Meeting held on Tuesday 16th January 2024
11 people were present. Five gave their apologies.
We discussed the dangers of the rise of the extreme right. In UK the Reform UK party, led by Richard Tice, has policies (like raising tax threshold to £20k and more stringent measures against immigration) which might appeal to labour voters in ‘Red Wall’ constituencies. While we thought it unlikely that they would gain seats in next year’s General Election, if proportional representation were installed, they could gain considerable support. Such policies also make it difficult to distinguish ‘right’ and ‘left’, particularly when the Labour Party seems more keen to attract Tory voters than appeal to concerns to reduce wealth inequality. Some discontent was expressed at a very recent leaflet advertising the High Peak Labour candidate which, with its prominent Union flags on both pictures, appeared more like a poster for a right wing party than one of the left.
The only clear policy of Starmer that we were able to identify was a concern to create ‘growth’. But which party is not keen to create growth? And whose growth is being referred to: the growth in expensive property prices or growth in workers wages?
We were concerned at the fragility of democracy which is increasingly threaten by authoritarianism, especially (but not only) in U.S. At the same time the underprivileged classes are increasingly becoming disenfranchised (q.v. identity documents required to vote in UK even though there is virtually no evidence of voter fraud).
One reason for this appears to be that democracies have increasingly failed to support public services (health, transport, libraries, etc), or to put a break on rapidly rising wealth inequality. In such a climate there appears to be considerable lack of a sense of agency amongst large portions of the public who see no point in voting as “all politicians are the same”. This feeling of helplessness provides the ground for populist parties which seem, at present, to be from the political ‘right’. The proportion of the public who give any thought at all to politics is a very tiny minority.
This lack of agency in the community at large appears to be reflected in the Labour Party as an organisation itself. A tight control by the centre of the party gives an appearance of consensus around the Leader’s policies and encourages members to keep quiet if they don’t agree. Thus the very instrument of democratic revival – the Labour Party – fails to be an adequate manifestations of democracy.
The next meeting of Whats Left will be on Tuesday 20th February