This December 12th, as on every December 12th (and every other day) since that fateful day in 2019, many of us took the opportunity to bow our heads and mourn a great loss.
RIP UK
This December 12th, as on every December 12th since that fateful day in 2019, UK socialists, humanists and environmentalists took the opportunity to mourn a great loss.
The 2019 General Election, won by the Conservative Party, was a low point in British politics. Populist nationalism, a biased media, and an establishment terrified of moderate left-wing policies united to defeat a Labour Party, which, under Jeremy Corbyn, had remade itself as a party of the people—for the many, not the few.
The causal factors behind this outcome included:
• Media bias towards centrism and the Right
• Relentless smearing of Jeremy Corbyn and the Left
• Brexit
• Sabotage by the Labour Right
• Jeremy Corbyn’s refusal to play dirty
Media Bias
The UK has one of the most biased print media among developed, democratic nations, a bias that veers strongly to the Right.
Our broadcast media also leans definitely towards the centre/centre right. Radical right-wing channels such as GB News now exist, but among broadcast media, the BBC far outweighs these, with its centre-right, pro-establishment, and increasingly hawkish foreign policy stance now coming very much into the open.
The combined bias of our print and broadcast media contributed to Boris Johnson’s perceived suitability for high office and Corbyn’s perceived unsuitability.
Now that Johnson’s manifest unsuitability is fully recognised, it is reasonable to suggest our media were equally wrong about Corbyn’s unsuitability.
The Scam
It isn’t solely passive bias on the part of the media that contributed to Labour’s 2019 General Election failure. The attacks on Labour and its supporters were also actively orchestrated and deliberate.
Jeremy Corbyn was smeared as weak, old, senile, scruffy, a contrarian, a terrorist sympathiser, a puppet for Putin, and an antisemite. The centrist or ‘progressive’ media, such as the Guardian, the Observer, and the New Statesman, and even alternative news outlets such as Novara Media, vigorously participated in this smearing, succeeding in turning large numbers of those who voted for Corbyn’s Labour in 2017 against him.
Many on the Left now see this – particularly in regard to the false accusations of antisemitism – as one of the greatest informational scams ever perpetrated on the British public. The smearing has even gained its own hashtag: #ItWasAScam.
For an excellent debunking of the Corbyn smears, see Simon Maginn’s The ‘Labour antisemitism crisis’: 10 obvious frauds.
Getting Brexit Done
The 2019 General Election was not only a Scam and a Disinformation Election, it was also decisively a Brexit election. The Conservatives had created the protracted nightmare of Brexit, and then, once the electorate were heartily sick of the topic, in a stroke of unself-critical political genius, their 2019 election campaign promised to “Get Brexit Done”.
In the 2017 General Election, promising to honour the Brexit vote, Labour almost unseated the Tory government. Between 2017 and 2019, Keir Starmer, as Labour’s Brexit Shadow Secretary, then sabotaged a soft Brexit deal with Theresa May (see Oliver Eagleton’s The Starmer Project) and manoeuvred Labour into backing the People’s Vote. 90% of the seats Labour subsequently lost in 2019 were Leave constituencies who felt, as a result of Starmer’s machinations, that they could no longer trust Labour.
Between the Tories’ false promises and Starmer and his allies ‘duplicity—Starmer now supports a hard Brexit—the opportunity for a progressive government in the UK was vanquished.
Sabotage
We can see right-wing Labour’s attack on Brexit as sabotage against their own party, but their sabotage went significantly further. Many on the Party’s right actively participated in the smearing of Corbyn and the Labour left as antisemites (see Weaponising Antisemitism, Asa Winstanley). Labour insiders and staff worked to ensure a Labour defeat in both the 2017 and 2019 elections (see the leaked ‘Labour Report’). This sabotage began in 2015 when Corbyn was elected leader of the Labour Party and continued through to the 2019 election. And it didn’t stop even then, as we see with the continued systematic dismantling of the Labour Left under Starmer’s leadership through to the current day and the Party’s corresponding loss of membership, voter numbers and poll favourability.
A problematic outcome of this evisceration of Labour by its own right-wingers is that it may have paved the way to a hard right Tory/Reform government in 2029.
The Gentleman
Jeremy Corbyn always refused to engage in adversarial gutter politics. He never slandered his political opponents or indulged in character assassination. These are decent and honourable characteristics which we all long for in a British Prime Minister. but they were a great weakness in the 2019 election campaign. This principled approach meant that Corbyn and his team failed to question the dishonest motives of his smearers or to properly challenge their false accusation. And no politician in the last six decades has been more worthy of character assassination than Boris Johnson. Street fighting politics was called for in the political climate leading up to the 2019 General Election. This is something Corbyn was inherently too decent to deliver.
The Outcome
These factors resulted in the British public voting against a government that would have addressed the critical issues that face our nation, both in 2019 and now. Issues such as:
• The dangerous impacts of climate change
• A growth-obsessed economic model
• Ever-increasing inequality
• A news media in hoc to the establishment
• Energy insecurity
• Food insecurity
• Geopolitical instability and war
• The genocidal actions of our allies
Instead, in 2019, the table was laid for a hard Brexit, an appalling sequence of Conservative Prime Ministers, a failure to address the critical issues above, and a lost opportunity to gain from Labour’s many other progressive policies of the time (tackling homelessness, renationalising essential services, protecting the NHS et cetera).
A further damaging outcome has been the replacement of a progressive and compassionate Labour Party with a party now indistinguishable from – or perhaps even to the right of – the Tories under Theresa May.
Integrity, decency, and common sense were the losers of GE2019.
The winners were an increasingly assertive UK establishment, fronted in those early years by a liar, a philanderer and a coward who hid in a fridge.
RIP decency and hope.
RIP a real democratic alternative.
With thanks for the wreath image to John La Farge, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
