“‘Popular conservatism’ is an oxymoron”: Yet ANOTHER Tory faction forms
A group of Tory MPs have announced the launch of yet another new Party faction, this one called ‘Popular Conservatism’, or ‘PopCon’, with the principle aim to “restore democratic accountability to Britain and deliver popular conservative policies”.
Headed by the shortest-serving prime minister in history, Liz Truss, commentators have been quick to call out the irony in the groups name and head, with Truss previously polled as the least-popular UK prime minister in the history of polling.
Liz Truss announced the launch yesterday on X, with the new movement adding to a number of Tory break out factions that have developed in previous years, as MPs bid to push the party further to the right and influence Rishi Sunak’s manifesto ahead of a general election.
OPINION: To avoid another government committed to continuing Thatcherism, we need new tech that makes votes count
After nearly 13 years in power, the Conservatives have a problem. They are surrounded by the consequences of their own policies, and the place looks like a bomb site. Living costs have soared, the NHS is in crisis, and staff across the public and private sectors are on strike. The party’s friends in the media are doing their best, but even the most incurious and forgiving voter can see that all is not well.
Not surprisingly, support for radical change to Britain’s economic and political model is overwhelming. Most Tory voters support wealth taxes and the re-nationalisation of the energy infrastructure. A majority of Labour voters want to introduce PR and a majority of all voters are in favour of some kind of electoral reform.
Given all this, it would be a massive missed opportunity if Labour emerged as the main beneficiary of the Conservatives’ collapse. Keir Starmer, the party’s leader, has refused to give a whole-hearted voice to the desire for change. Instead he has dropped the reform pledges that secured his victory in the 2020 leadership contest and is now sounding off about fiscal responsibility and tough choices.
Comparisons with the 1990s are easy. But there is more of a hint of 2008 Barack Obama in Labour’s current posture. The elite are nervous; the scams have become too obvious and the cruelty isn’t being confined to the usual victims. As in the US immediately after the collapse of the banks, British capitalism needs its Team B to give the appearance of change without conceding its substance. And Starmer is all too willing to play his part.
Anthony Barnett, the founder of this site, points to another historical analogy, far less flattering to the Blairites who now control the Labour Party: 1974. Back then the Labour Party won an election at a time of escalating crisis. But rather than make the radical reforms necessary to revive the postwar social order, first Harold Wilson and then James Callaghan presided over years of desperate brinkmanship until Thatcher took power in 1979 and imposed her own radical vision on the country.
Presented with a series of provocations from the Tories, the Labour leader has repeatedly sided with the right in an attempt to demonstrate his reliability to the UK’s media. At a time when living standards are rapidly declining and organised labour is fighting to protect what little of the postwar social compact remains, the Labour Party is laser-focused on the fact that government departments buy stationery.
The response of the democratic left to the restoration of the Labour right since 2019 has been hampered by the massive damage done to the Liberal Democrats by Nick Clegg and the Bennites’ recent and fraught stint at the pinnacle of the Labour Party. Many with a public platform who support radical change seem to think that, while extra-parliamentary activism is all very well, there is no realistic alternative to voting Labour at the next election.
But a 2024 Labour government committed to the Blair-Thatcher status quo, which refuses to meet the UK’s accumulating crises with a programme equal to it, will only aid a nativist and authoritarian right that offers its own, hallucinatory solutions. Our likely trajectory, absent fundamental reform, is one that discredits the centre-left in government and empowers the extreme right in opposition.
As living standards decline, the Labour Party is laser-focused on the fact that the government buys stationery
In these circumstances, our best option at the next general election must be a mobilisation that puts as many ecosocialists and sincere left Keynesians into Parliament as possible. Our priority should be to maximise the number of MPs willing to argue for replacing Thatcherism with a new green and democratic settlement. Once we grasp that, the question then becomes technical: how?
Part of the answer is down to the politicians. The Greens could help by formally adopting strengthened versions of the ten pledges that Starmer has now dropped. And the Lib Dems urgently need to apologise for their role in the austerity disaster, and loudly denounce Clegg.
But we also need digital resources to translate the public’s desire for radical change into electoral victories. We have no independent means to secure the full value of our votes. We don’t know what other voters in our constituencies think, how they would vote given various conditions, or what opportunities the political geography offers. Not only that, the entirety of the established media is always determined to treat each election as a national contest, as a presidential choice between Rishi Sunak and Starmer, in which we all have an isolated vote among millions.
