And The Will Of The People Must Be Respected

How the Tories pulled off the world's greatest con job on the British people

And so this is Christmas — and what have we done? Well, we voted the Tories into power because Brexit. That was bloody stupid and we're going to pay for it, big time. I predict the acceleration of the dismantling of the NHS and the welfare state. Our major institutions will continue to crumble and the blame will fall on everyone but the architects of our nation's destruction.

For the love of God, why?

There are four main reasons for this:

1) Propaganda and the press
2) Gerrymandering and vote suppression
3) The Opposition rolled over
4) People swing right when they're scared

Okay, let's dig in -- and be prepared to accept and learn the lessons.

Propaganda and the press

For over forty years there has been a concerted, continuous media campaign to malign the EU as a wannabe empire, a centralised power base run by and for a Franco-German alliance at the expense of everyone else. The undercurrent of federalism that runs through the EU's major members and the EU Commissions (there are several) didn't help; they confirmed the bias which was amplified over and over again despite the fact that a United States of Europe will never actually happen because the people of EU member states aren't feeling it. Why?

The expansion of the EU to include former Soviet satellite states brought in people who remember Russian occupation, the secret police, and suppression of dissidents, so they are having none of it. They fear assimilation into a bigger, more powerful state. Remember ACTA? Without the aid of the Polish MEPs, it would have sailed through.

The campaign 

There were actually two campaigns: anti-EU and anti-Corbyn.

The anti-EU campaign has been very effective. It painted the EU as a bullying, brutal dictatorship, asset-stripping smaller countries and imposing crippling austerity measures because they could -ignoring the fact that neoliberal governments are doing that now to their own countries in the name of keeping taxes low.

It also painted the EU as a failed experiment holding Britain back from striking its own deals and denying it the opportunity to reach its full potential. A closer look at this reveals that the British Empire collapsed a long time ago. Nonetheless, the dewy-eyed Rule Britannia brigade believe it’s coming back and Brexit will bring it.

On the left, the story was that we couldn't possibly have a socialist utopia as the EU wouldn't let us nationalise All The Things! They also have their own version of disaster capitalism in which the idea is to cripple the country, then promise to put things right. They own the results as much as the Tories and their media allies. No doubt they are gloating that they won Brexit, but they have absolutely no chance of imposing socialism on us.

The anti-Corbyn campaign has been equally effective. Every right wing newspaper bent over backwards to present him as a terrorist-loving, anti-Semitic Marxist throwback desperate to bankrupt the country in pursuit of his unworkable Socialist Utopia rainbow unicorn. They criticised everything about him from his bicycle riding to his sex life as well as his politics, displaying their own rank hypocrisy as the things they picked on mirrored Tory policy as well as the personal actions of its leaders. But damn if it didn't work like a dream! The Labour party split between the Red Tories, centrists, and Momentum – and Brexit. The result will no doubt cause it to implode.

The media matters

Our media is owned by an ever-shrinking group of mostly foreign entities, consolidating power over the public narrative in the hands of right-wingers with no national allegiance. Even the supposedly neutral BBC picked a side — the one that has continually threatened to pull the plug on the TV licence fee that pays for its existence. All this pressure has shaped the public narrative that handed a landslide to a government whose leader and activists lie all the time and hid from the BBC's Piers Morgan in a fridge.

Gerrymandering and vote suppression

One of the reasons why the majority of people feel that their vote doesn't count is because the game is rigged.

Gerrymandering results from constituency boundaries being drawn to benefit one party over another – which can occur under non-partisan procedures. There are two main types. In a stacked gerrymander one party’s votes are concentrated in constituencies won by large majorities: it amasses a large number of surplus votes (additional to the number needed to win the seat) whereas its opponent wastes relatively few in the seats that it loses. A cracked gerrymander occurs when a party wins as many constituencies as possible by small majorities, amassing few surplus votes while its opponent gets a large number of wasted votes.

The geography of support for the two main parties in the UK produces both types of gerrymander. - Fifty Years of Bias in the UK’s Electoral System, by Ron Johnson et al (2001)

There have also been reports of party activists demanding ID and people being turned away from polling stations under dubious circumstances.

