How cooked is the British left?
In 2017 the British left almost won power for the first time in generations. Since then it's been routed at every turn.
Now that the British left seems further from power than it’s ever been, it seems incredible to think that a genuinely left-wing Labour leadership was just a few thousand votes away from winning a general election just seven years ago.
Ever since that high water mark, the left has suffered defeat after defeat.
In the aftermath of the 2017 Corbyn surge, social media companies changed their algorithms to dramatically reduce the reach of the independent left-wing media outlets that dominated the online election coverage.
Pages like Another Angry Voice and Evolve Politics that used to get hundreds of thousands of shares and literally millions of engagements have had their reach throttled so dramatically that they can no longer even reach most of the people who actually follow their pages, let alone millions of others.
Jeremy Corbyn was relentlessly smeared as some kind of despicable racist and lumbered with the electoral millstone of relitigating the interminable Brexit chaos with a "sore loser" referendum, which led to his downfall in 2019.
Keir Starmer brazenly lied his way into the Labour leadership by promising Corbynism without Corbyn, before binning all of his pledges on issues like public ownership (rail, water, energy, NHS), ethical foreign policy, abolition of the House of Lords, free university education, and pluralism in the Labour Party, then surrounding himself with the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation hard-right of the party.
The genuine left of the Labour Party has been subjected to marginalisation, purges, and expulsions, and the surviving members of Labour’s left-wing Socialist Campaign Group live in fear of Starmer’s vindictive retribution if they ever step out of line by taking genuinely left-wing positions.
Even the moderately left-wing SNP is in retreat in Scotland and playing musical chairs with the party leadership.
There are however a few small glimmers of hope. The Green Party achieved by far their best General Election result ever in 2024 with almost two million votes, but thanks to Britain’s archaic and unrepresentative voting system, that only amounted to 4 MPs out of 650 (a return of 0.6% of MPs for well over 6% of the vote).
Several independent candidates also won seats at the 2024 General Election, defeating atrocious Labour right-wingers like Thangam Debbonaire and Jonathan Ashworth.
The big problem for the left isn’t that left-wing policies are unpopular, it’s that the left is simply locked out of Westminster politics and the media.
A June 2024 YouGov poll found that support for public ownership has increased dramatically since 2017, with overwhelming majorities in favour of public ownership of schools, water, energy, public transport, mail, and the NHS.
Despite the overwhelming popularity of public ownership, Keir Starmer has turned the Labour Party into a right-wing party that vehemently resists it, with even its plan to "renationalise" the railways a deceptive sham to protect the interests of private rail freight companies and the obscene profiteering train leasing companies.
Even when the case for renationalisation is absolutely compelling, as with England’s privatised water companies that have extracted £70billion+ in profits whilst loading the companies up with unpayable debts, and pumping raw sewage into our rivers and coastal waters to save themselves the cost of treating it, Starmer’s Labour are implacably opposed to giving the British public what they want, and taking them back into public ownership.
It’s clear that Keir Starmer and his right-wing backers are intent on continuing the same Tory agenda of austerity, privatisation mania, welfare vandalism, and managed decline, and most people know it. A recent poll found that 63% of people believe that Labour in government "feels like more of the same".
The problem isn’t that traditional left-wing ideas like public ownership, decent pay, workers’ rights, quality education, investment economics, affordable housing, and a functional social safety net have become unpopular, it’s that proponents of these views have been systematically marginalised from the political system and across conventional media and social media alike.
The British left has failed in multiple regards, not least in their seeming inability to convey the popular ideas that most British people support, instead allowing themselves to be falsely portrayed as ultra-woke culture warriors, Jew-hating racists, economic daydreamers, etc. by the seethingly hostile media and political establishment.
Admittedly it’s difficult to get your message across when the means of communication are utterly dominated by hard-right billionaire capitalists (capitalist media outlets and social media platforms) and the establishment order itself (BBC), but there’s no real excuse for the lack of development of alternative left-leaning social media platforms, or a left-leaning non-profit subscription processor.
If the British left can’t even organise the tools to establish a foothold in the modern mediasphere, how can they expect to build a popular movement capable of achieving the power required to implement their popular policies at the national level?
It’s impossible not to include myself in this criticism, given that I rely on capitalist platforms for my publishing my work and accepting donations (Facebook, Substack, PayPal, Twitter, GoCardless, and most recently Bluesky).
Consider the tens of millions the radical right are spending every year on loss-making propaganda outfits like GBNews; the $44 billion Elon Musk spent to turn Twitter into a far-right misinformation machine; and the vast sums of money that radical-right US billionaires have spent supporting extreme-right agitators like "Tommy Robinson", and it’s clear what the left is up against.
As vital as individual subscriptions and donations via the likes of PayPal, Substack, Patreon, and KoFi are to left-leaning content creators, they’re a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the £billions that the right are throwing around to influence the direction of political discourse.
The British left doesn’t just need to build a political movement that’s capable of winning votes in elections, it also needs to find ways of communicating with the public that can’t just be algorithmically repressed by capitalist operators when their ideas become inconveniently popular.
Obviously this is a lot easier said than done, but as long as the British left remains entirely reliant upon capitalist means of communication to spread their message, they’ll remain susceptible to content suppression, marginalisation, and gross misrepresentation.
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It remains the same here when people like Jill Stein, Bernie Sanders and Cornell West are smeared, stifled and denied representation through any means possible.
When trying to summarise politics to my children I came up with a phrase that gets to the core of what you are articulating:
"Politics is the accumulation and application of vast amounts of wealth to bring about a particular outcome".
IMO, the left keeps getting its arse kicked, since at least from the early '80s, because it doesn't really understand this principle. The left often tries to occupy the moral high ground and put forward convincing arguments when it is really about money. It's why the unions were successful in their early history, but flounder now because they can't compete with the billions.
It's not just about who owns the media or buying politicians and algorithms . There's think tanks and vast amounts of hidden research and hard science that's being bought too.
If the 'left' wants to win anything it has to start tapping into the vast billions of corporate profits. That is to say, buy capitalism to dismantle it.