Our first post is an introduction to the main players at Westminster – the British political parties.  It looks at who they are, where they come from, and what they stand for.  This knowledge is useful because it allows you to interpret their policies better, and to judge for yourself why they are making that policy and whether they can be trusted.

This article has been written by someone involved in London politics.  For those dealing with the politicians in the devolved parliaments of Wales, Northern Ireland, and Scotland there may be less useful information.  Perhaps one of our readers might like to write us a piece about the politics of the assemblies?

 

A Users’ Guide to Political Parties

We can’t trust politicians to tell the truth about what they are and what they believe. In this, like in all things political, they speak with forked-tongues.  Politicians are keen to present their politics and actions as part of a sensible middle ground between left and right.  See here, and here.  

 

Not only is this not logical – the ethical thing to do isn’t a central point between two opposing positions, that’s just a compromise position, the ethical thing to do is always the ethical thing, regardless of whether it is a right-wing position or a left-wing position (or neither, or both).  As a thought experiment, let’s think about two positions regarding whether or not to set a baby on fire.  The compromise position might be to set it a bit on fire, then put it out.  Perhaps instead of setting it completely on fire, or never setting it on fire at all, we can set its head on fire every Monday? Whilst this is a deliberately extreme example, it shows that simply adopting a middle ground between two competing ideas isn’t always right.  

 

But the middle ground can be a useful place to be.  A voter might be willing to compromise on some things in order to get the law to change on others.  So positioning yourself in the middle might seem like a sensible position between two competing ideos, and catching elements of both.  Of course, this has led to many politicians claiming their politics are the middle ground – the Tories have recently made plenty of claims to be a middle ground, (though any analysis of their actions reveals the lie behind those claims).  This doesn’t just apply to the centre-ground.  Some people make a living from presenting middle-ground ideas as radical.  The newspapers and comment sections are full of writers who are say they are radicals and socialists, yet an analysis of their policies would show them to be social liberals.  So where do the various politicians and parties stand and what do all these terms mean?.

 

Let’s start with a bit of history.  The terms right and left come from the French Revolution of 1789, where the members of the National Assembly (the French Parliament at the time) divided themselves into two political groups according to whether they supported the King or supported the revolution.  The king’s supporters sat on the right hand side of the room, the supporters of the revolution sat on the left.  For more information on this, see Wikipedia.  Whilst this particular parliament didn’t last very long, the idea stuck, and the terms right and left came to mean roughly what they do today.  Right-wingers tend to emphasise tradition, private property, respect for the church and monarchy, increased powers of the legal authorities, reduced welfare rights, and unfettered capitalism.  Left-wingers tend to demand change, nationalised utilities, the separation of church and state, abolition of the monarchy, expect capitalism to serve the people if it is to continue at all, and support restorative justice.  Both left and right generally claim a monopoly on democracy and free speech.  In the US, right and left mean slightly different things – the right are the same conservatives, but the left are liberals – centrists, rather than socialists or even social democrats.  The increasing comingling of the European idea of left with the American one has helped to push left-wing politics to the right in recent years, led by Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US.  

 

Conservative Party

The British Conservative party, or to give them their full name, the Conservative and Unionist Party, is the most successful of Britain’s political parties.  It was formed from a split within the old Tory Party back in 1834, and when that Party dissolved their name was used as a nickname for the Conservatives.  The old Tory Party (Tory is an anglicised Irish word, torai meaning ‘robber’, intended as an insult but adopted ironically by a group of aristocratic parliamentarians to describe themselves) was a party of the landed aristocracy, whilst the Conservative Party aimed to be a party for both the aristocracy and the wealthy middle-class merchants. In terms of the modern Conservative Party, there are a number of things that all Tories believe.

