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The British left must learn to speak a new language – Spanish
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(5 months later)
‘Politics has nothing to do with being right,” says the pony-tailed Spanish political phenomenon Pablo Iglesias. “Politics is about succeeding.” And succeed is what the Spanish left does.
This could be because it launched early, our rights have expired, there was a legal issue, or for another reason.
The fortresses of Madrid and Barcelona fell in regional elections this weekend, now set to be ruled by two feminist radicals who are implacably opposed to austerity and the free market order. Movements linked to Podemos – the party led by Iglesias which was formed only last year – has mounted the biggest challenge to Spain’s two-party system since the restoration of democracy four decades ago. Spain has one of the fastest growing economies in the EU, but economic growth has not rescued the defenders of a grotesquely unequal order.
Related: The Podemos revolution: how a small group of radical academics changed European politics | Giles Tremlett
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So if you’re part of Britain’s battered, bruised and demoralised left, you should listen when Iglesias speaks. Last year, he delivered a speech berating the traditional left’s failure to communicate. Leftwing students never spoke to “normal people”, he said, and treated working-class people as though “they were from another planet”, bewildered that they did not respond in the way Marxist textbooks said they should. The enemy, says Iglesias, “wants us small, speaking in a language no one understands, in a minority, hiding behind our traditional symbols”.
The left in Britain is still in shock. We did not have time to emotionally prepare ourselves for a Tory majority government, because the pollsters and analysts with their fancy graphs and scientific formulas were insistent that the election race was neck and neck, despite the travesty that was the Labour “opposition”. For many, it is though time stopped at 10pm on 7 May 2015: we’re still trapped in that moment of horror and panicky disbelief. Demoralisation is compounded by the farce that is the Labour leadership “debate”. Strip politics of any conviction, inspiration, sense of purpose; add in a few vacuous buzzwords guaranteed to make the eyes of the average punter in the pub glaze over, and, voila, you have the leadership contest.
How tempting for the left to turn inwards, to suddenly feel like strangers in a foreign and hostile land, populated by shy Tories and rampant Ukippery. You can see how the already inward-looking left could become ever more insular, with leftwing meetings serving as group therapy rather than a means to win over the unconvinced or the unreached, and activists retreating into online “safe spaces” free of those who think differently. Our language often seems intended to exclude, full of rhetoric and terminology that only those who have associated with leftwing milieus could ever hope to digest. Social media abounds with activists attacking others on the left for failing to abide by the strict rules of communication.
Not speaking or writing in the correct way can be seen as suspicious at best, treacherous at worst. For millions of people who are not au fait with the latest queer theories, that means being written off. Being “leftwing” could become a cultural label, like being a hipster or an emo-kid, a way of standing out from the crowd and asserting difference in a Ukip-ised England.
How ironic that the right preaches rampant individualism but often displays great solidarity, while the left professes collectivism, but often operates in the most rampantly individualistic way. Voices on the left who achieve any prominence whatsoever are castigated for careerism or other ulterior motives, or for failing to use their platform to promote the correct form of politics. Rather than seeing different strategies as complementary, an advocate of a different approach risks being accused of not acting in good faith.
Podemos’ approach is based on the assumption that, outside politics, most do not think in terms of 'left' and 'right'.
For those of us who want to transform society, rather than just noisily critique the way things are, we have to completely rethink our approach. This is not me castigating the failures of others, arrogantly assuming I have it all worked out. I don’t, and this is about my failure as much as anyone else’s. The debate on how the left succeeds is often reduced to structure and organisation, about whether we are Labour, the Greens, the SNP, or some leftwing splinter group.
Yes, in the months ahead, a wide-ranging discussion about how we best achieve political representation for working people and all those denied a voice beckons. But this comes back to what Iglesias said. It’s about attitude and approach, otherwise we are just debating which self-imposed ghetto we want to rant impotently from.
Podemos’ approach is based on the assumption that, outside politicised bubbles, most do not think in terms of “left” and “right”. Outside the political world, most think in terms of issues to be addressed in a way that is convincing, coherent, and communicated in a language that people understand. Statistics and facts won’t win the support of millions; we’re human beings, we think in terms of empathy. Stories are more persuasive, because they speak to us emotionally. Why else do rightwing tabloids focus on extreme examples of benefit “scroungers”? They know such stories make their readers’ blood boil; they are human stories that connect emotionally, and powerfully so.
Study after study shows that most Britons believe in policies that are on the “left”: like a living wage, public ownership of utilities and services, or workers’ rights. Ukip voters are, on some measures, even more on the left on economic issues. Though many want these policies, they may not be convinced they can be delivered; or they may prioritise clamping down on immigrants or benefit claimants over renationalising the railways. But many could be won over by a left that learned to communicate in a way that convinced and inspired.
Millions of Britons did not vote in the election. Four million opted for Ukip, many of them working-class people with fears over housing, jobs and wages that have not been answered with politics based on hope. Here are groups that surely the left must be reaching out to.
How do we do it? It means a new form of community-based politics rather than a strategy of yet another leftwing rally followed by yet another A to B demonstration. Do I have the answers to how this could be done? No, but that’s where the debate must surely be. Look to Podemos in Spain. They abandoned the old shackles of the left – the terminology and rhetoric from a different era – and they started to win. Some on the left are all too accustomed to losing; it’s almost become comforting. The rest of us have to change, just like Podemos, or we will die.