Hearing lots of stories of polling stations in Tory seats insisting on ID being shown to vote. Please spread the word to ALL voters they do NOT need to show ID and should insist on voting without it. It is their right to vote. You do NOT need ID!#GE2019 #VoteLabour

— Chelley Ryan ??? #VoteLabour (@chelleryn99) 12 December 2019

Whether or not this had an effect on election results is yet to be seen but this is troubling, to say the least.

The Opposition rolled over

There was bog all opposition to Tory policies during the May regime. Even afterwards, they didn’t seem to be a serious Opposition party. Whipping MPs to vote against their consciences – and their constituents’ wishes (however misguided) alienated them.

The Parliamentary Labour party never liked Corbyn and often slagged him off when they weren’t working to undermine him. Corbyn showed a little spine from time to time during Prime Minister’s Questions but wasn’t really taken seriously in Parliament. That was a massive error on his part. You can’t just rock up wearing your ideals on your sleeve and hope that people will be nice enough to join you. Parliament is a down-and -dirty cockfight where baying MPs cheer and boo as if they’re at a theatrical performance. You have to win and be seen to be winning in order to gain credibility and Mr. Corbyn’s efforts to bring in gentler politics not only ignored the zeitgeist, it hamstrung him in the eyes of the voters and in those of his foes. He was never compelling enough to get White Van Man behind him.

Factionalism 

It's not just that Jo Swinson's Liberal Democrats split the Remain vote by refusing to work with Corbyn, it's not even the fact that the Labour party was split between various factions and refused to unite behind him. What actually killed the Labour party was the fact that Corbyn and his crew couldn't put together a story and a message that people could believe in. Corbyn himself was split between his own Euroscepticism and his desire to do right by the country according to his principles. If you don't know where people stand, how can you trust them? You can't please all the people all of the time, that's for sure.

People swing right when they're scared

It is a historical fact that people swing right when they're scared. We picked Churchill to be our leader during the Second World War because we needed someone with a bulldog spirit who wouldn't falter during the tough times ahead. When the threat of war and further destruction had passed, he lost in a landslide to the Labour party, which ushered in the NHS and the welfare state despite a flurry of opposition and scare-mongering from Churchill himself. It was another ten years before they got a taste of power. Indeed, when Margaret Thatcher came to power it was on the back of Labour incompetence at a time now known as the Winter of Discontent. Thatcher's overbearing nature finally brought her down when she introduced the Poll Tax and her own party turned against her. The lacklustre John Major was replaced by Tony Blair's New Labour shortly afterwards. Can you see it? Tories cut services because they don't believe we deserve them. When the hard right have made enough people miserable enough, Labour gets in. When Labour get in they reverse austerity and everything is better for a while but when the hard left gets its hands on the steering wheel, everything falls apart and the Tories come in promising to tidy up the mess using the same policies as before, i.e. cutting services. It has been Labour's turn to get back in for a while but they're too disorganised and the Tories have been playing on people's fears of an even more disorganised party in charge to gain support.

Missed opportunities

While people criticise Corbyn for being too nice they're missing the point. Labour could have made a lot more use of Tory mismanagement of the courts (they've completely ignored this), of funding for police and social services (they've been lacklustre at best on this) and the sheer mind-boggling incompetence of Chris "Failing" Grayling, but for reasons that baffle me, they haven't. Had they battened down on these like starving dogs on a bone, they'd have won the election -- it was theirs to win. But they didn't. They were distracted and disorganised. The promises didn't ring true, and so we've all lost.

What can we do?

Jack Monroe has the answer:

People asking what we do now.

We grieve.
For a bit.
And then we help the most vulnerable in any way we can.
We donate to food banks.
We campaign for living wages.
We fight like buggery for our NHS.
We sign every petition that we can get our hands on that might improve something

— ☘️🇨🇾Jack Monroe (@BootstrapCook) December 13, 2019

She's right. Let's be doing this. Who's with us?