• The monarchy.  There isn’t a place in the Conservative Party for republicans.
• The Union.  They believe that Britain should be united, that England, Wales, NI, and Scotland are all part of one united state and should not be independent states.  Many Conservatives advocate for increased devolution of powers to England, where they have a majority, to prevent Scottish and Welsh politicians from helping to oppose their bills.  
• Capitalism.  All Conservatives are enthusiastic capitalists.  But!  The Conservative Party has a slightly complex relationship with capitalism.  Some Tories subscribe to a philosophy called one-nation conservatism.  These Tories believe that capitalism should be a benevolent master to the working classes.  Thus one-nation conservatives want a more gentle roll-back of state-funded services, as opposed to a strict one.  They believe in reducing the country’s spend on education, health, and welfare, rather than removing it completely.  One-nation conservatism arose as a response to the rise of socialism, as an attempt to co-opt the working classes into conservatism. Other Tories believe in a philosophy known as the New Right.  They don’t believe that capitalism has any duties towards the less privileged and argue that the state should exist only to provide security and that all other services should be privatised and provided based on ability to pay.  This philosophy is often known in the UK as Thatcherism or neo-liberalism (or which more later).  Sometimes Tories of the New Right, such as David Cameron, try to present themselves as One-nation conservatives, or are presented as such by their supporters.   
  • Neo-liberalism can be confusing.  For many people liberalism means social liberalism – tolerance, multiculturalism, protection of minority rights and that sort of thing, but this is a modern (and slightly dishonest) use of the term.  In this case liberal means liberalisation.  This means the removal of laws restricting trade.  These laws might be protectionist in origin (which means tariffs put on imported goods to prevent undercutting British manufacturing), or they might be health and safety laws, working rights, minimum pay rates, or laws preventing exploitation.  Neo-liberals see people as possible markets to exploit, and as such many are enthusiastic supporters of diversity. There’s no use cutting someone out of the opportunity to give you their money!  Here is a good example of Barclays Bank sponsoring Gay Pride and encouraging attendees to use Barclays’ own payment app to donate money and buy stuff.  Thus capitalists can appropriate causes and profit that way.

 

• Hierarchies.  Conservatives expect ‘natural hierarchies’ to be respected.  They think that the natural order of things is having Conservatives and their friends at the top. They would argue that they have experience of leadership and thus are best suited to lead.  They argue that the best people rise to the top, and thus the upper classes and those who make a lot of money must be the best people.  The obvious flipside of this is that the poor are poor because of their own failings.

• Law and order, and the use of the police and prisons to keep offenders in line.
• Private property.  Land and businesses should be owned by the private sector, for the benefit of the owners.  There should be minimal state intervention to direct this.  This doesn’t seem to apply to payments from the state to landowners in the form of unconditional subsidies, which Conservatives are strong advocates of.  Conservatives advocate property ownership, and claim that their policies encourage this, though this has been achieved not by building affordable private housing, but instead by cheaply selling council housing.  This has made a few people homeowners at the expense of those who are not, rather than at the expense of conservative voters and supporters.
• There is currently (and has been since the 80s) a division amongst Conservatives between nationalist conservatives (who believe that the British economy should serve British businesses, and that the British parliament should control Britain), and the neo-liberals / Thatcherite / New Right (who believe that the needs of big business and international corporations should come first).  You will see this in the divisions over the EU, and Britain’s place in it.  The EU Referendum was given to the nationalists in exchange for their support for David Cameron.  The EU is one of the world’s biggest and most powerful trade blocs (that is, a group of countries who have agreed to trade with each other at favourable terms and act as a single unified body when dealing with outsiders), but some Tories found themselves poorer and/or politically weaker once we were in it.  In particular the old landowners, and those who owned small-to-medium businesses that were now undercut by European businesses found themselves not doing so well.  Similarly many Conservatives felt that Britain was made weaker (militarily and in terms of bargaining power) by allying itself with Europe rather than with the USA.  The majority of party donors however do very well out of Europe and want that to continue.
• Support for the Established Church.  The Conservative Party are defenders of the Church of England, and seek to maintain the church’s power and privileges.  Whilst there are groups within the party that represent Catholic, Muslim, Jewish etc Tories, as Conservative Party members thet sign up to the maintenance of the establishment.  They support the existence of the Lords Spiritual – the 26 bishops of the Church of England who sit in the House of Lords alongside the Lords themselves.  No other religious or political groups in the UK have automatic representatives at Westminster, not even the Conservatives themselves.  In addition, former Lords Spiritual are invariably given life peerages when they step down, which allows them to continue sitting in the House of Lords.
• Conservatives seek to maintain the status quo as it is.  By which I mean, they wish to conserve or protect existing power structures and systems of living.  This defence of existing power structures is expressed by Conservatives in a support for traditions and traditional values, ‘how things have always been done’, though what these traditions and values are changes as time goes on  Under David Cameron the party sought to gain ground from Labour, by presenting himself as socially liberal, whilst still espousing right-wing economics.  This has been done by claiming to support equal rights such as gay marriage, paternity pay and such like (though both measures required cross-party support to be passed, showing that not all Tories were on board with this).  The tradition of tolerance has been introduced, to sell to old-fashioned Tories the idea of equality in law, and to present the Tories as a party of social tolerance rather than historic intolerance as has actually been the case.  Teresa May has followed this policy and it seems to be working for them.  

