UK Punishment Elections: The Empty Mainstream and Ghost Parties

UK Election 2024: The emptiness of the mainstream, punishment elections and ghost parties

The UK is experiencing a turbulent, messy, argumentative election contest. One where the main players and institutions seem unsure of themselves; their place in the world; their relevance – and moreover their ability to govern and present policies and ideas. Dani Garavelli summed up the SNP’s record in office in The Guardian saying that the party has ‘talked the talk without walking the walk and took its supporters for granted’ – in terms of its centre-left rhetoric and the disjuncture between that and reality.

Whatever the final election result it looks certain that the Labour Party will be elected with a sizeable majority. The Conservatives will be decisively rejected, the right split by the rise of Farage’s Reform; while in Scotland the dominant governing party for close on two decades, the SNP experiences, a significant reversal of fortunes.

This raises many questions – including the nature of Starmer’s Labour project; the direction of the Conservatives after the election and further lurch to the right; the nature of the Farage project and attempt to realign the forces of the right, and what happens to the SNP as it suffers a loss of direction and downturn in its fortunes.

Underpinning all of this are bigger challenges that are overcoming mainstream politics everywhere. The broken UK economic model since the 2008 banking crash, and the falling living standards and real wages for the vast majority that exist alongside grotesque levels of wealth, inequality and poverty, in one of the world’s richest economies. Add to that the tyranny of corporate power and finance capitalism and the climate emergency, which mainstream politics has conspicuously turned its back on addressing in any meaningful way.

The Labour Party under Keir Starmer are defined by their limited agenda. Their iron-will discipline offers as few hostages to fortune as possible to the Tories and right-wing media. This brilliant and frustrating stance, which has worked in opposition and is working in this campaign, will be completely unsuited to government

Nowhere in the Western world are the centre-left and social democracy in rude health. Look at the shellacking that the German SPD and French left received in the recent European elections, or the shrivelled state of the once all-powerful Swedish Social Democrats.

British Labour have addressed this by buying into fiscal conservatism and combining it with a social conservatism motivated by nervousness at how the right have weaponised ‘culture war’ issues. Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves is outdoing Gordon Brown’s ‘Iron Chancellor’ period and invoking the spectre of the classical economic orthodoxy of Labour’s Philip Snowden – Ramsay MacDonald’s Chancellor in the 1929-31 Labour Government and the Great Depression of 1929 who clung to balancing the books as the economy crashed.

The Conservative Party’s historic mission through most of the 20th century has been to be the party of power and to act as a moderating force against the more extreme forces of the right. This compact began to break down in the 1980s and in the era of high Thatcherism.

Following on in the latest period of Tory ascendancy, and more so post-Brexit, the Tories have broken free of many of their traditional moorings and shifted dramatically to the right. This is clear not just on immigration, but in their cavalier approach to the rule of law and international obligations, and willingness to consider the UK leaving the European Court of Human Rights. This right-wing rachet is now working at an accelerated speed destroying what is left of the old Tory Party with senior Tories such as Suella Braverman and Jacob Rees-Mogg openly appeasing Nigel Farage to come to some kind of understanding on the right.

The Power of Ghost Parties: The Case of Reform UK

2024 should be less understood as a repeat of the 1993 Canadian Conservative wipe-out and more a reverse 1983. Then Michael Foot’s Labour fought an inept, amateur campaign and struggled to retain second place in votes and see off the challenge of the new third force: the Liberal-SDP Alliance. At one late point the polls crossed and Labour fell into third place, but such was Labour’s residual loyalty in places that it held onto second place narrowly: a result which gave the party breathing space to recover.

The Tories are now fighting for their political lives to retain second place against Farage’s Reform. There is a high chance as in 1983 that the polls will cross again at some point, and while the Tories may still finish second in votes they lack the same residual loyalty that Labour had 40 years ago. Politics is more transient and individualist in its loyalties, and the Tory floor is lower than Labour all those years ago.

The phenomenon of Reform UK is worth noting. It is not a real political party; it is a private company owned 53% by Farage and 33% by Tice. It has no real members, no policy making or democratic structures; hence Farage could unilaterally announce he was returning as leader last week with no debate. 

