British society has three years to fend off a far-right election victory. It is important to be clear about what such a victory could entail: a gutting of social welfare, a rollback of abortion and LGBTQ rights, a militarisation of the police, masked paramilitaries bundling citizens into unmarked vans and spiriting them away to incarceration centres beyond the reach of the law, and security forces firing at, and occasionally killing, those who have the temerity to protest.
Each of these actions, it is important to acknowledge, will be conducted with the tacit, and sometimes explicit, approval of a significant section of the electorate. That is, at least until some of them, as individuals, find themselves caught in the unnervingly violent enactment of policies that sounded quite anodyne on paper: reducing crime, cutting wasteful spending, empowering the police, controlling immigration, restoring national pride, making Great Britain great again.
These are not paranoid fantasies. They are the actions of governments run by the democratically elected Republican Party in the United States and India’s Bharatiya Janata Party, which was once democratically elected and has since disembowelled most institutions of democracy. Will Reform be any different in power? It is not worth taking the risk to find out.
When confronted with such scenarios, it is entirely understandable for most people, who have thus far lived in more or less functional societies, to seek refuge in rationalisation: “How bad can it get?”, “It happens elsewhere, but it won’t happen here”, “Governments are elected from the fringe, but must rule from the centre”.
But as someone who has lived this journey in India, I can say that it gets worse than you thought, faster than you imagine.
Keir Starmer has often tapped into these fears to get people to fall in line and support what has now been proven to be his unpopular agenda. As last week’s elections have demonstrated, the prime minister is now actively driving voters both rightwards and leftwards, but always away from Labour.
Irrespective of whether Starmer stays or goes, it is going to be very hard for the government (and for that matter, most governments around the world) to measurably improve lives and livelihoods when energy prices will stay consistently high, growth will remain low, and the world will remain unpredictable. The economy will continue to struggle and even marginally progressive policies will be eviscerated as wrong-headed and dangerously radical by the reliably right-wing corporate press, and torched by the left (not always incorrectly) as pandering to the fascists.
In that sense, the plight of Labour sums up a time when liberals feel the need to play defence in power, which only paves the way for the right to play offence.
So what now?
The scale of Reform’s success in the local elections in England and the parliamentary elections in Scotland and Wales, combined with Westminster’s First Past the Post voting system, means any hope of installing a progressive government of the UK rests on the need for a coalition – probably in Parliament post-22029 but definitely in society right away.
It is accepted wisdom that voters dislike drama, but political instability is not inherently problematic. There is now a body of research demonstrating that in India and much of the developing world, for instance, noisy coalition governments have invariably delivered higher economic growth than governments elected with a strong mandate. This is a trend that has held up over decades.
Here in the UK, readers will likely shudder at the coalition years from 2010 to 2015, which got us into this mess. That’s why it is important that we now build a societal consensus not specifically to save the Labour Party, but rather to create the type of society we want to live in.
Election pundits love to talk about the “inherent contradictions” within social coalitions; yet the truth is that coalitions are contingent alignments between ordinarily misaligned groups, and so are unstable by default. The work of organising and politics is to hold these groups together for as long as possible.
If that sounds idealistic, consider how effective Reform and the Conservatives have been in creating a sense of inevitability about their preferred policies – particularly on immigration – while they are still in the opposition.
Labour, it bears repeating, is in power and out of ideas. This is a government, decisively shorn of hubris, that might finally listen to its constituents, if only to stave off its own demise. So go out, volunteer, write to your MP and councillors, join your neighbourhood WhatsApp group, join a campaign group, organise your local community against hate and division.
Do not be distracted by who is in line to become prime minister. Now is the time to claim your power.
