Robin McAlpine – The world needs a new left

Woke and progressive are dead. Unfortunately the prepetrators will be the last to realise this.

Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal

I’m off next week doing DIY because I need a project to take my mind off the state of the world. However this also means that I will inevitably spend my week thinking about the big issue facing a person like me – how to create a new left.

The left has failed for 40 years and it continues to fail almost everywhere. The currents of public anger which should fuel a left politics have been rejected by parties of what was the left and so the anger is instead channelled and embraced by the far right. The left became a mainly middle class phenomenon and became obsessed with its own issues.

Worse, the left spent so much time at university discovering how ‘right’ and morally correct it was that somehow it convinced itself that it didn’t need to communicate to anyone outside its own group chat. After all, the case for us is obvious and doesn’t need stated.

We all have our own theories of everything and love to talk about them. Unfortunately theory turns into policy via slogans and since they’re our boutique theories, they end up being our boutique policies. Let’s be honest; most of what looks like organisation on the left is done by affluent people (or people like me who know that if we wanted to we could become affluent). The left no longer feels or fears economic desperation itself so we don’t prioritise it.

Or rather we say we do, but don’t in practice. Our interests were gender politics, climate marches, independence, public finance and public services, financial regulation and monetary policy, first time house buying, arts and culture, foreign policy, human rights, decolonialisation… We told ourselves our interests were a proxy for ‘their’ interests, those people we told ourselves we were ‘saving’.

After all, if we can run just perhaps three or four more conferences on Modern Monetary Theory we’ll get their lives properly sorted. They’ll can wait until then, surely? The centre left seems to think the solution to child poverty is just to wait until they all reach adulthood and are no longer included in the statistics. The identarian left thinks we must free them from their prejudices before we can free them from their hardship.

The traditional economic left believes they’ll be fine as soon as everyone realises our critique of global capital was right all along. The participatory left thinks that if we form a circle and speak one at a time, the poor will free themselves.

Basically we have been convinced for the longest of times that whatever it is that we ourselves really enjoy doing is the solution. I remember about ten years ago when I first saw the progressive catchphrase ‘the most radical act is self care’ I had a very strong sense that we’d completely lost the plot. If you honestly think taking an extended work break to eat cupcakes is radical, god help us all.

Here’s the truth; the truth is that almost everyone now knows we need a new left. And almost everyone knows what it would roughly be like if it wanted to win again. It would end the centre-left practice of pretending things are basically fine and would name the true villains behind our rising poverty, and it would end the economic left’s view that communicating workable policies to those they would benefit is someone else’s job.

Then it would dig a big hole in the ground, fill it with our narcissistic self-obsession and vanity and set it on fire. An era when we thought we we didn’t need to change things, we just needed to usher in the inevitable progress that we represented in our own moral certainty, must end. The ‘progressive’ era must end.

It would finally accept – horror of horrors! – that the left cannot, cannot win, without the working classes. It would accept that if we are a movement by and for the educated elite, if we insist that everyone must look and talk like us, we’re finished.

We need to accept all of this. Then we can get on with the tasks. Let me give you a starter list:

We need to work out who we’re for

We used to understand our role when we were comfortable with social class. We were fighting in the interests of labour, the working class, they were fighting for the interests of capital, the ruling class. Then social class distinctions got complicated and so we gave up on an idea of the ‘working class’ in return for all kinds of alternative concepts such as ‘the vulnerable’ or ‘the marginalised’.

So frankly we drew circles round people we didn’t like and concluded that we didn’t need them – and then wonder why they don’t vote for us. So let me kick off with this; the left (and independence, which is much the same audience) can win without the votes of private equity managers and quango appointees. Those we could sacrifice.

We don’t win without a core, and our core has below average income. Inequality means that most people in work live on less than average income, as is true for the big majority of people not in work. Most people are below average income, yet we all think we’re talking to ten per cent of people at either side of the income spectrum. If we do, we lose.

We need to work out what they need

Unless we’re paying attention to the actual lives they lead, we’re not showing respect. If I have to hear ‘identity politics makes poor people’s lives better too’ without someone screaming ‘but not less hungry and not less cold and not less scared’ I’ll be doing the screaming. Our own self interest coinciding with a not-that-major issue for them is not the same as solidarity.

We need to start measuring quality of life. Not airy-fairy ‘wellbeing’ metrics; how close each month are people to not being able to afford core bills, and how much do they fear not being able to meet those bills next month? To what extent does their health or their mental health make their lives hard? Is their community pleasant to live in?

One of the resounding findings of the endless autopsy that is US left politics just now is that the Harris campaign simply didn’t even seem to know what level of financial duress its core voters faced. They were only looking at national averages, because the centre left is obsessed with performance indicators and is generally disinterested in lived experience. Inflation levelling out just means ‘still can’t afford to eat’.

