All the media commentators say that Cameron achieved a surprise major victory. When Labour leader Wilson won a similar number of seats in October 1974, he, and the media of the day, thought it was a disaster - and it was. The political commentators all say that the two major problems for Cameron's regime will be the union with Scotland and the relationship with the EU. For what it is worth Miliband did try to make the EU referendum an issue - but failed. In reality neither of Cameron's massive dilemnas were raised in a major way by anybody else - including the political pundits, during the campaign. Nor was the ongoing global economic crisis discussed. (China's exports - reduced by 6.4%, and imports - reduced by 16.2% this month and overall trade by 10.9% year on year. The EU is stagnant, etc.) Leave aside the growing number of old people; the desperate underfunding of social services; the exponential split between rich and the rest; the renewal of Trident; Britain's appalling productivity; the lessons of Britain's most recent wars; the election was mostly fought (in England and Wales) on non issues, (do political leaders lie; did Labour cause the UK's economic mess; will the SNP run Labour etc.)
What does the election result tell us? It tells us first that Britain's political crisis is still with us. Indeed it has got worse. There is an accelerated crisis of the political system itself - Conservative MPs needed 33,230 votes each; Labour, 39,650 votes; UKIP, 3.8 million votes; Greens, 1.2 million votes and the SNP, 76,800 votes per MP. (This figure is a division of the voting population of Scotland. It is absurd to measure the SNP vote by total UK voting population - as most of the London based media has.) These figures illustrate a bizarre - and dangerous situation. What does the British establishment believe will happen to 3.8 million UKIP voters who are unrepresented in Parliament? What conclusion will some of them come to and where will they go? UKIP is not yet a fascist party. It has no official mass movement that carries out their racist and reactionary programme on the streets - not yet. Among a host of poisonous problems, another Golden Dawn is being built by the utterly self-serving agreement between the Tories and Labour to hang on, as long as they can, to the current sclerotic system of voting.
In one of Miliband's last speeches he remarked that Labour's defeat had come from 'the rise of two nationalisms.' He meant that the SNP in Scotland and the large number of UKIP voters, as well as Cameron's attempt to rally the English voters against any SNP invasion of Westminster, had overwhelmed the Labour vote, first in Scotland, then in England. In fact Labour and Miliband's disaster came from the same political crisis which infects the Westminster voting system. Westminster based social democracy has run out of steam.
The SNP ran on an anti-austerity ticket in Scotland. It was successful because the bulk of ex-Scottish Labour voters did not believe that Labour would defend them against austerity. They thought , correctly, that Labour supported austerity. Some, including on the blind-sided British left, believe that it was all a trick in Scotland by the SNP to get an early re-run of the Independence referendum. But as the SNP leaders patiently explain, an early vote on independence is likely to produce the same result as before. The SNP realise that the coming Holyrood elections and the results of Britain's EU referendum are the real staging posts to a new shift of Scottish opinion on independence. While oil prices are low, and global economics look shaky, another early round of the independence battle looks extremely unlikely. Fatally, Labour did not take up the challenge of this particular 'nationalism.' It could have openly embraced the proposal of an anti-austerity alliance; won back some ground in Scotland; changed the terms of the debate in England.
To compare the SNP with UKIP and Cameron's 'Englishism' is insulting drivel. The 'national' impulse in Scotland comes from the desire to defend a multi-cultural society, to enhance equality, to get rid of nuclear weapons and all of Britain's global military pretensions and to get out from under the Scottish Labour rotting canopy that smothered Scottish radicalism for decades. UKIP and now Cameron's nationalism is another beast entirely.
Miliband's Labour lost because it never fought the nonsense that the 2008 economic crisis was somehow Labour's fault. Why? Because it did not want to tell the truth - that the City of London - and its criminal behaviour, nearly brought the house down. The City is 20% of the economy and central to British capitalism. Take it on and you are in a fight about what sort of economic, social and political system you should have. And that is not what British social democrats can or want to do. Labour lost also because it 'compromised' with austerity. That is an understatement. For long periods in the last parliament Labour was in competition with the Coalition about who could make the most cuts. Nobody believed, especially in Scotland, that Labour had changed its spots. No. It was not that Labour was vulnerable to the anti-austerity SNP that lost them support; it was that nobody believed them - either way, when they tried, at the last minute, to sing from both hymn sheets.
So; in the end, Labour's catastrophe had nothing to do with swirls of reactionary nationalism in Scotland; nothing to do with a middle England demographic that now includes only self-seeking (read 'aspirant' in the new Labour parlance) builders and dog groomers. Do the academic half-wits who brew up this concoction imagine that Scotland is still choked full of industrial workers and council houses? It has everything to do with a dying social democracy that is fragmenting (as it already is in the case of the SNP and as it will in the case of the new Labour MPs at Westminster) and dissolving (in the case of ex-Labour UKIP voters in Tyneside.) It is the 'working class' part of Britain's political crisis.
Next blog; what happened to the left outside Labour and the SNP and what could the left do next?
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