Reform are a ghost party and political force with no policies and presence which by virtue of the power of Nigel Farage strikes terror into the Tories. But as a ghost and chimera it is more powerful, because it cannot be held accountable and scrutinised in the way that conventional parties are. The late Mark Fisher described this as ‘the agency of the virtual’ – the ability to affect things rather than altering reality directly; taken to its logical conclusion it can be observed of political parties that existence is a bit old school and significantly over-rated.

Punishment Politics and the Conservative Party

This contest is at its core a punishment election. A contest where voters want to reek vengeance on the Tories as brutally and unambiguously as possible. Voters have stopped listening to Tory mendacity and their brazen lies as they attempt to explain 14 years of decline, disaster and division, and have no time for Sunak’s never-ending list of future promises. Voters have tuned out and want them punished, humiliated and as far from power as possible.

The 2024 election has a powerful popular sentiment animating it for all the unedifying nature of the day-to-day campaign. This is the potency and emotion of anti-Tory feeling running through the country. This can be seen in the debacle of the Tory campaign; the rise of Labour; tactical voting aiding the Lib Dems, and even part of the rationale of the Farage-Tice Reform UK strategy wanting to inflict maximum damage on the Tories.

This makes this, with all its limitations, a watershed election which could be as impactful as those other seismic post-war contests: 1945, 1979 and 1997. In each of these occasions there was more of a positive shift to the winning party: Labour in 1945 and 1997; the Conservatives in 1979.

Today the rejection of the governing Conservatives is shaping the election and is off the scale compared to the reverses of previous governing parties – the Tories in 1945 and 1997 and Labour in 1979. Two of these three elections involved a changing of the guard in the ideological environment – binning the inter-war assumptions of laissez faire economics and indifference to unemployment and poverty in 1945; then overturning the post-war settlement in 1979. So far 2024 looks more like 1997, but the election is being held against the backdrop of the collapse of the economic and social order which has framed UK politics post-1979.

Change is coming to Scotland

Something profound is going on in Scotland. The era of SNP dominance is over just as the Labour era of hegemony ended previously. The SNP are not in a good place, have no obvious cut-through themes, and no obviously positive story to tell after 17 years in government and no plausible vision on independence.

The SNP’s leadership is all over the place in this election; John Swinney and Stephen Flynn have been trying to row back on the party’s official policy of asserting that winning a majority of seats is a mandate to open negotiations for independence with Westminster. This policy was never going anywhere only, having been devised to keep as many pro-independence voters with the SNP as possible under challenge from Labour. But this is a dishonest, undeliverable, anti-democratic policy, and at its heart, anti-self-determination, daring to overturn the 2014 indyref with an election mandate.

The SNP’s senior figures have belatedly recognised the folly of this. They have taken cognisance that if you make the election about independence and experience a severe setback, this has consequences for the cause of independence. Hence, Swinney and Flynn as well as others have been trying to downplay and even deny this policy. This dose of reality is a bit late in the day.

The corporate capture of the public sphere 

The tailwinds and storms currently raging across the globe turning assumptions and institutions upside down – economically, culturally or geo-politically – barely get a reference in the UK election. There is no chance of a return to normalcy under Keir Starmer’s Labour because the fissures and faultlines domestically and internationally are so powerful. Some on the centre-left yearn for a return to the managed, ordered society of the Britain of 1945-75 defined by a ‘post-war consensus’ whether across the UK or in an independent Scotland. This is not possible because the kind of UK society and international order it was built upon (managed currencies, exchange controls, the Cold War) has gone forever.

One way that politics and public discourse is being transformed in the UK and developed capitalist societies is the changing nature of the public sphere by new actors and platforms. A major factor in this, as well as the retreat from traditional and legacy media, is the reconfiguration of societies with an enormous and unprecedented (in recent times) concentration of wealth. Finance capitalism, dark monies, deregulation and weak governance has created a new generation of self-styled ‘masters of the universe’, who assume a divine right to shape democracy – and humanity – to their interests.

Such individuals have funded the likes of GB News in the UK and a host of TV and radio platforms in the US and elsewhere which have increasingly deep political influence. They have contributed to a coarser and harsher, partisan public conversation; one where contentious statements, disinformation and conspiracy theories are allowed free reign. Think Trump’s lie that the 2020 election was ‘stolen’; or the outlandish assertions that COVID, lockdown and the vaccine were all ploys at global control by elites.

