This week, millions cast their ballots with no expectation that things will change, many of them knowing that whoever comes to govern will do little – or nothing at all – to improve their situation. Millions more, still, did not vote or even register to vote, as they see elections as a meaningless exercise or don’t like what’s on offer.
While elections are not, at present, a focus for Rise – and when the time comes we will engage in electoralism very differently from the typical approaches – it is useful for us to have a sense of what the election results mean for the working class in Britain, and for the Rise project.
The essential thing for us is that our sense of how this election would go has been largely played out. It was clear for some time that Labour would win, and likely win big. It was also clear that the right would see a surge, reflected in the Reform vote, and that it was highly unlikely for broadly left/anti-war/pro-Palestine independents to break through (because of First Past The Post (FPTP), the media ecosystem etc.).
Even so, there are still some notable trends for us to highlight and reflect upon, in the context of building Rise and independent working class power more generally.
Starmer and his allies have done a sufficiently good job of “changing” Labour to convince the British ruling class to give the B-team a run in government. On the surface the Labour win looks like a major triumph, but: (i) it’s in the context of the lowest turnout since WW2; (ii) Labour won 65% of its seats with a 34% share of the vote (iii) the Labour vote, in comparison to 2019, has increased by 1.7%, while the Conservative vote has fallen by 20% (Reform being the major beneficiaries).
The implications from this are that while Labour on the face of it has a large majority, its popularity is fragile. In power we know Labour will do nothing of substance to address collapsing wages, living standards, climate breakdown and social decay. We also know that they will be authoritarian in their approach to protest and dissent, and that they will be rabid followers of the US/NATO line in international affairs.
What we’ll likely see is some superficial investment in public services, a shaky reliance on wooing private finance instead of taking the lead on rebuilding the economy, and more entanglement in war and imperialist aggression.
The consequence of this is that Labour will not be able to meaningfully address the crises that fuel working class decline and anger in Britain, so instead they’ll tack to the right on cultural issues, and in that way legitimate and fuel the far right
Labour has already backtracked on key promises made since 2020, including but not limited to: nationalisation of critical infrastructure including water; rail and energy, climate pledges, an overhaul of workers rights and trade union freedoms, modernising the Gender Recognition Act, abolishing the House of Lords, scrapping tuition fees and more. As such, it is entirely foreseeable that they will fail to deliver on workers rights, housing, and many other issues of central concern.
Predictions are always tricky – but it seems, given domestic and global factors – that this Labour government will serve one term where they shift British politics to the right, and in doing so pave the way for an even more reactionary, Farage-inflected government in 4-5 years time. Effectively, a speed-run of what Macron and his party have done for Le Pen in France.
It’s also likely that in the coming years, while working class conditions continue to decline, that the major trade unions will want to “keep their seat at the table”, and so tensions will arise between workplace militancy, and a co-opted union officialdom, deeply interconnected with the Labour Party.
This does not change much for us in Rise – our understanding of the Labour Party meant we would always be antagonistic to them, in or out of government, and the broad trends of capitalist decline we have identified, have already indicated what the lines of struggle will be going forward.
But the short take is that Labour’s win is far less impressive than it appears, it is born of mass alienation and dissatisfaction coupled with a dysfunctional electoral system, and the politics of this Labour government will be regressive, repressive and reactionary.
The big losers in the election are the Tories, and the big winners are Reform. Reform performed well in both middle class suburbs and working class neighbourhoods alike, particularly in areas which have experienced drastic deindustrialisation. A key example is where we see sharp swings of support in former industrial heartlands of the North East.
This fits with the general trajectory of politics across the world, particularly in declining capitalist-core states, of the right being ascendant. If Britain had a system of Proportional Representation (PR) and not FPTP Reform would have won even more seats. The likely implications of this election, which we flagged previously, are that the Tories will continue to move rightward, and will embrace, even more, the culture war politics of Farage and co.
Meanwhile the far right, the broad combination of Farage-Reform and the myriad “patriotic” groups, offer, at least in rhetoric, the attractive image of strength (in numbers, confidence and charisma) stability (offering an alternative vision of a nation to populations where state and local economies have dwindled away) and a superficially insurgent politics, when they could not be any more establishment.
Fundamentally, because none of the main parties can address the root causes of climate breakdown, spiralling inequality, collapsing living standards etc, they are happy to shift the terrain of politics to that of culture wars while building a wholly exclusive, narrow, nationalist vision for Britain. Already on the night of the election results, Andrea Leadsome, an important voice within the Conservatives, said that one of the lessons for the Tories was that they hadn’t been hard enough on “woke”.
So in the coming years, as the Labour government fails to address the ills of society, the right will likely make further gains, attacking migrants, trans people and the marginalised. While pushing an economics that combines an increasingly lacking “growth at all costs” agenda with a piecemeal state interventionism that doesn’t address the disaster of who owns our economy.
The combination of a more right wing Tory party, and more publicised Reform party, and the variety of other far right groups, means that the discontent of large sections of working class communities (and the threatened middle and upper classes) will be met with no shortage of right wing “solutions”.