Digital technology makes it possible to communicate voter-to-voter and voter-to-candidate more easily than ever before. We could, given the right tools, understand where we live in fine detail and use this to make informed political choices about how we vote. We only have to imagine what a BBC that wanted to make votes count would create and make freely available: vote-swapping tools, apps that allow voters to share what they would do in various scenarios, Reddit-style forums that allow groups to organise around local demands in their constituencies and to plan real-world candidate debates and meet-ups, mapping software that gives ordinary voters some of the insights currently hoarded by political professionals. Taken together, these digital resources would help to transform tactical voting from a Lib Dem ruse into a strategy for democratic self-assertion.
Labour branches and constituency parties could use such a technology to help re-elect incumbent MPs who are serious about promoting the policies we need, or to break with the party and run independent candidates – and not just in Jeremy Corbyn’s seat. Other parties, currently squeezed by the Con-Lab duopoly, will also benefit if they can persuade voters that they will represent the desire for change in Parliament, and not fall for the seductions of Westminster’s lobbying industry.
I recently spoke with a Labour Party member living in an English university town. They told me that every Labour member they knew would vote Green if they thought the Greens could win the constituency. These are not just Labour voters, but fully paid-up members. With the right digital resources, they could discover the extent of support for the Greens in their constituency, and act together accordingly.
To create this technology, we need a generous budget and lots of clever people. Exactly how much doesn’t really matter. The costs are going to seem trivial or exorbitant, depending on whether the project works or not. But we are probably looking at hundreds of thousands of pounds, rather than millions. Not much compared to the amounts wasted on futile or deceptive efforts to stop Brexit.
Starmer won’t reform a voting system that has just given him a landslide victory. His challengers on the left should
Who’s going to pay? The large unions are paralysed by their constitutional link to Labour and their long neglect of communications as an aspect of collective power. To give you some idea of how rigorous that neglect has been, Unite, Unison and the GMB have a combined membership of 3.2 million but fewer than 10,000 subscribers on YouTube. It would be nice to think that they could change in time, but it seems unlikely. As things stand they seem content to put their trust in Starmer and hope he doesn’t treat his assurances to them as casually as his promises to Labour members, or those who thought he was going to stop Brexit.
There’s another source of support that has enough money and is motivated to want the next general election to be at least a little bit democratic. If the wealthy liberals who support proportional representation and House of Lords reform are serious, they need to support a programme to make votes count in the next election, in spite of first-past-the-post. Starmer will not reform a voting system, never mind a broader constitutional order, that has just given him and his faction in the Labour Party a landslide victory. His challengers on the left will, if they have any sense at all.
The offshore right gave Dominic Cummings a few million pounds in 2016 to win the Brexit referendum for them. He built a superb propaganda machine, which comprehensively defeated the left in 2019. His success tells us something important about agency in a political system as centralised and befuddled by propaganda as ours. Relatively modest investments in technology can make a massive difference to political outcomes. If we can create the means for voters to communicate among ourselves in pursuit of our shared interests, if we then act with some fraction of the right’s energy and daring, with some fraction of their budget, we can begin to create a new economic and political settlement before the old impoverishes and demoralises even more of us. If we wait meekly for a Starmer landslide, we will get nothing, and deserve less.
Starmer’s role has been simply to emasculate the Labour Party, and to purge it of any elements that might seek to pose a threat to rampant neo-liberalism and wealth inequality. His efforts to ban Labour MPs from supporting striking railway workers must be anathema to anybody who has the slightest feel for the history and traditions of that party and indeed the most basic understanding of its very raison d’etre.
This Tony Benn quote from the 1980’s has come into vogue because it is prophetic, and the process appears now complete:
If the Labour Party could be bullied or persuaded to denounce its Marxists, the media – having tasted blood – would demand next that it expelled all its Socialists and reunited the remaining Labour Party with the SDP to form a harmless alternative to the Conservatives, which could then be allowed to take office now and then when the Conservatives fell out of favour with the public. Thus British Capitalism, it is argued, will be made safe forever, and socialism would be squeezed off the National agenda. But if such a strategy were to succeed… it would in fact profoundly endanger British society. For it would open up the danger of a swing to the far-right, as we have seen in Europe over the last 50 years.