This trajectory will continue for the foreseeable future as old assumptions about media and media consumption decline. There is a predictable prospect across the West of seeing a financially well-resourced insurgent hard right media attack some of the basic tenets of what we used to think made up society – multi-culturalism, the need for a welfare state, respect for the rule of law, and international treaties and obligations.

The public sphere in the UK and elsewhere is now even more corroded and controlled by the forces of corporate capital. Take one recent controversy: Baillie Gifford’s withdrawal from sponsoring book festivals after the campaign by Fossil Free Books. Such are the difficult times we live in for arts and culture funding that many leading cultural figures jumped to the defence of Baillie Gifford – having been put in an impossible bind.

Yet in too many public discussions the wider picture of corporate capture is never aired, or the backdrop of the closure of culture described eloquently by Mark Fisher in 2015 – ‘Self-educated working-class culture generated some of the best comedy, music and literature in modern British history. The last 30 years have seen the bourgeoisie take over not only business and politics, but also entertainment and culture’. Instead we have witnessed, in the words of academic Jeremy Gilbert, the ‘unlimited accumulation of capital for the sole benefit of capitalists’ and its consequences.

How does politics cope with such huge challenges? The answer is not to be found in the response of mainstream politics in this Westminster election. Nor the slightly less broken and tainted version on show in the devolved Scottish Parliament. A similar picture can be found across most of the Western world and advanced capitalist societies.

Today’s Labour Party has little creative, original or radical to say about the scale of challenges faced by the UK and the world. Yet it is too easy to just blithely dismiss Labour without understanding why the party has ended up in this position: forever attacked by a partisan right-wing press, faced by a Tory Party which until now has shown a historic desire to win, and imbued by the experience of regular defeat. All this means that the party has a nervousness about how to put together a nationwide coalition which can withstand incessant Tory and media attacks – not just in an election but over years.

A similar judgement can be made of the SNP and Scottish independence. The limits of what passes for social democracy and the politics of a broadly progressive nationalism have been left exposed for all to see: ‘a defensive social democracy at best combined with a self-congratulatory nationalism have been our kudos for too long’ said a SNP senior adviser to me a while back noting that such a politics was fast running out of treadmill; and so it has proven.

The future has been decided – unless we act

None of these fundamentals are being touched upon by the UK election, but that is to be expected. Westminster politics has long been a pantomime exercise in theatre, drama and emptiness. But the inconvenient truth is that Scottish politics has for too long fallen prey to believing it is fundamentally different when it isn’t.

The political traditions and practices which define Westminster and Holyrood and all that orbit them are broken, threadbare and hollowed out. Yet as this becomes more apparent, we are confronted with huge challenges – the barbarians at the gate representing the hard and far-right, the runaway nature of zombie capitalism, the nature of climate catastrophe, and the corporate capture of the public sphere and even the very notion of ‘the public’ itself.

As we come to the end of this Tory era, some commentators have some degree of hope, Will Hutton writing at the end of This Time No Mistakes: How to Remake Britain that: ‘We can rebuild an attractive country with an uniquely dynamic, purpose-driven capitalism grounded in an economic philosophy that recognises the interdependence of the private and public spheres’ all ‘underwritten by a vibrant social contract.’ None of which addresses the nature of the British state and capitalism, the weakness of any challenges to them, and the absence of UK-wide agency.

Timid social democracy, bourgeois nationalism, or mild-mannered green politics are inadequate for present times. This at least needs recognition before a politics and practice of resistance and transformation can have any prospect. We need to start with a degree of honesty about the emptiness of the politics around us: challenging the mainstream while addressing the unsustainable economic and social order it is clinging to as the wreckage and damage mounts all around.

Reviving a ‘little Britain’ of 1945-75 or our own Scottish version of it are diversions and illusions; we will have to face our own ghosts and fairy tales and dare to start imagining a different post-neoliberal and even post-capitalist world. If we do not do so on what passes for the left, the forces of the virulent right have a bleak, dark future they are already preparing to impose on us.