Like the movie Cats, the last season of Game of Thrones and many other things that happened in 2019, the British election was expected by many on the Left to be bad, but turned out to be so much worse. The Conservatives won 365 of the 650 seats in parliament – a majority so big that the Tories will remain the largest party even if a significant number of their MPs are suspended for sexual misconduct or thrown out for disagreeing with the leader, as has happened before.
This was a resounding victory for a party whose policies have caused over 130,000 preventable deaths since 2012 in England alone; been so hostile to disabled people and migrants that some have been driven to suicide; and failed to deliver even on their own dangerously limited environmental promises. Meanwhile, Labour had a manifesto packed with economic policies that the majority of the British public supported; a leader who broke with elitist traditions; and election adverts that stood out for their honesty.
This was an abysmal election that showed very clearly what obstacles socialists come up against when they threaten elite power, from media bias to political disenfranchisement to structural racism. The way forward must be to learn from this and continue organising outside of government. If there is one glimmer of hope for the Left it’s the increased understanding of the fact that politics isn’t a service you can hire someone else to do on your behalf – we have to do it ourselves. The most promising strand of this thinking is prefigurative politics; that is, the politics of organising in the here-and-now in a way that reflects the society we want to see in the future.
