Barely anyone on the English Left seems to have grasped the gravity of the situation emerging from the May 2021 elections. As the Labour Party contemplates its bleak results, all eyes are now on the precarity and inadequacy of the party’s leadership. A year ago, the party’s incoming leader, Keir Starmer, promised to continue Jeremy Corbyn’s radical domestic agenda, marrying it with competence, electoral success and a nod to Labour’s overwhelmingly pro-European base. The reality has been rightward drift, silence on Brexit, and electoral disaster followed by a series of shambolic maneuvers in which Starmer accidentally started a party civil war by sacking his deputy Angela Rayner from her role as party chair, before later claiming to have promoted her.
The really historically significant thing about these elections, however, was not the fact that Boris Johnson got to pose in front of a giant inflatable version of himself on Hartlepool’s seafront, or Labour’s increasingly fraught and incoherent internal debate about the Red Wall, but the result in Scotland. Falling just one seat short of an overall majority, Nicola Sturgeon is now at the head of a strengthened pro-independence majority in the Scottish Parliament, with the SNP and Greens holding 72 out of 129 seats between them. This means that we are about to enter a period of sharp contestation between the Scottish and UK governments over Holyrood’s right to hold a referendum. There is much to be said about what this means for Scotland, but this will be a crucial test for progressives in England, too.
For five years, when Corbyn led Labour, the English Left threw everything into an electoral project to the exclusion of almost anything else. It is now in a period of existential crisis, unable to break with its addiction to parliamentary leadership and trapped in a relentless focus on high politics, polling figures and D-list celebrity drama with a diminishing sense of power and agency. Its instinct will be to regard the battle between Sturgeon and Johnson – as it gets drawn out through negotiations and the courts – as a sideshow, and it will be disinclined to mobilise around it. There is even a possibility that the Labour Party at Westminster could continue to oppose a referendum in spite of the 2021 election result. Both of these prospects should be cause for alarm.