For Rise, this means that while fighting the Labour government, we must also be fully engaged in challenging the growing right, in particular through being embedded in our communities and articulating a positive, socialist vision for addressing the concerns and needs of our class.
Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, as well as post-Corbyn regroupment, saw a large number of independent candidates stand in this election. With some honourable exceptions (most notably Leanne Mohamad, Andrew Feinstein, Adnan Hussain, Shockat Adam and Jeremy Corbyn) they were not able to make a significant impact on the electoral arithmetic. There was a lot of energy poured into the elections by good people on the broad left, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that, for the most part, they were engaged in a sort of electoral-fatalism.
In other words, they contested the elections because they know there are a lot of things wrong, know we need an alternative, but can’t think or see beyond the limited horizon of elections. Even in the knowledge that they have little or no chance of winning, and that if they did win, could do little more than provide a potentially principled, but ultimately ineffective, voice in Parliament.
An open question now is to what extent the people involved with these campaigns will begin to draw conclusions that lead them beyond electoralism, and into wider, transformative politics. It’s likely that some will, and that’s a layer of people that Rise will seek to work and build with. For others, the lesson will be to campaign more and earlier to win the next election, but without connecting this to the need for that broader, transformative politics.
Overall, left-electoralism in its current form seems exhausted after this election. The coming years, on the electoral front, will be a contest between shades of right (Labour’s authoritarian managerialism versus the reactionary broad right and their culture wars). In Rise we have argued, from the outset, that the focus and energy of socialists needs to be on building in communities, workplaces and social movements.
The aim of this practice must be to assert ourselves in those places where the state and economy promise nothing but managed decline, providing a true sense of strength and stability rooted in principles of solidarity, not the exclusive nationalism of the right. Only in this way can we build our own power, challenge the right, and, in time, engage on the electoral terrain in a meaningful sense.
The election results vindicate that stance, and it’s a line we will continue to develop further (both in terms of how we express it, and in practice) going forward.
These groups are, broadly, on the left, but also form a distinctive type of politics. It seems that the Workers Party (WP) has made no real progress, and George Galloway has lost his seat. His win, in the first instance, was a small, and very context specific, victory for the broad anti-war movement. But the politics of the WP, seeking to blend nostalgic social democracy with reactionary anti-wokeism, never offered anything of substance. The party is tethered to the personality of one man, and has no real roots in any working class community. Its demise, as a force and focal point on the “left”, is no bad thing. But the anger and energy which it fleetingly reflected are still there – and it is essential that we channel this into serious organisational efforts to build working class power.
The Greens have made some gains. Again, under a system of PR they may have made more. On the surface, it’s positive that we will have elected MPs who will prioritise and spotlight environmental issues in an otherwise climate change denialist Parliament. But the Greens are very much a party, and a form of politics, of the disgruntled middle classes. They will not consistently or meaningfully build in working class communities, and will never offer a politics that truly goes beyond capitalism – the root cause of climate breakdown.
Experience also shows that Green parties across Europe will side with the status quo on a range of issues (like the virulently pro-war German Greens, or the pro-austerity French and Irish Greens), in particular if they ever have a whiff of power. The British Greens have in the past been weak on workers rights, on the question of the EU, and in the last year have dropped their opposition to NATO. So while on the electoral terrain, gains for the Greens can be seen as an alternative, in a limited way, to the status quo, the Greens offer no real alternative for the working class. Instead, they are part of the problem in locking in a top-down, managerialist, middle class approach to climate breakdown.
Our focus in this regard should always be on foregrounding working class voices and leadership in the broader climate movement, and rejecting the limited green capitalism of the Greens and others.
Labour ran this election on the spurious notion of “Change”, but in truth nothing of substance has changed. The challenges we face as a class remain the same. All of this was foreseeable, and the unfolding vista is one that we have anticipated. Over the next few years Rise will have to address the key issues facing our class:
We have to figure out, through daily organising and struggle, the myriad ways in which we address these issues, through our unions, communities and existing social movements. We have to do this while recognising that we are fighting the right on two fronts, both for the narrative, and in practical terms.
The conditions of the working class in Britain, and around the world, will continue to worsen because of the structural crisis of the capitalist system. Climate breakdown will accelerate, and the consequences of it will increasingly be felt beyond the Global South. The right will be on the march, emboldened by the Labour government, and empowered by the deep crises of the system.
The only way to check this downward spiral is through the slow, persistent, patient work of building a working class movement rooted in class and place. That’s what we have begun to do with Rise. The main thing that these elections really tell us, is that we need to redouble our efforts and build the movement we need and want. Before we begin to imagine a better future, we need to put the groundwork in and organise.
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Capitalism, which dominates every aspect of our lives, is in terminal decline, it will limp from crisis to crisis, each one more devastating than the last.
The injustices that produce the conflict in occupied Palestine will continue until the structures of apartheid and colonialism are dismantled. There will be peace, but only when Palestine is free, from the river Jordan to the Mediterranean Sea. Rise will work tirelessly to hasten the day.
It is clear to everyone that our society does not work for us all. Working class people, who produce the wealth, and without whom nothing works, have seen their wages, living standards and quality of life collapse. At the same time, the wealth of a tiny minority in society grows without restraint.
