It's not "foolish and self-indulgent" to vote for candidates that you want to win
We deserve better columnists
Guardian columnist Sonia Sodha did the anti-Starmer left a favour this week by putting all of the flimsy arguments that are going to be used against us in the run up to July’s general election in one place.
Let’s refute them.
All political parties face a trade-off under a first-past-the-post electoral system … To put [a Labour majority] at risk by casting a protest vote against a Labour government that does not yet exist is perhaps the ultimate form of luxury belief campaigning.
Under first-past-the-post, the argument goes, we should hold our nose and vote for the lesser evil. This makes sense until you consider that it was Starmer who ruled out replacing FPTP, against the stated wishes of his party’s membership. If you extrapolate this thinking, we’re going to be holding our noses until we run out of oxygen. We will never get what we want if we don’t have the courage to vote for it. Sodha doesn’t acknowledge, let alone suggest a way out of, this cul-de-sac she’s directed us down.
Also notable, and perhaps indicative of her reading habits, is Sodha’s invocation of “luxury beliefs”. The term, a U.S. import popularised by such esteemed thinkers as Matthew Goodwin and Suella Braverman, implies that working class people can’t afford to be left wing. The opposite, of course, is true. The biggest losers under right-wing austerity policies are invariably the poor.
[In May’s local elections] the Labour Party experienced losses in some of its safer seats as a result of disaffection over its position on Gaza … It would be a huge loss if any of these able and widely respected feminists were unseated. [Jess Phillips, Thangam Debbonaire & Shabana Mahmood]
Putting aside for a moment the fact that Debbonaire is being challenged by the Green Party’s Carla Denyer, a vocal feminist herself, the vaguely sexist argument made here is that we should give these politicians an easy ride because they’re women. This is a general election, the full records of these candidates are on the ballot and to imply that disagreeing with them is tantamount to misogyny is ludicrous.
[the left argue that] the “Tories are toast” and Labour can’t lose, so disgruntled left voters can safely vote for other parties, such as the Greens … what this underplays is the number of Labour-Tory marginals where a relatively small vote for other left candidates could cost Labour a win.
Sodha is right about this. The We Deserve Better campaign is wrong to argue that “you can vote Green or independent with no risk [of a Conservative gain].” The correct argument is that you should vote Green or independent because you believe in their policies and that, if you let Labour take your vote for granted this time, they will take your vote for granted next time, with the same underwhelming policies.
a Labour leader’s most important job is to connect with potential voters, not to coddle members … Liz Truss provides a cautionary tale of what happens when a party leader seeks to impose a membership-endorsed platform on the country without a general election. For Starmer to have stuck to his 2020 leadership election pledges, instead of spending the past four years understanding voters, would have been fundamentally anti-democratic.
Up is down. Down is up. If Starmer hadn't ditched the pledges he made to win the leadership it would have been “fundamentally anti-democratic”. This argument is too stupid to entertain but, because “your ideas are just as unrealistic as Truss’ were” is a common argument against the left, it’s worth unpacking just how inappropriate the comparison is.
Liz Truss was a wildly unpopular leader (-31 net approval on the first day of her premiership) who pursued a wildly unpopular mini-budget (-41) that made her even more unpopular (-73 today).
Keir Starmer was a mildly popular opposition leader (+22 on the first day of his leadership) who abandoned a number of popular pledges like nationalising rail (+48), mail (+57), energy (+55) and water (+55) and abolishing the House of Lords (+46), and is now mildly unpopular (-10).
The lesson here is not that ditching leadership pledges magically makes you popular, it’s far simpler than that:
Doing popular things makes you popular.
Doing unpopular things makes you unpopular.
Saying that you’re going to do popular things and then reneging makes you unpopular and makes people angry.
It’s not electoral rocket science.
the Green party has mopped up enough of the cranks expelled by Labour that it has had to acknowledge its growing problem with antisemitism.
Sodha links to these accusations of antisemitism rather than spelling them out in the article, presumably because if you click through to these articles, much of it is just inconvenient truths about Israel. For example “a councillor in Leeds, who said on October 7 that Palestinians had the right to fight back.” is presented as a shocking act of racism when it is, in fact, a statement of the Palestinian right to resistance under international law.
Sodha, having witnessed the efficacy of smearing the left as antisemitic in the Corbyn years, is just mashing the antisemitism button to win the argument. Lazy false accusations like this muddy the water and jeopardise the necessary fight against actual antisemitism.
Labour won’t be getting my vote. It’s become clear the only chance of getting the Labour leadership to throw its weight behind a referendum [on a Brexit deal] is to deny it my vote.
Whoops, I don’t know how this one got in here. It’s not from this article, it’s a quote from 2019 when Sodha (foolishly and self-indulgently) agreed with the thrust of my argument.