 

The Labour Party

The Labour Party was founded in 1900 as an attempt to unite the many different socialist and Trades Unions groups by forming a single party to try and get left-wing candidates elected to government.  The idea was that they would be better able to achieve parliamentary success that way.  Amongst these groups were the Fabians, a middle class intellectual group; the Scottish Labour Party, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Foundation.  The groups agreed to work together despite disagreeing on many issues, and this broad range of opinions has generally been part of the Labour party ever since.  Since 1900 the Labour Party have won just five General Elections outright, three of those under Tony Blair.  Labour is historically the opposition party, at least since the 1920s.  The Labour Party claim on their website that they are a democratic socialist party, i.e. that they wish to achieve socialism through the medium of democracy.  It may be important at this moment to define socialism:

“a theory or system of social organization that seeks to put the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of money, land, etc., in the community as a whole.” (means of production is a term that means the wealth and the land and equipment necessary to create products and thus further wealth).  All socialists believe in some form of shared ownership, and that success is based on giving a high standard of living to all the people rather than just delivering profits to shareholders and business owners.  

 

The Labour Party once had a commitment to socialism as part of their constitution, but this was removed in 1995 and replaced with a commitment to “realising our true potential”.  That isn’t a joke.  At this point the Labour Party stopped being a democratic socialist party and became instead a social democratic party.

 

.   Wikipedia offer a fantastic definition of social democracy.  Social democracy is a political, social and economic ideology that supports economic and social interventions to promote social justice within the framework of a capitalist economy.  The important thing is that you can’t be both socialist and capitalist.  Either you are committed to public ownership or to private ownership.  A mixed economy, where some things are owned by the state, and others are owned by private individuals or corporations, is not socialism.  Many capitalists argue that it is socialism, of course.  The internet is full of right-wing commentators denouncing David Cameron as a socialist!  Around here we deal with facts!  Many Labour MPs would be happy to be described as social democrats. Social democracy looks good on paper, but has failed to deliver since the glory days of the 1950s post-war consensus – when even the Tories came to agree that the NHS and welfare state were desirable.  Sadly there has been little in the way of victory since then and the Labour party has only had one winning idea ever since…

 

Under Tony Blair the Labour Party adopted a political philosophy called the Third Way. This was an import from the USA, where it was a feature of the Clinton presidency.  The Third Way is a combination of Thatcherite economic policy and limited social liberalism.  Thus privatisations and military spending happened, alongside tax cuts for the wealthy.  But also there was increased spending on wider welfare issues such as supported housing and early years care.  

Cynics might argue that the increased spending on welfare mostly ended up in the hands of the private sector, and that this was merely a socially acceptable transfer of public funds into private hands.  

