The elections that no one thought would happen are finally over.
A democratic exercise, for an undemocratic organisation, where the main critics of said organisation, tried to stop the elections happening. Politics is a funny old business – but it’s also pretty brutal, so much so that many of my friends, students at university or college, are at the point where they are fed up of it all, at a time where our voice is so crucial!
Elections are, if nothing else, a verdict on the political parties, their organisation, messaging, and campaign. Ultimately, elections are a verdict on a party’s ability to communicate with the electorate their vision for how they will make their lives better.
In this aim, the Labour Party – previously my own party – has abjectly, and entirely failed. I’ve always voted Labour as have my parents and most of my family. But moving into this election I didn’t feel able to put my trust in the party any more.
I have never seen, or heard of, an election where so many members, activists and long-time supporters of the Labour Party have been unable to vote for their own party.
The country has now been deprived of some brilliant MEP candidates such as Eloise Todd and Alex Mayer because of our mealy-mouthed position on a People’s Vote, which is being demanded by the overwhelming majority of Labour members, supporters and voters across the UK.
Every piece of polling for weeks has shown the drastic drop in our party’s political fortunes. They have shown that Labour has haemorrhaged four times as many votes to overtly pro-People’s Vote parties like the Liberal Democrats and the Greens, than it did to the Brexit Party.
Those same polls show that Labour would’ve been eight points ahead of Farage if we had given unqualified backing towards a public vote.
There is a simple reason for this. Despite the patronising attitude of some of the middle class commentariat which is closely associated to the Leader’s Office, the referendum in 2016 was not delivered by working class Leave voters. In fact, they represented less than one in eight of the total Leave vote – and that number has fallen drastically in the succeeding three years as working class Labour voters realise they’ve been sold a busted flush.
Never again, can Labour policy on the most important issue of our time find itself on the wrong side of members, voters and history.
If we do – in an increasingly more likely scenario of a General Election; we will get battered. Pure and simple.
No one should take these election results as a mandate for Nigel Farage’s – and some Tory leadership contenders jockeying for their old and male membership votes – no-deal Brexit.
There was no mandate for a humiliating no-deal Brexit in 2016, and there certainly isn’t one now, in an election voted on by third of the electorate where the Brexit Party got around a third of the vote.
This is the Farage trick: do well in low turnout elections, create relevance and airtime, before fading away in a General Election (where he’s never been elected as an MP, despite running seven times before).
But this should be a wake-up call, to anyone who considers themselves on the progressive side of British politics. Farage’s goal, is to run create fear and confusion, and run down the clock until we enter a no-deal Brexit scenario, without a vote or express consent. That would be a democratic, constitutional and moral outrage for millions of working class people across the country.
Elections are a verdict on political parties. More than anything else, this one was a verdict on the Labour Party. Get off the fence, get ready and get going on properly and vocally backing a People’s Vote.
Otherwise the real verdict on Labour will be young people for generations, who will have to suffer the consequences of our inaction.