Meeting held on Monday 19th June 2017
14 members were present and two gave their apologies.
This was the first meeting since the general election ‘won’ by the Tories, but with a hung parliament, after a remarkably successful outcome for Labour. High Peak changed from Tory to Labour. We started by thanking those in the Green Party for forgoing their candidature in order to support the Labour candidate in High Peak and noted that she won by about the same number of votes as had been cast for the Green candidate in the last general election. It was also acknowledged that many from Derbyshire Dales (where the labour vote increased by 50%) had contributed to canvassing in High Peak. We were sorry, however, that the Labour Party was generally reluctant to support ‘progressive’ alliances or tactical voting, which could easily have led to a Labour Government. We exchanged anecdotes about enthusiasm for Corbyn and commented that the Hope Valley really seemed to have come to life politically.
We thought that social media had been used in ways that supported Labour. This was partly because Labour made a particular appeal to younger people who tend to make more use of social media. But the election result was (like Brexit, Trump) very different from the predictions of the mainstream media (MSM), which had been so hostile to Corbyn. We wondered whether the predictions and bias of MSM being confounded would undermine their influence.
Our celebration of the election result was tempered by a concern that the Tory party is highly disciplined and we should work on the expectation that it will recover. What will its strategy be? How will it attack Labour? Is the ‘austerity’ narrative now over and might it adopt labour-’lite’ policies to gain popularity now that the ‘frame’ has moved to the left? We need to develop further the excellent policies in the manifestos of progressive parties and encourage Labour to be more open to collaboration with Green. This would be consistent with the more open, generous and collaborative style of politics that Corbyn’s Labour represented.
Progressive political parties also needed to address the problem that many feel that nobody listens to them. There were two aspects of this: first those who (like Grenfell Tower residents) speak up but are ignored; second those who (perhaps like many Brexit supporters) do not engage with democratic processes (like voting, pressure groups, community action). The disenfranchisement of the former group is a question of power (often money); that of the latter group is often a consequence of social and educational deprivation.
We were very conscious that we needed to plan for the next general election, although we have no idea when that might be. To this end a subgroup of us held a further meeting after the group finished at 10pm.