Blairites make a number of claims about the Blair premiership, for example they claim to have lifted a million households out of poverty (though almost none of these were able to stay out of poverty for a significant period), and they point to increased NHS funding (some of which went of PFI projects that awarded huge and unsustainable contracts to private companies and are now a major cause of NHS underfunding).   See here for a news story about PFI /PPP projects in Scotland that show how utterly foolish it was allowing the private sector to build schools and hospitals,

The real argument for the Third Way was that it allowed the Labour Party to get into power, by promising huge profits to businesses in exchange for allowing some welfare reforms.  This is what Labour “moderates” and newspaper columnists mean when they talk about being electable.  When the billionaires who own the big global media companies wanted more profits they switched their support back to the Conservative party, and here we are.  No modern Labour party will be successful without the wider media onside.   Gordon Brown didn’t have it, nor did Ed Miliband.  Jeremy Corbyn certainly doesn’t have it.  This is a fact that many of Corbyn’s liberal-left critics seem to forget – they seem to think that the anyone else will get better press than him, but they seem to have forgotten Ed Miliband being called a Stalinist in the pages of the Evening Standard, or Gordon Brown’s mental health being derided in the Sun.  Both of those men offered the same thing that Blair offered, but it wasn’t enough for the businessmen who run the country, and so they were pilloried in the press.  Whoever Labour members choose to replace Corbyn, whenever that happens, they will still get the same press until Labour choose someone who is known to the Murdochs etc as a person they can trust (to increase profits).  

 

So it is hard to provide a bullet-point list of unifying tenets of the Labour party.  Labour members and MPs represent a cross section of British politics, from enthusiastic neoliberals on the right, who would have fitted into early Thatcher cabinets, through to committed Marxian communists (i.e. those who believe that socialism is desirable and can be achieved without revolution) on the left.  Truely is it said that the Labour Party is a broad church.  The only thing that they will all agree on is that some sort of social welfare should happen somewhere…( perhaps, depending on what you think Mr Murdoch?.)  

 

Whilst the current battle over the direction of the Labour Party might appear terminal, it’s nothing new.  At every stage of its’ history, from its very earliest days, the Labour Party has been fighting itself.  Even during the glory days of the post-war consensus, when even Tories agreed to keep the NHS and welfare state, there was dissent in the ranks.  It is nothing new.  Labour is supposed to be a principled position, and as such it causes strong disagreements.  The Labour right have repeatedly purged the party of the Labour left, most recently in the early 80s and again in the mid 90s, but each new generation brings another set of naive optimists who insist that you can’t negotiate with power from a position of compromise.  Soon we will no doubt see them again removed from the Labour ranks so as to ensure that international business leaders can again set the agenda and limit the terms of the debate to ones that suit their shareholders, and we can all sleep soundly in our beds again  Those of us who have beds, of course.   Still, as long as we have a place in a shared shed room that a private landlord can receive the housing benefit on, we’re doing our bit to keep the Cayman Islands the British economy afloat and that’s what matters.

 

The Liberal Democrats

The Liberal Democrats are a party dedicated to liberalism and democracy, unlike the other two, who are liberal and democratic.  What currently marks them as different to the other parties is that whilst both Labour and Tories campaigned for Remain during the EU referendum, the Liberal Democrats have decided to make their pitch to Remainers after the referendum.  It is ironic that a party called the Liberal Democrats are thus campaigning to overturn a democratic decision!  However, given that they committed electoral suicide during the coalition, committing it again can only benefit them now – they got nothing to lose by it!

The LibDems have a number of key policies that they are no closer to achieving now than when I was a nipper, but it’s nice that they try.

