217. I WAS WRONG: Rejecting Settling For a Better Tone of Oppression
It’s been a year since the Tories got kicked out and Keir Starmer’s Labour Party came into power. A year ago I urged people to vote Labour, making the argument I have been making since around 2009 about the “tone of our oppression”. I even wrote a song about it in 2016. Put simply, as an anarchist I think all electoral politics is problematic and the left and right, as Bill Hicks once so deftly put it, just two different puppets held by the same puppeteer. However, so the argument went, within the narrative framework of the imperfect world we live in, although both parties essentially agree on the same principles of protecting capital and maintaining structural inequalities, the left/right framework means there is an important difference in rhetoric used and the point of view of the debates around politics presented. In short: parties on the left at least pay lip service to the protection of minorities and better helping those who are suffering than the parties on the right who have no ideological need to pretend that they care. And this rhetorical lip service translates into real world protections and help, minor as they may be, for the most vulnerable in our society which makes the tone of our essential political oppression that much better under a left-wing government than a right-wing one. Therefore, I argued, we have a moral obligation to vote for the left wing party even if we know it won’t fundamentally change the overall status of our oppression. Until utopia is possible, let’s at least make this non-utopia better for the most amount of people.
But watching the Starmer government continue the same performative cruelty as their Tory predecessors for the last twelve months, I have to admit that all my anarchist and other radical critics were right and I was wrong: the tone of our oppression has not changed under Labour. If anything, the assumptions that a left-wing party would be sympathetic to the vulnerable and our “wait and see” approach to what the new government might do has allowed the oppression to be much worse. A knife in the back instead of in the front.
Under Labour, those on benefits have been made to suffer more. Even if eventual legislation ends up getting watered down from the original cruel intentions, the weeks and months of uncertainty and dehumanising language around some of the poorest in our society showed that you don’t have to be a member of the Conservative Party to attack the most vulnerable in our society. It also showed the intention that remains to continue to erode welfare. Likewise, a combination of unreserved support for the Cass Review and the Supreme Court’s limited definition of a “woman” has allowed the Labour government to decimate trans rights under the apparent legitimacy of medical and legal objectivity, making their continued quashing of trans people’s ability to live the lives they want almost more nefarious than the, at least explicit, transphobia of the name-calling and mocking Tories.
A year on, our hospitals are no better, our teachers are still being underpaid, the cost of living continues to hit the poorest the hardest, and Gaza continues to be the site of a genocide our government is more concerned about censoring musicians like Bob Vylan and Kneecap over than censuring Israel. As Trump continues to violate democratic norms across the ocean, Keir Starmer continues to fluff his ego instead of criticise him, scraping and crawling in the hope of a trade deal because little progress has been made reconciling our broken relationship with Europe.
I was wrong to vote for what I believed at the time to be the better “tone of our oppression” and vote this Labour government into power. If I had voted with my conscience for someone like the Green Party instead, or even not voted at all, I would have not been tacitly endorsing this continued decline in basic public services and human decency that seems to be Keir Starmer’s Labour Party. I certainly wouldn’t feel so deeply disappointed all the time. At least the Tories told you that they didn’t give a damn what happened to those most vulnerable in society. Their callousness was to be expected.
I was heartened over the last week to hear rumblings from Zarah Sultana and Jeremy Corbyn about starting a new political party on the left, freed from Labour’s centre-right obsessions and left-wing purges. It made me remember the last time I was actually hopeful about electoral politics back when Corbyn was leader of the Labour and I was able to actually vote in two elections in a row for a party manifesto I actually believed in and didn’t merely think was the best of two evils. And I don’t think we talk enough as a country about how history continues to prove Corbyn right on most of those policies we never got to see properly enacted.
From now on, tweaking the flavour of propaganda and the words used by politicians to continue to do nothing to help us is not enough for me. The tone of our oppression is just window-dressing that ensures nothing of substance is done to address the massive structural inequalities and embedded barriers to happiness and flourishing that continue to limit the life chances and ability to thrive of the most vulnerable of us. No more wasted votes. No more choice between Conservatives or Conservative-Lite. The practice doesn’t match the theory and real people are continuing to be under-served and actively attacked by a government who put the interests of the few above the interests of the many. It’s time to focus on fixing the oppression not simply adjusting the tone. I was wrong all along, and it’s time to stand corrected.
Author: DaN McKee (he/him)
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