Starmer is in one sense the apotheosis of this process. Not only has he acted to purge the Labour Party of socialism, he also offers so very little of a meaningful alternative to the Tories that there is very little danger of the Tories being voted out of office. Not only is he a safe right-wing backstop, he is a self-redundant safe right-wing backstop.
The Guardian has long been viewed as the voice of the liberal-left in Britain, so it surprised many during the Corbyn leadership to see it act as one of the main media vehicles through which the campaign to bring him down was fought.
The paper was a key part of the “anti-semitism crisis” that engulfed Corbyn’s leadership. From 2016-19, the Guardianpublished 1,215 stories mentioning Labour and anti-semitism, an average of around one per day, according to a search on Factiva, the database of newspaper articles.
In the same period, the Guardian published just 194 articles mentioning the Conservative Party’s much more serious problem with Islamophobia. A YouGov poll in 2019, for example, found that nearly half of the Tory party membership would prefer not to have a Muslim prime minister.
The Guardian’s coverage of anti-semitism in Labour was suspiciously extensive, compared to the known extent of the problem in the party, and its focus on Corbyn personally suggested that the issue was being used politically.
The late Jewish anthropologist David Graeber commented after the 2019 election: “As for the Guardian, we will never forget that during the ‘Labour antisemitism controversy’, they beat even the Daily Mail to include the largest percentage of false statements, pretty much every one, mysteriously, an accidental error to Labour’s disadvantage”.
I am likely to revise this article but I want to get it out. It’s about the historical and continuing malign and corrosive influence of the Australian-American press baron Rupert Murdoch on UK politics. The article starts by looking at Murdoch’s influence over Tony Blair’s government before looking at how he still wields influence over Boris Johnson’s current government (and needs expanding there). I’m only searching the web so you can do this for yourselves.
Former Sun deputy editor Neil Wallis was in charge during the 1997 election campaign when then-Sun editor Stuart Higgins was on holiday.
The paper made shockwaves when it published a “Sun backs Blair” front page after declaring “it was the Sun wot won it” for the Conservatives in the previous election.
…
He said he asked for a first-person piece from Blair on his party’s “cut and dried position” on Europe but it was “a piece of PR flim-flam that actually said nothing”.
“I said ‘I’m not running this Alistair [Campbell, Blair’s spin doctor] because it’s just saying nothing’. But I said ‘for this to be coherent, for this to have an impact, this needs to say you will not go into the Euro without a referendum’.
“And I duly got the piece under Tony Blair’s name committing them to a referendum on the Euro if it was ever considered that they would go into it.”
Former UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage directly linked this Sun column with the eventual vote to leave the European Union 19 years later.
He told the documentary: “The price of Rupert Murdoch’s support for Tony Blair was that Blair promised he would not take us into the European currency without first having a referendum, and if Rupert Murdoch had not done that we would have joined the Euro in 1999 and I doubt Brexit would have happened.
“So I think when we look at the long history of Britain’s relationship with the European project that led ultimately to the Brexit vote, I think that was a decisive intervention from Rupert Murdoch.”
TONY Blair spoke to media mogul Rupert Murdoch three times in the 10 days before the Iraq war – once on the eve of the invasion – it was disclosed yesterday.
Details were released by the Cabinet Office the day after Mr Blair stepped down as Prime Minister. …
So much falls into place with the revelation that Tony Blair became godfather to one of Rupert Murdoch’s two young daughters and attended their baptism on the banks of the river Jordan last year. True, it isn’t yet clear whether Blair had agreed to become a godparent while he was prime minister [see footnote], and the ceremony did take place after he had left office, but the important point is that the relationship underlines Murdoch’s deep entrenchment in British political life.
Murdoch’s third wife, Wendi Deng, who let slip the information in an interview with Vogue, described Blair as one of Rupert’s closest friends. Blair’s account of the relationship in his memoirs is somewhat different, portraying Murdoch as the big bad beast, who won his grudging respect. That is clearly disingenuous. As other memoirs and diaries from the Blair period are published, we see how close Murdoch was to the prime minister and the centre of power when really important decisions, such as the Iraq invasion, were being made.