• Replacement of the First Past The Post electoral system with something better.  During the coalition they managed to get the Tories to concede to a referendum on the matter in exchange for LibDem support.  However, they were only able to get the referendum to be about replacing FPTP with AV, which is the only other election system that is as bad as FPTP.  The public couldn’t see the point in replacing one undemocratic system with one that is just as bad and more complicated.  Replacing FPTP with Proportional Representation would generally be a good thing for democracy, though it would give more power to UKIP, so it would be a bad thing for humanity.  Hopefully there will be a Lib-Lab pact at some point in the future and we’ll get a change to PR, but I doubt it.  
• An elected House of Lords.  This is something Labour promised during the Blair years but somehow it never happened.  Whilst removing most of the hereditary peerages was a start, appointed Lords make a nonsense of the whole thing.  Each new Prime Minister just appoints all the Lords they need to get a majority there.  It’s a gravy train unlike almost any other in the UK.  £300 just for turning up!   So this is a policy that any sensible person would get behind and which won’t ever happen!
• The EU.  The LibDems are staunchly pro-Europe, and intend Great Britain to rejoin the EU at the earliest possible moment.  This is where the two separate liberalisms meet.
• Liberalism.  I’ve been avoiding this so far, because liberalism has many meanings.  The LibDems represent both main types of liberal!  They are social liberals and also economic liberals.  
  • Social liberalism is when you want people to be nice to each other and respect our differences.  Social liberals strive for equality of opportunity (and sometimes outcome).  They support limited state intervention to ensure this.
  • Economic liberals believe in the market economy – free trade (of which more later), limited or zero state interference in the market (ditto), and private property as the cornerstone of the economy -again, by private property, they mean that ownership of industries and money should be in the hands of companies rather than the state..  
  • Thus liberal can be both a positive social thing and a negative economic thing.  Most of the time you’ll find that liberals themselves want you to focus on the first when the second is the important bit – for example, representing their pro-EU stance as about human rights and multiculturalism rather than economic issues.  The economic bit is the important one.  All mainstream politics is critiqued by the relationship of the player to money.  If you’re not following the money, you’ve missed the important bit.  
  • Social liberals claim to believe in democracy, that democracy is good in itself, and that democracy is the best way of delivering good things to the most people.  This doesn’t seem to stop liberal politicians or governments from selling weapons to dictators and undermining democratic governments for big businesses.   This is something to do with individual freedom, which is more important than someone else’s right not to be tortured to death
  • Neoliberals don’t seem to care about democracy at all, seeing it as just one way of ensuring that they retain power.  They write a lot about freedom and democracy, and how freedom can only come from economic liberalism, but there’s nothing to back it up.  

 

Essentially then, liberals believe that the system works, but needs a bit of tweaking.  It is important to see this in opposition to conservatives, who believe that the system works and doesn’t need any tweaking, except possibly to ensure that the right people maintain power.  It is also in opposition to socialists, who either believe that the system doesn’t work, or is ethically undesirable (or both).

 

Both types of liberals believe that personal freedom is important and that this freedom comes from the ability to make decisions that affect their lives.  This freedom, according to liberal theory, is linked to free market economies, and is itself a good thing.  Thus a democracy is better than a monarchy or a dictatorship regardless of the actions of that democracy.  Thus someone choosing how their money is spent is better than a state choosing how that money, regardless of what the spending is on.  Social liberals generally accept that the state should make interventions where private enterprise is not doing so – so, for example, if no-one has found a way of monetising the care of the mentally ill, the state should step in to prevent people with mental health problems being homeless and / or untreated.  Both of these things seem good in principle – obviously we all want democracy and freedom! – but both of these ideas fail in that they treat the tool as the thing… that is, democracy and economic freedom are tools for achieving outcomes, they are not the outcome themselves.  Famously, Hitler was elected democratically, and the Soviets turned an agrarian peasant economy into a modern 20th century state and created the second greatest and quickest improvement in standards of living ever seen in human history.   Where democracy and economic freedom are not doing good, they are worthless except as excuses.  It is far better to live in a good democracy than a bad dictatorship, but to live in a bad democracy where there is no chance for meaningful change is no different, ethically,  than living under a dictatorship where the leader changes but the policies stay the same.  To go back to the Soviet Union, where there were regular elections but you could only choose between members of the Communist party to elect (sometimes there were others, but these had no chance of winning).  In the UK you can only choose between various liberal capitalists, without any other ideologies having any meaningful access to power.  

 

As we can see, all three main parties are economically liberal (though many Labour members and a few MPs are not), all three of them are broadly socially liberal (though some Conservative MPs and many party members are not), and all three have neoliberal strands running through them.  When you describe yourself as liberal, or curse liberals for enthusiastically propping up capitalism, it may be important to remember that liberal means different things to different people!

 

There are a couple of other players in the UK mainstream politics field that are worth mentioning.  The most powerful of these is the SNP.  UKIP and the DUP are the others whose policies affect Westminster decisions and thus the English political landscape.  

