Elections 2011: A good day for the Tories – now we must answer on the streets
The elections illustrate the tremendous challenges ahead of the anti-cuts movement, but we can still answer the Tory menance with a huge movement on the streets, argues Luke Cooper
It’s little wonder that attention has focused on the collapse of support for the Liberal Democrats in Thursday’s election.
They were heavily defeated in the Welsh and Scottish Assemblies and lost a third of their seats up for re-election in English local government too.
On electoral reform, the cause célèbre of Liberal Democrats for generations, they also suffered a bitter defeat. The referendum on the AV system saw it rejected by around two to one.
The enormous anger with the Liberal Democrats is certainly justified.
They marketed themselves as the ‘free education party’ since the introduction of higher education fees and regularly positioned themselves to the left of Labour throughout the Blair years.
But once they were offered a small slice of power, they dropped it all to prop up a Tory government intent on a terrible programme of public sector cuts. The students, many of whom voted for them, were right to feel an enormous sense of betrayal when they took to the streets against the £9,000 fees hike.
For all these good reasons, the Liberal Democrats have been resoundingly punished at these elections. But a defeat for the Liberal Democrats isn’t automatically a victory for working people who want to beat the cuts.
The Tories were expecting to lose hundreds of seats, because they were defending big gains they made back in 2007 when New Labour was at one of its lowest ebbs.
But their vote actually held up – indeed they gained 81 seats and saw a net gain of four councils too. They only narrowly lost out in the popular vote too – scoring 35 per cent to Labour’s 37.
Tories toast victory
Most of all though, the Tories delivered a victory for the FPTP system. Yes, the No2AV had the backing of large sections of the parliamentary Labour Party and the unions, but it was largely fronted by David Cameron, zealously promoted by the right wing press, and backed by the Tory millionaire donors.
They ran a demagogic campaign of lies, slander and sheer hypocrisy- presenting an election run under AV as a race where the one who broke the tape first “lost” and the loser “won.” In truth, the British system regularly allows the “winners” in each constituency to have a minority of the votes when a majority have voted against them.
The result is that on a national scale the third party tends to be outrageously under-represented. Back in 2010 the Tories received 10,703,754, votes for which they got 306 seats, and the Lib Dems got 6,836, 824 votes, for which they got just 57 seats. Whatever we think about the Liberal Democrats this was, and remains, wrong.
The No2AV campaign created phantom counting machines that would cost “millions of pounds”, they lied and said it would abolish the principle of one person, one vote when it would do no such thing, and they even had the gaul to produce a leaflet on how Nick Clegg’s “broken promises” would become “the norm under AV”. As if the electoral system would ever stop a capitalist politician breaking their promises?!
Thanks to this campaign and the vested interests of the political establishment, including all those Labour MPs who feared for the future of their “safe seats”, No2AV won.
The Tory millionaires could hardly contain their delight on the TV news as a system that allowed them to win majority rule on the back of 35 to 40 per cent of the vote across the 20th century was held in place. They even said the vote was so overwhelming that it was an endorsement of FPTP – not just a vote against AV.
Notwithstanding how poor the campaign for AV was in putting across its arguments and how the system itself didn’t represent much of an improvement on FPTP, the contest was a reminder of a sad reality: just how susceptible mass public opinion can be to the lies and demagogy of the political right.
The case for voting yes was clear and simple – a preference system would have given voters more choice, would undermine the propensity for “tactical voting” that dominates British elections, make voting intentions more transparent and let workers vote left of Labour without letting the Tories in. It would moreover have been a rejection of the arch-reactionary British FPTP election system. Instead a no vote endorsed it.
Who is the ‘real enemy’ – Liberals or Tories?
Although the far left weren’t a factor in the situation, it’s remarkable that so many organisations called for a no vote in order to “deepen the cracks in the Coalition”.
Their argument was basically that the Lib Dems are the Coalition’s weakest point so by focusing in on them, treating the referendum on electoral reform as one about Nick Clegg (as the Tories were cynically doing), you would force them out of the Coalition. This is sheer nonsense and will become more and more damaging if it becomes the perspective of the wider anti-cuts movement.
It is quite clear that the Liberal Democrats are not going to abandon the Coalition. To leave now would be political suicide, possibly leading to a snap election and their annihilation. Even now only a very small number of councillors and grassroots activists have called for Clegg to resign.
