Blue Labour’s Super Majority

The poll (actually multi-level regression analysis) conducted by YouGov and Sky News, predicts a Labour Majority of 194, with Labour on 422, and Tories reduced to 140. Liberals quadruple their seats, up to 48, whilst Greens double their seats to 2. The Liberals’ vote share rises by less than 10%, compared to the 50% rise in the vote share for the Greens. Labour’s vote share rises by 30%, despite doubling its number of seats. Reform, despite winning as many votes as the Liberals, win no seats. It indicates the undemocratic nature of the election system, which amounts to ballot-rigging. But, the poll was already out of date at the time it was released, because of the decision of Fartage to stand as a Reform candidate, and to become the Leader of Reform, in place of Tice.

Previous polling has suggested that if Fartage was to be Leader of Reform, it would double its vote share. Since that earlier polling, Reform already almost doubled its support, as the Tories have gone into meltdown. So, whether that finding still holds, we will not know until the next set of polls are undertaken. I suspect we are seeing a political realignment, and that the reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist base of the Tories is splitting away to Reform, like rats leaving a sinking ship. That will accelerate in the next week or so. But, also, in the Red Wall seats, that reactionary petty-bourgeoisie, and the declassed elements in their periphery, who have been abandoning the decomposing Tories, and, reluctantly, turning towards a Blue Labour that has prostituted itself in a demeaning, but predictable, scrabble for their votes, in the face of a hopeless prospect of Reform winning those seats, might, now, also, be drawn back towards Fartage and his company.

That means that the Tories are getting squeezed on both flanks, from Reform and from Blue Labour. But, its, also, not great news for Blue Labour either. If Reform rises strongly in the polls, as it picks up votes from Tories and Blue Labour alike, that will further decompose the Blue Labour vote, itself based on a flaky, right-wing, populist and sovereigntist electoral coalition. What is worse, for Blue Labour, is that, as its relative position weakens, as it loses votes to Reform, it also gives hopes for its own progressive voters, as those who previously considered voting for Greens or Liberals, but considered it a wasted vote, will no longer necessarily make that conclusion. As those voters are more likely to use internet sites indicating how to best vote tactically, to defeat the Tories, that is even more likely.

Its true, as John Curtice noted, that in the recent local elections, Reform took far more votes from the Tories than from Blue Labour, but local elections are unrepresentatively small polls, and that was before the Tories went into total meltdown, and before Fartage returned to Reform. The YouGov MRP, although its based on analysis in each seat, does not give a dynamic view of what has happened in the last few days, including what may happen in all those seats, where Blue Labour’s authoritarian regime has split the party in order to bureaucratically remove left of centre candidates. As with Corbyn, that will, in some cases, result in them standing as independents with a good chance of winning. In others, it will result in Labour voters sitting on their hands, or voting for other, more progressive bourgeois candidates, such as Greens or Liberals.

In Scotland, the travails of the SNP look set for them to be hit, but a further examination of the MRP, shows that the forecast of Labour gains at the expense of the SNP is fragile. In many seats, its marginal as to whether Labour gains it from the SNP, and that can easily change in the next month. A look at Labour’s typically dismissive, English nationalist attitude to Scotland shows why that might be. For example, in discussing Labour’s position of an even harsher, more racist solution to the “small boats”, one Blue Labour spokesman talked about putting the smugglers on to barges and shipping them off to Scotland! Its the same kind of reactionary nationalist idea employed by the North Koreans, of loading shit filled balloons, and sending them off to South Korea.

In Wales, it is the corruption scandal now surrounding Welsh Labour, and its Leader Vaughan Gething that may lead to it losing votes to the benefit of Plaid Cymru, and the Liberals.

None of that is in any way enough, on the basis of the current polls, and the MRP to prevent Blue Labour still winning with a thumping majority, though I suspect, one that will shrink as each week goes by, not to the benefit of the Tories or Reform, but to the benefit of those more progressive bourgeois parties, in various seats across the country, especially where, tactical voting will act to their benefit. That is what was also seen in numerous by-elections, even where Labour had been in second place to the Tories, but where, having split the reactionary vote between itself, Tories and Reform, the progressive vote split from Labour and Tories, and consolidated around Liberal candidates. In local elections that was also seen in favour of Greens. In Bristol, that process can be seen clearly, as Blue Labour Shadow Minister, Thangam Debonair, looks certain to lose to the Greens, who are predicted to win 50% of the vote.

But, as I pointed out in a previous post. For Marxists, elections in themselves are not significant. As someone said, if elections changed anything, they would ban them, and indeed, inside Blue Labour, Starmer’s Bonapartist regime has done so, in order to put in place its puppets. As Lenin noted,

“action by the masses, a big strike, for instance, is more important than parliamentary activity at all times”

But, bourgeois elections give us an opportunity to speak more directly to workers, to expose the sham nature of that bourgeois-democracy, and the class nature of the bourgeois parties, including the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois workers parties, such as Blue Labour. It provides the opportunity to explain how that bourgeois-democracy is simply a means of the ruling-class dominating society and exploiting and oppressing them, that it is simply a velvet glove covering its iron fist, and that the answer is not to elect parties to such parliaments, but to build their own alternative workers democracy, based upon directly elected and recallable workers’ councils/soviets.

Blue Labour will win a large majority in the election, but it will represent nothing progressive, even in bourgeois terms, and certainly nothing positive for workers. Its “support” amounts only to opposition to, and a desire to remove, the Tories, much as was the case in 1997. In fact, as was the case then, and contrary to the narrative, then, of the Blair-Rights, and, now, of Blue Labour, if Corbyn were still Labour Leader, that opposition to the Tories, would, almost certainly, result in the same kind of Labour majority, currently projected. The huge swing to Corbyn’s Labour, in the 2017 General Election, the biggest since 1945, is evidence of that.

But, that soft basis for such a government is dangerous. No sooner than the Tories are gone, that reason for backing Blue Labour goes with it. After 1997, Labour’s vote and support continually eroded, despite it having the benefit of a strongly rising global economy after 1999, and the potential to use that to put money into the NHS and public services. Blue Labour does not have those economic conditions, and has hamstrung itself even more, due to its reactionary, petty-bourgeois, nationalist agenda. It does not propose any improvement in those public services, and so on. From Day One, it will inevitably begin to attack workers, and they will resist, including via their mass organisations, still affiliated to the party. It will be just the beginning of the real political battle, and realignment.

Originally published at https://boffyblog.blogspot.com.