 

Scottish National Party

The Scottish National Party is a social democratic, nationalist party.  It’s important to make the distinction here between state nationalism and racist or conservative nationalism – whilst some of the former are also racist, the nationalism as practiced by the SNP is about Scottish independence -the pursuit of Scotland as an independent state.  So whilst they compete with Labour and the LibDems for voters, the biggest significant difference is that they aim for an independent Scotland.  Both Labour and the LibDems, historically strong in Scotland, do not – an independent Scotland would reduce both parties powers in Westminster, and likely lead to permanent Conservative governments for the rest of the UK.  For this reason many English and Welsh liberals and socialists are against Scottish independence.  Also for this reason, a Labour-SNP pact to form a majority government (should election results offer such a prospect) would be unlikely.  The condition for forming such a pact on the part of the SNP would only be either Scottish independence or possibly a new referendum at best.  Considering how close the last one was, and the shonky handling of Brexit by Tories, a new referendum would probably result in Scotland leaving the rest of the UK and a permanent Tory majority in Westminster.  The SNP are also a pro-European party, like the LibDems.  The SNP are economic liberals in practice, possibly more than social democrats, and despite the powerful and stirring rhetoric of some of their MPs are no more on the side of the working classes than any other economic liberals.  

 

Democratic Unionist Party

The DUP are the biggest party in Northern Ireland.  In most areas it can be regarded as allies of the Conservative Party – indeed socially and economically it is on the right of the Conservatives.  For the English political amateur that is all you need to know – factor their votes in with the Conservatives..  If anyone reading this wants to write a short essay for their Northern Irish political amateur comrades feel free to send it to me to stick up here!

 

United Kingdom Independence Party

UKIP. Where to begin with UKIP…  Whilst Nigel Farage claims to be neither right wing, nor left wing, but a radical, neither his politics nor that of UKIP are anything other than right-wing populist.  Free-market, nationalist, and anti-immigrant policies put UKIP firmly into the right-wing populist camp, and presumably Farage knows this and is lying to us.  In order to present UKIP’s policies as radical you’d have to believe that we live in a socialist state rather than a liberal capitalist one.  Sadly we do not, and this can be demonstrated simply by going to a shop.  Like the SNP and LibDems, the only difference between UKIP and the Tories is that UKIP are not split on the issue of the EU.  UKIP represent that small but significant branch of capitalism who suffered under the EU – while the larger businesses were able to increase profits and lower costs by entering the EU, some smaller businesses found that they now had to compete with businesses from across Europe.  Similarly, UKIP appeal to both civic nationalists and ethnic nationalists alike.  Civic nationalists are basically people for whom sovereignty and control of one’s own laws is more important than profit.  Ethnic nationalists are generally those for whom Englishness is categorised by their ethnic background.  Many of these people are active or passive racists, and the crossover between civic and ethnic nationalists is unsurprisingly high.  To understand UKIP’s appeal however,  it is necessary to understand that their supporters aren’t just racists and British Empire throwbacks.  It is necessary to analyse where (and who) the EU project has failed, and to look at how the EU has been treated in British political culture.  I will do this as briefly as I can – both of these are long essays in their own right so a short version is necessarily lacking detail!