We need to do climate change and human rights and ethical foreign policy and all that – we’re not wrong about that on the left. But unless we begin with what matters at the core of the lives of enough people to give us majorities, we don’t get to do anything.

We need to deliver

The centre left political parties have behaved like understanding its core voter is necessary only to shape the slogans, not the policies. Or, same thing, they introduce policies they know aren’t going to solve people’s problems but do so in the language of solving those problems; i.e. they knowingly lie about making things genuinely better for people, not just very slightly less bad.

Which means no more aspirations, goals or targets, only actions, meaningful actions. It is exactly talking about the unfairness of inequality but then prolonging it that has broken that social contract. It must be restored. Nothing but nothing should be thought without the follow-through ‘how do we make this happen and when we do, how do we make absolutely sure it benefits most people?’.

I know you don’t think a policy-led approach saves the left. Neither do I. A delivery-led approach is what saves us, and that means having policies that work, that we can explain why they work and we can explain how lives get better when they do work.

Unite, don’t divide

The left wins through solidarity. Above all, the left has been so, so much worse at building cross-society coalitions than it needs to be. As I explained a few weeks ago, unless we can persuade a low-income pensioner and a struggling small business that the source of their woes is the same source, we are losing.

Identity politics is the gift that keeps giving to the right. It is an entire political philosophy built around focussing on what separates us and it does so by setting a zero-sum game in which every gain from one group is seen as needing to come at the expense of another. It operates on ‘allyship’, a military term that reveals that coalitions in identity politics exist on a ‘common enemy’ basis.

It is both horrible and counterproductive. I have a new sort of wry passtime where I skip and jump between the articles in The Guardian that claim it is factually incorrect to blame the Democrats for alienating men to the greater number that can be summarised as ‘Democrat says everything would be OK if it wasn’t for fucking white men’. I mean, you’re alienating me and I’m on your side.

I’m not saying this means the left needs to give up on trans-friendly policy, or the pursuit of reparations for slavery, or continue to raise questions about who gets statues made of them. I am certainly not saying that climate change or justice for Palestine are disposable issues. On the contrary, I’m saying that whatever we want to do, we only do it if our mission connects with a lot of people.

If our mission is identity, we will keep paying the prices, because most people don’t want an identity-focussed mission, they want a life.

We need to talk

Not to ourselves. We could stop talking to ourselves quite a bit and no-one would suffer. We need to talk to people who we claim we are fighting for. We need to organise. We need messages that belong in Scotland’s dispossessed communities and we need to organise to take that message to those communities.

The support of people outside the political bubble who don’t rush avidly towards the politics pages of a newspaper is not ‘induced’ by us grandstanding. Somehow or other our messages have got to reach these communities. Another video of a gender-non-specific performance poet is not going to do it.

The right talks to these communities, because it spent money to create channels to talk to them. We responded by… calling it the ‘manosphere’ and insulting everyone reached by it as ‘incels’. Unless we come up with a communication method, we’re out the game.

And we need to believe

One of the most common centrist defences of the Democrat campaign was that it didn’t stand a chance because all incumbent governments since the cost-of-living crisis have either been removed or faced stinging setbacks. This is true; a whole host of centre right and centre left governments were swept from power and two right-wing ethnic nationalist ones suffered unexpected major electoral setbacks.

It’s just that this isn’t all. Because there was one election where an incumbent throughout the cost of living crisis wasn’t of the centre left, centre right or nationalist right, but of the populist left. It is Mexico where Amalo was seen to have fought for ordinary people against the price gouging of big corporations. He was at his term limit but his successor actually increased his party Moreno’s share of the vote – and become a first-time female president. They are now beyond dominant and they are popular.

There are those who think there is no need for this in Scotland because we elect centre left parties anyway. Well, we do so far, but a chunk of that base is swinging towards Reform, having voted for figures like Swinney and Starmer and having got little out of it.

To secure the future, we need to be more than that, more than a habit. We need to be a reason, a purpose, a real mission. We need to be change for people who desperately need change. And we need to be the change they need, not the change we quite fancy. If we can do that, we dominate.

Or let me put it in a sentence; the left must become a political movement for the real quality of life for the big majority of people who need us to be a movement for that quality of life. From there, we can be anything. For what it’s worth, for the next year, that is what Common Weal is. We’re a body trying to create the change agenda a new left needs. It is crucial. The world needs it. We can’t keep letting it down.

Robin McAlpine

“Globally, these are dark times. There is a sense that things are getting worse on a whole range of fronts. More people across Europe want to see change than in any time I can remember. But where will they go? To the far right or a democratic, environmental left? Without publications like Brave New Europe, we’ve simply got less chance of shaping change for the better.”

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