This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.
You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jun/24/we-need-to-build-a-new-left-labour-means-nothing-jeanette-winterson
The article has changed 2 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.
Previous version
1
Next version
| Version 0 | Version 1 |
|---|---|
| We need to build a new left. Labour means nothing today | We need to build a new left. Labour means nothing today |
| (2 months later) | |
| ‘7am and woken up to UKIP England. Never cried for my country before. But it isn’t my country anymore. Now we have to build a new Left’ | ‘7am and woken up to UKIP England. Never cried for my country before. But it isn’t my country anymore. Now we have to build a new Left’ |
| This is what I tweeted this morning. And in someone’s reply were the words “nothing left”, which is where we are. The left has nothing and is nothing. Corbyn was the wrong kind of protest vote. Labour – the word itself – is outdated. Labour was the right word and the right party for the 20th century – until the Thatcher-Reagan takeover. The Blair years disguised the problems of the left because Blair was persuasive and charismatic, and there was plenty of money flying around. Cue the Iraq war – and the left rightly started to wonder what a Labour government stood for, when its comrade in arms was George W Bush. | This is what I tweeted this morning. And in someone’s reply were the words “nothing left”, which is where we are. The left has nothing and is nothing. Corbyn was the wrong kind of protest vote. Labour – the word itself – is outdated. Labour was the right word and the right party for the 20th century – until the Thatcher-Reagan takeover. The Blair years disguised the problems of the left because Blair was persuasive and charismatic, and there was plenty of money flying around. Cue the Iraq war – and the left rightly started to wonder what a Labour government stood for, when its comrade in arms was George W Bush. |
| Then came 2008 and the global crash, and Labour’s failure of response in any direction except to prop up late capitalism against the interests of ordinary people. | Then came 2008 and the global crash, and Labour’s failure of response in any direction except to prop up late capitalism against the interests of ordinary people. |
| At the last election, Ed Miliband refused to work with the progressive Scottish National Party, and failed to understand why his party no longer spoke to working people with no work. The result was depressing but not surprising. | At the last election, Ed Miliband refused to work with the progressive Scottish National Party, and failed to understand why his party no longer spoke to working people with no work. The result was depressing but not surprising. |
| What did surprise me was that Cameron and Osborne would risk the first full-power Tory government in decades on a gamble with an unelected cartoon character from a time-warp. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. But he has won. There was no need for this referendum. What we needed was a firm cross-party consensus explaining why the EU is not the problem facing Britain. And as the party in power, the Tories could have faced down their own Eurosceptics and the darker side of the right. If the left had been anything like a serious opposition, the Tories would not have had the luxury of infighting, or this testosterone-fuelled fight to the death with Ukip – a party with just one MP. | What did surprise me was that Cameron and Osborne would risk the first full-power Tory government in decades on a gamble with an unelected cartoon character from a time-warp. Nigel Farage is ridiculous. But he has won. There was no need for this referendum. What we needed was a firm cross-party consensus explaining why the EU is not the problem facing Britain. And as the party in power, the Tories could have faced down their own Eurosceptics and the darker side of the right. If the left had been anything like a serious opposition, the Tories would not have had the luxury of infighting, or this testosterone-fuelled fight to the death with Ukip – a party with just one MP. |
| Now we face the vision of Boris Johnson as prime minister and that mediocre nonentity Gove as chancellor. I don’t know what happens to Farage and his flag-wavers. But they’ll be wanting plenty of seats at the new table. | Now we face the vision of Boris Johnson as prime minister and that mediocre nonentity Gove as chancellor. I don’t know what happens to Farage and his flag-wavers. But they’ll be wanting plenty of seats at the new table. |
| Meanwhile Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are hailing Brexit as a triumph for democracy. | Meanwhile Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen are hailing Brexit as a triumph for democracy. |
| So what can we do? | So what can we do? |
| I am an optimist by nature. I believe in solutions. We need solutions to the absolute failure of the neoliberal Project Few, whereby capitalism has been hijacked to serve the rich, where investing for the long term has been replaced by short-term profiteering, and where globalisation has been allowed to wreck local economies in the name of free trade. | I am an optimist by nature. I believe in solutions. We need solutions to the absolute failure of the neoliberal Project Few, whereby capitalism has been hijacked to serve the rich, where investing for the long term has been replaced by short-term profiteering, and where globalisation has been allowed to wreck local economies in the name of free trade. |
| Too many people in Britain face no future at all – no security at work, no certainty of a home, diminishing access to education and resources, not even a library to sit in on a rainy day. Certainly this is political failure – of the right and the left, but none of this will change because immigrants are going home or because we scrap all those annoying EU directives on workers’ rights and employers responsibilities. | Too many people in Britain face no future at all – no security at work, no certainty of a home, diminishing access to education and resources, not even a library to sit in on a rainy day. Certainly this is political failure – of the right and the left, but none of this will change because immigrants are going home or because we scrap all those annoying EU directives on workers’ rights and employers responsibilities. |