• Firstly, since the 1980s British politicians have been blaming everything bad on the EU, presenting themselves as powerless in the face of bureaucratic oppression.  Thus a false narrative is created that the EU imposes rules and laws onto a country that the country is unable to negotiate or quibble on.  In fact British politicians have been involved in the discussions at all stages, and have had exactly the same say as everyone else.  And British politicians can ignore whatever they want.  The best example to show that British politicians do not have to accept everything, is shown by David Cameron’s simple refusal to allow prisoners to have votes.   He refused, prisoners don’t have votes.  So blaming the EU and pretending to not be responsible for its actions has long been a good way for politicians to shift the blame onto something else- the organisation that these politicians are mostly in total support of.
  • In turn this has created a feeling of resentment amongst parts of the British population, as well as the idea that things cannot be changed whilst we’re in the EU.  This narrative hasn’t been challenged (until recently, at least) in the media, and indeed continues to be put across by those parts of the media who are opposed to the EU.  Similarly, the narrative on austerity that has been used to justify swingeing cuts to social welfare has been adopted by UKIP, co-opting people’s unhappiness at Conservative cuts to blame the EU.  Both situations have been created by deceitful Tory and Labour politicians but exploited by UKIP.
• Secondly, that whilst EU membership brings many economic advantages, these all come at a human cost.  When a factory moves from the UK to a European country with cheaper labour costs, many people are made unemployed.  The UK’s shift from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge and service economy has least benefited the working classes, who have seen skilled trades and well-paid jobs disappear, to be replaced by semi-skilled and poorly paid work.  Whilst some have adapted and improved, many have not.  At every level the working classes of the UK, whether skilled or unskilled, well-paid or poorly paid, now have to compete with immigrants from all over Europe – especially Eastern Europe.  No other mainstream party have engaged with that issue, preferring to tell people that EU is good for them, that Britain is economically better off (which is of course true, but Britons are not universally better off – the wealth is not going to the working classes), to point out that they could go to Romania and get a job if they wanted, or to call racist those who raises the issue of immigration under capitalism, or to deny that this is happening.  This political refusal to engage honestly with the downside of EU membership has allowed UKIP to scoop up support all over the UK, and has created a right-wing echo chamber wherein racism is allowed and unchallenged.  The far-right and UKIP have a lot of crossover, with the far-right treating UKIP as a recruiting ground, whereby people’s legitimate concerns are fed-back to them changed into racist ideology.  One could hardly have worked out a better way of pushing people to the right.  

So UKIP needs to be accounted for.  They only have one MP, and he might be defecting back to the Tories soon.  Organisationally they are a shambles, with infighting and backstabbing amongst its handful of elected members and paid officers.  But they got millions of votes last time.  They may get more next time, taking votes from Conservative and Labour alike.  Not enough from each to wipe them out, but enough to effect marginals on both sides.  Also, UKIP have a newspaper on side, in the Express (and sympathisers at the Mail), and are massively over-covered by the BBC’s Politics team – Nigel Farage appeared on Question Time between 2010 and  2015 more than any other politician except Caroline Flint, giving UKIP significant amounts of airtime to make their case.  This is how the window of acceptable public discourse is pushed rightwards.  Farage interacts with the far-right in the UK, in Europe, and in the USA, they share ideas and plans, then he presents these policies to the British public who otherwise wouldn’t be exposed to them, on BBC tv!  Recently he has been spreading these ideas in the USA to Donald Trump, who presents Farage as an important British politician.   Like Trump himself, Farage appears like a clown, a grotesque puppet whose appeal is hard to see.  But the two are both much cleverer than they seem, and their friendship can’t bode well for British politics.  Where America leads Britain has always followed, for reasons mostly relating to our shared language and ideologies, and so a quasi-fascist strongman can’t be too far away for us either.

 

So these are the main options laid out in front of us.  Three flavours of liberalism, all dedicated to the capitalist economy, disagreeing only on the how little welfare to provide.  Is it any wonder then that some people give up quickly on electoral politics when the differences between the parties are smaller than the differences between that person’s values and the parties themselves.  Is it any wonder that angry people are channelled to the right, when the left has been so effectively silenced in everyday discourse, and centrist or even right-wing ideas are denounced as socialism?  But let’s not abandon ourselves to the moral cowardice of “not being political”, that most weaselly of get outs.  We all have politics – politics is just values.   Not having politics is the same as agreeing with the existing status quo, or refusing to engage with its critics.  And if you’re reading this Beginner’s Guide, chances are you’re not happy with the status quo!  

 

I hope that this essay can tie into the earlier one, to give the reader a sense of what is achievable through mainstream protest and political actions, and what is not.  Political realism is important – this is not defeatist.  This is to understand why change will not happen because you’re asking nicely, or because you’ve got a good argument.  Defeatism is doing the same thing time and time again and expecting it to work, or throwing away your energy on pointless actions that don’t change any minds.  Know the parties and the system and you know what you can expect from them, you know best what buttons to press and where their weaknesses are.