, progressives need a positive mindset more than ever. While the breaking of the Labour Party would be as painful for many as the referendum result, there is a need to look even at a split in such a historically consequential party in a positive light.

The division of one creaking edifice of a party could be the spark that ignites a much broader progressive unity. If it leads to better relations on the Left, to more cooperation and on better terms, to a pact and an alliance that brings progressives together to advance, and to defend, the most important of causes, then even a party as significant as Labour is just a party, a means to and end, not an end in itself, whose interests should not be put above those aims for which it was formed to achieve.

Progressives need to focus on the future: The first priority is guaranteeing basic rights

Night falls at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. Photograph: European Court of Human Rights by Francois Schnell (License) (Cropped)

The referendum is over and Brexit has won. It might have been a flawed way to settle a dispute, with an awkward result that has split the country nearly completely in two, ensuring an outcome that will not be representative. But progressives have to push on.

The necessity now is to focus on future. Leaving the EU will leave holes in our rights protections, and the Left needs to give consideration as to how to plug the new gaps. That means getting behind a push for new rights protections above and beyond just legislation.

As the Labour Party's senior Brexiter Gisella Stuart was keen to remind us all during the referendum campaign, the UK certainly does have rights legislation of its own - gathered in a long history of campaigning and political reform (ITV News, 2016; ITV, 2016).

"It's been strong trade unions and strong Labour government which have produced that. If you look at any of the rights which we have, either started here or are better here. It is a nonsense to think that the EU protects us from ourselves."

The traditional approach of the Left, as Stuart alluded to, is to rally a movement, in this case the labour movement and unions, to build and maintain majority pressure for new rights and ensure the vigilance to watch over previous gains. That might be described as the 'democratic' approach.

What this approach is not, is a substitute for guaranteed rights - inviolable by the state, with the individual holding the legal power to challenge the state where it infringes upon their essential rights. Such protections are the 'liberal' approach.

In the referendum campaign, these two approaches - one democratic, one liberal - where presented to us as opposed to each other. The liberal guarantees where presented as unnecessarily safeguarding against ourselves, as an undesirable restraint on majority power.

Yet the point of both democratic and liberal protections is to check the abuse of power. Democracy holds individuals in positions of authority to account - as Tony Benn put it, "What power have you got? Where did you get it from? In whose interests do you exercise it? To whom are you accountable? And how can we get rid of you?". Liberalism complements it by holding the majority to account, protecting the individual, or minorities, from the wrath of the many.

Combined together, the democratic approach with the liberal, provides an intricate web of protections ensuring progress made, opening up liberties and removing barriers, cannot be lightly undone - or casually put aside in a moment in which they are considered an obstructive inconvenience.

With Britain's exit, the protections for the individual provided by the EU's social chapter - negotiated and enforced across all of the EU's member states in cooperation, presented - will be withdrawn. That creates a large hole in the UK's rights protections.

That hole could be widened by an ending of the UK's commitment to the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) - put at risk in the UK by Brexit, thanks to leading Conservatives like Theresa May, seemingly likely candidate to run against Boris Johnson to be the successor to David Cameron as leader of the Conservatives, expressing a loathing for the ECHR and a wish to withdraw the UK from it (Asthana & Mason, 2015).

For progressives, this marks out clear territory. On the one hand there is a need to reinforce that which the EU's social chapter previously protected - particularly the rights of women and of workers - and on the other to ensure protections remain in place for essential human rights. These hands must work together.

The only current effort to provide some kind of domestic level of protections had been the Conservative promise to introduce a British Bill of Rights. Yet that effort has never fully materialises, and what information has come out of the process has been roundly criticised.

Bella Sankey, Director of Policy at Liberty UK, stressed that 'British' Bill of Rights proposals represented a fundamental diminishment of the protections of our basic rights and put the most vulnerable at risk (Sankey, 2016, Sankey, 2014)). The Conservatives bill risks creating tiered rights, that fail the universal test and hand powerful vested interests the right to decide whether an individual should be protected by human rights, in order to make a crudely naked nationalist pitch.

Sankey goes on to argue that the 1998 Human Rights Act, which set the stage for British judges in British courts to rule on human rights claims domestically, is still the far superior protection. That makes defending the UK's place upholding the ECHR essential.