| Brexit is a vote for change – and if the left can accept that, then change can happen, starting today, here in the UK, and working together across the world, as Varoufakis has proposed with Diem 25, a movement for equality and social justice that stands against the baleful rise of the extreme right. | Brexit is a vote for change – and if the left can accept that, then change can happen, starting today, here in the UK, and working together across the world, as Varoufakis has proposed with Diem 25, a movement for equality and social justice that stands against the baleful rise of the extreme right. |
| What I’d like is for the Women’s Equality Party to remake itself as the Equality Party. It’s a relevant name, a powerful name, and naming matters. I’d like to drop Labour and New Labour as words that don’t mean anything anymore. If you still needed proof of that after the last election, Brexit just gave it to you. | What I’d like is for the Women’s Equality Party to remake itself as the Equality Party. It’s a relevant name, a powerful name, and naming matters. I’d like to drop Labour and New Labour as words that don’t mean anything anymore. If you still needed proof of that after the last election, Brexit just gave it to you. |
| The word Conservative means what it means, and what it will always mean. The left is by nature progressive. It changes. Change is what we need now, and an invigorated left, with a strong economic argument and some real solutions for what the world of work is going to look like in the future. The world of work isn’t going to be heavy industry, labour-intensive agriculture, office jobs, careers for life. The middle class is feeling the hit as much as the working class. The old story is told. It’s history. | The word Conservative means what it means, and what it will always mean. The left is by nature progressive. It changes. Change is what we need now, and an invigorated left, with a strong economic argument and some real solutions for what the world of work is going to look like in the future. The world of work isn’t going to be heavy industry, labour-intensive agriculture, office jobs, careers for life. The middle class is feeling the hit as much as the working class. The old story is told. It’s history. |
| I am a writer and I understand the power of the stories we tell. Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative. | I am a writer and I understand the power of the stories we tell. Everything starts as a story we tell ourselves about ourselves. Every political movement begins as a counter-narrative to an existing narrative. |
| The media is mainly run by the rich and the right-wing. They are telling their stories their way, and as Brexit shows, their narrative is working. It’s the immigrants, it’s the EU, it’s the feckless unemployed. It’s welfare, it’s climate control, it’s (what’s left) of the unions. | The media is mainly run by the rich and the right-wing. They are telling their stories their way, and as Brexit shows, their narrative is working. It’s the immigrants, it’s the EU, it’s the feckless unemployed. It’s welfare, it’s climate control, it’s (what’s left) of the unions. |
| If we’re living in a post-facts world – let’s have better stories. Inequality is not a law of nature, like gravity. We make it up as we go along. The world does not have to be run for the benefit of the Murdochs, the Koch brothers, the offshore trusts and the tax havens. The left can tell it better and do it better. But only if we come together. | If we’re living in a post-facts world – let’s have better stories. Inequality is not a law of nature, like gravity. We make it up as we go along. The world does not have to be run for the benefit of the Murdochs, the Koch brothers, the offshore trusts and the tax havens. The left can tell it better and do it better. But only if we come together. |
| A long time ago, when I was 16 and living in a Mini in Accrington – a working-class town in an area that is today losing its libraries to the pack of lies that is Osborne’s austerity – I realised that I needed to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact. The facts weren’t looking good for me – I had nothing and I was nothing. And I thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because if I am the story I can change the story. | A long time ago, when I was 16 and living in a Mini in Accrington – a working-class town in an area that is today losing its libraries to the pack of lies that is Osborne’s austerity – I realised that I needed to read myself as a fiction as well as a fact. The facts weren’t looking good for me – I had nothing and I was nothing. And I thought that if I understood myself as a story I might do better, because if I am the story I can change the story. |
| To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. The facts aren’t working – that much is for sure. Young people, people who are left out by politics, want to hear a new story. The Brexiters latched on to that with spectacular and disastrous results. | To change the way we are telling the story of our country, the story of our world, does need more than facts. The facts aren’t working – that much is for sure. Young people, people who are left out by politics, want to hear a new story. The Brexiters latched on to that with spectacular and disastrous results. |
| It reads to me like Labour, as a party, is finished. The creative forces that make up the left are far from finished. We can find a narrative that unites us, not one that divides us. We can find a left alliance for the 21st century. | It reads to me like Labour, as a party, is finished. The creative forces that make up the left are far from finished. We can find a narrative that unites us, not one that divides us. We can find a left alliance for the 21st century. |
| Equality Party, anyone? | Equality Party, anyone? |
Previous version
1
Next version