Blair and Murdoch didn’t have to be bosom buddies for the relationship to be counter to the interests of a healthy national life and politics. As Lance Price, the former Blair spin doctor, has said, Murdoch was one of four people in Britain whose reaction was considered when any important decision was made during the Blair years.
Rupert Murdoch launched an “over-crude” campaign to force Tony Blair to speed up Britain’s entry into the Iraq war, according to the final volume of [total cnut] Alastair Campbell’s diaries.
Mr Blair’s former communications director accuses the media mogul of being part of a drive by American Republicans to drag Britain into the controversial war a week before the House of Commons even voted to approve the intervention in 2003.
The claim is explosive because it appears to contradict Mr Murdoch’s evidence to the Leveson Inquiry. The News Corp chief told Lord Justice Leveson in April: “I’ve never asked a prime minister for anything.”
It is the second time that claim has been contested. Sir John Major, the former Prime Minister, told the inquiry this week that Mr Murdoch threatened to withdraw the support of his newspapers for his Government unless it took a tougher stance on Europe. …
Liverpool MP Andy Burnham has suggested that Tony Blair did not order a full enquiry into the Hillsborough disaster because he did not want to offend Rupert Murdoch.
Mr Burnham, a Labour leader hopeful said he was told not to pursue his demand for an official investigation when serving under Mr Blair.
As a result a “major injustice” was allowed to remain in place for more than a decade, he said.
Mr Burnham was the driving force behind Gordon Brown’s decision to set up the Hillsborough Independent Panel into the deaths of 96 Liverpool fans. … The Sun caused lasting outrage after publishing a report following the 1989 tragedy accusing “drunken” Liverpool fans of attacking rescue workers. …
Former Prime Minister Tony has always adamantly denied allegations he had an affair with Wendi, who was married to the News UK magnate from 1999 to 2013. However, the new BBC show spoke about Wendi’s affection towards him, including an unearthed diary entry in which she spoke about his ‘good body and legs’ before adding: ‘And what else and what else and what else…’.
…
But it was a series of emails, allegedly from Wendi about Blair, that effectively caused their divorce. ‘She made a bad mistake,’ journalist Ken Auletta explained. ‘She was sending emails on Newscorp email, so it’s easy for one of Murdoch’s minions, or lawyers, to extract those emails and see what they said – and they did. …
dizzy: At Rupert Murdoch and Jerry Hall’s wedding in March 2016 Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Priti Patel were invited – three prominent members of the current UK government. David Cameron and George Osborne – anti-Brexiteers – were not invited. Tony Blair was not invited – he’s been dropped by Murdoch after not having an affair with Wendi Deng.
As a supporter of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn and his allies, I was truly shocked and disappointed by the result of the recent general election. The Labour Party achieved an unexpected poor result losing 59 seats while the Conservatives won an additional 47 seats. I expected the Labour party to improve on their 2017 result.
Boris Johnson shamelessly and repeatedly lied during the campaign – the big lie being “get Brexit done” – but also 40 new hospitals, 50,000 new nurses and “… no checks on goods going from GB to NI and NI to GB …”. While the media failed to nail him on his incessant lying he was also assisted by burying a report into Russian interference in British politics and the Metropolitan Police inquiry into his sponsorship of Jennifer Arcuri getting postponed until after the election.
The electorate latched onto the “get Brexit done” lie and that BJ’s BJexit deal is a Trumpian “great deal” while Labour failed to convey the message that Brexit fatigue and turmoil is all down to the Conservatives.
Jeremy Corbyn proved personally unpopular. People refer to him as a Communist without realising that he is simply a typical Democratic Socialist with a typical Socialist agenda. There were accusations that he would slaughter Kulaks and the intention to nationalise and provide free broadband was accused of being Communism. There is nothing wrong with having utilities and train services provided by the state – that is the normal way of doing it.
Jeremy Corbyn’s personal unpopularity must be down to the incessant and unjustified accusations of anti-Semitism. Zionists have succeeded in imposing Israel’s veto on Jeremy Corbyn. That veto is documented. Labour’s policy of appeasing the Zionists has failed.
Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour party proposed a real Socialist alternative. The manifesto was huge because they have a real vision of change.
Despite proposing real policies to address the climate crisis, it appears that the public remain ignorant of the pressing need for action.
I feel for the Labour party and fellow Socialists and climate activists.