And ‘cracks in the Coalition’ is exactly what the right wing of the Tory party want. They are emboldened by this vote. Bill Cash for example told BBC News it was a “vote for one C, not Coalition, but Conservative”.
These divisions reflect, through the pressure of the elections, the different social base of the two parties.
The Tories have pretty consistent support amongst 30 to 35 per cent of the electorate, particularly concentrated in rural and suburban areas, who are ideologically committed to highly reactionary, and anti-working class politics – in particular, cutting taxes for the better off and slashing public spending.
The Lib Dems traditional base of support is the ‘progressive wing’ of the middle classes. They have picked up support from young people and no small number of workers over the last decade too, because they were perceived to be “the nice party”.
The vicious policy the Tories have carried out is therefore simply less likely to alienate them from their core, traditional support, but it was anathema to many Lib Dems voters, particularly those who started to back the party under Labour thinking they were a centre-left alternative.
In this situation we need to be crystal clear who the ‘real enemy’ are – it’s the Tories. And the harsh reality is that there is nothing in Thursday’s results that tells us the Tories couldn’t win a snap general election.
That means now more than ever we need to be hammering the Tories – as the vicious party of cuts that are out to destroy our public services.
It’s important to put the anger with the Liberal Democrats in perspective. They capitulated by giving in to the Tories, but it is after all the Tories who proposed all the things they conceded to.
The focus on the Liberal Democrats was understandable in the student movement – where it was Clegg and co who did the exact opposite of what they promised. But now as an anti-cuts movement we need a more developed argument about how we want to bring down the government and what we want (and what we don’t want) to replace it with.
Labour – where’s the alternative to Tory cuts?
And in its own distorted way this anti-Lib Dem fetish reflects another illusion that is even more prevalent across the working class movement; the belief that the victory of Labour at the next general election is inevitable.
The logic is simple – the Lib Dems leave the Coalition, the Tories force a snap election by no confidencing themselves in parliament, but it backfires and Labour wins.
But no one can be certain that this will happen.
There are big class battles ahead between now and the next general election, any one of which could potentially transform the British political situation for better or worse.
The huge programme of cuts being pushed through by this government are historic and would if successful completely break up the welfare state as we know it.
A defeated and broken working class may stay away on election day.
A Tory government that had achieved everything it had set out to achieve (“sorted out the deficit” / broken the working class), could potentially pull behind it enough votes in the swing constituencies to win.
Even if it were true that a Labour victory is ‘inevitable’ – what would returning Labour to power mean unless they were committed to undo the Tory crimes against our public services?
At the moment Labour won’t commit to this at all. Indeed, they just won’t put up an alternative to the Con-Dem cuts beyond saying they are “too much, too fast”.
Scotland is a big lesson in this regard. The landslide the SNP were able to pull off arguably reflected the simple fact they put some, however minimal and inadequate, clear blue policy water between them and the Tories – on higher education fees, free prescriptions and trident.
That doesn’t mean they aren’t the Tartan Tories as the Scottish workers’ movement labelled them for years. Of course, they are – they have no links at all to the Scottish working class at all.
And the more support they gain from the electorate, the more support they’ll get from big Scottish capital, and the more they’ll create the impression independence for Scotland is inevitable.
But the rise of the SNP does go to show just how impotent the Labour Party has been.
They are happy to vote against government bills, safe in the knowledge they’ll pass anyway, but they won’t actually commit to undoing the damage of these cuts. It’s remarkable that Ed Miliband will not even pledge to undo the £9,000 fees despite the mass movement we saw against them.
In spite of all this, Labour are certainly rebuilding some links with the mass of their electorate and the unions. They won a lot of seats back in the north of England in their core areas; mainly picking up support and seats as the Lib Dem vote collapsed, taking control of Sheffield along with 25 other councils, and overall scoring 800 seat gains.
It sounds good, but not when you consider they were starting from a very low base, having suffered a series of local government defeats when in power.
That’s what is in the end troubling about the Tory performance and why they will be emboldened by this.
Ruling parties are nearly always punished at the local elections – but this time it’s only the Lib Dems, not the Tories that suffered that punishment.
Our answer to the Tory menace has to come on the streets and in the workplaces.
By building on the huge success of the 26 March, we can make the anti-cuts case to millions of people, showing there is an alternative to Tory cuts – the power of working people prepared to unite and fight to take control of our own lives.