As for workers' rights - in Europe covering everything from maternity leave to fair treatment for part time workers (Inman, 2016) - it has long been an aim of the Conservatives to 'repatriate' powers over employment legislation, what the Tories call the EU's bureaucratic red tape (Syal, 2013).

Apparently to help reduce costs for businesses, the Conservatives have said they want to cut back these restrictions. What they don't disclose is that most of these 'restrictions' were basic workers' rights, public health & safety standards, and legislation designed to ensure the common market could function as easily as possible by all businesses working according to the same harmonised expectations - basically helping to maximise marketability.

Outside of the EU's system of mutual guarantees, covered in legislation applying to all member states, workers fall back to trusting to the reliability of political parties and movements to be a bastion for their rights at work.

Under Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, that has meant clinging to Labour even as the party has drifted to the right and accepted the neoliberal consensus. That simply trammels voters, restricting their freedom to choose - as splitting the vote between other parties, in pursuit of other objectives, would risk letting down the guard protecting workers, preventing voters holding parties like Labour to proper account.

The situation calls for a solution that gives people reassurance that their rights at work have protections even when absolute vigilance isn't possible. To that end, the next step for workers rights should be a charter that, either by international treaty like the ECHR or under the domestic protection of the Supreme Court, guarantees employment rights beyond simple majority influence.

Beyond the reach of the EU and European rights protections, the ability of citizens to hold governments to account is reduced to a desperate struggle - between Unions and employers, and for voters between their ideals and pragmatic necessity in their choice of political parties. The UK's time in Europe has shown a glimpse of how things might be done better, that the fear and tension that comes with the uncertainty of whether your rights will survive the next election or cabinet whim could be reduced.

The task ahead of progressives now is to think constructively about the future and build a consensus to set basic rights, in Britain, in adamant.

The Alternative Guide to the EU Referendum: A progressive response to the Leave result

How soon the UK will withdraw its representation from a European Union it no longer supports has yet to be determined. Photograph: Espace Leopold in Brussels from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

With the painfully, aggressively, nationalist suggestion that 'without a bullet being fired' the United Kingdom had declared its 'independence', Nigel Farage claimed victory for the Leave campaign at 4am. Tactless as ever, the UKIP frontman put in his claim early to define the Leave campaign's victory. It is important now that progressives and moderates do not allow this outcome to be defined purely in his or his party's terms.

The Left has to avoid ceding control over events. For instance, immigration looks like having been the dominant factor, trumping the economy at the last. Social tensions, that saw tolerance failing amongst financial struggles and their attendant fears, are clearly present in communities that have been unable to diffuse them with integration.

Progressives can't be sucked into acquiescence to the popular narrative that wants to take the easy road and blame immigrants alone for these stresses and pressures. Progressive policy has to be to heal divisions and to keep making the argument for public investment - in services, in housing, in jobs - as the real solution to the UK's difficulties.

And yet exiting the EU looks likely to drive more wedges between the people of Britain before it heals them. Not least does it raise the spectre of another Scottish Independence Referendum. Nicola Sturgeon was emphatic that Scotland had voted comprehensively for a future in the European Union - in dramatic contrast with England. There has even been a call from Sinn Fein to respect Northern Ireland's pro-European position with a referendum on Irish Unification.

With the result split 52%-48% in the UK as a whole, with Scotland and Northern Ireland moving toward the EU, and England and Wales away, there is as much of a macro divide in the UK as there are regional and local divides. Those divides will not be helped if the British economy takes a further tumble thanks to the isolation of exit.

The European Union itself will also likely suffer for this result as well. The Far Right has already made gains, making strong showings in France, Austria, Poland and Hungary. That sense of Nationalism will only likely be inflamed by 'Brexit' in the elections in European countries over the next couple of years.

What this result cannot do is end the progressive commitment to an internationalist vision of the world. The future for progressives, and the solutions to many of the biggest problems - on the environment, on corporate tax dodging, on managing international debt - remain international.

But maintaining an international view now comes with the much more difficult job of getting to work on building a new pan-European democratic movement, to fill the hole left by the British exit. A key part of that will be going back to the start to make the arguments, from the ground up, that expose the real and dangerous flaws in insular, nationalist and intolerant thinking.

Only by working from the ground up now can progressives break through and begin to change minds. Only from the ground up can progressives unpick the hostility towards Europe, and the false beliefs underpinning it, that prevents us from seeing our commonality, our common values and challenges, and what we can accomplish together.