Meeting held on Monday 19th April 2021
Seven were present. four gave apologies for not attending. There was also a Zoom meeting.
We discussed Tory government corruption and the impression that the public were not too bothered by this. We were alarmed by reports that Starmer had refused to sign a letter by other opposition parties demanding an inquiry, on the grounds that Labour does not support proposals coming from other opposition parties. This led to wider discussion of failure – particularly at a local level – of collaboration between Green and Labour leading to a feeling that the first past the post (FPP) system is not working. It was suggested that the FPP system is a relic from a time when the two major political parties represented the ‘owners’ and the ‘workers’ with opposing sets of interests. Perhaps our current crisis of environmental collapse does not fall into this bi-polar construct. On the other hand, perhaps environmental collapse will (like all other crises) impact more upon the poorer in society.
The Labour party’s concern to attract votes of the ‘Red Wall’ constituencies of the NE of England has led to a lack of identification of Labour policies. The only policy which Starmer has made quite explicit was his support for Trident, which many of us opposed. Or was even this policy an attempt by Starmer to attract Red Wall voters whom he assumed would support nuclear armaments for Britain?
We discussed reports of the recent report on institutional racism, which appeared to reflect Johnson’s view that there is no institutional racism. The ways in which the report appears to be blind to racism seemed, in itself, to be an instance of institutional racism. The Black Lives Matter movement had made demands that history teaching should reflect a greater awareness of cultural oppression. Such awareness is opposed by government which, when Gove was Minister of Education, narrowed the history curriculum further by making the curriculum more UK (or England) centred.
There was some positive reflection on how Biden appears to be making the climate emergency a central aspect of US policy. Reflecting upon how Johnson’s success in the last election was a consequence of having a clear simple message – Get Brexit Done – the Labour Party should focus on what its clear message should be rather than attempting to placate some supposed constituency of conservative labour traditionalists. Some simple statement involving equality and climate, perhaps. We were unsure, however, whether the idea of ‘equality’ was popular. Did we not live in a society that celebrated inequality? To what extent do the public want to be more ‘equal’? Connecting the ideas of inequality and climate justice, we wondered whether climate injustice was not itself an instance of institutional racism.
The next Face to Face meeting of What Left will be held outdoors in the same place on 17th May, when outdoor meetings are no longer limited to six people.