We are not entitled to your vote
In too many of our conversations - from internal Labour strife to electoral reform we forget one key fact: It's up to the voters how they vote.
We are not entitled to your support: we have to earn it.
That should be the fundamental mindset of any political party and especially Labour who have been rejected by the voters over and over and over again.
It should also be the mindset of campaigners. You don’t win by being right. You don’t even win by convincing others you are right. You win by working with the electorate or the public to take the step towards the choice you think to be right. You work by them making that decision - never by making it for them and trying to crowbar them into the choice you think they should be making.
There’s a phrase we use in politics when talking about persuading voters to switch - creating a permission structure. This, done rightly, is about voters creating in their own minds permission to change their vote or stance. Not by repudiating their previous choices, but by seeing themselves the logic of the journey from one to the other.
But in our polarised and individualistic times, people are too often looking to distort this idea. The consequences of which are a short term dopamine hit of righteousness for themselves and continuing long term losses for their party and their cause.
So let us be clear about a few things:
No one owes anyone an apology for not voting Labour or for voting Tory at the last (or any) election or for voting for Brexit.
If Labour couldn’t persuade enough people to vote for them, that is a failure of the Labour Party, not the voters. If the Yes campaign couldn’t persuade enough people to vote for them, that is their failure too.
Those who were on the losing side of both of these battles are not owed an apology and the truth is as long as they continue to demand one or to ask for public repudiation of their choices from those they already failed to persuade once, they will continue down a losing spiral.
What would an apology actually do? What difference would it make? It might make you feel a bit better. Feel a bit more comfortable in your righteousness. But how would it make the person apologising feel? Humbled and humiliated most likely. Not like they had made a sensible and logical journey from one position to another. That is not a position that feels like an attractive option to most of us. I don’t want to feel that way and I expect you don’t either. So why push to inflict it on those we most need to feel good about coming towards us?
Politics is not about how you feel. It is about how we administrate the country to do the most good.
Politics - with a small and a big P - has come to be very personal in recent years. We take it to heart. This is why we fight - literally sometimes - in the street about it. It is why meetings have become so horrible to sit through. It is why language can really and truly feel like violence - because it does violate. We have built up these hardshell political identities - often inside of highly protected bubbles and we do not take kindly to the piercing of these.
So while politics should be about the complexities of managing a state that facilitates a good society, for all too many of us, we cannot bear a single loss to our sense of self that comes with the political give and take that makes the world go round.
Toxic individualism is hurting the collective that should be the backbone of progressive politics
We all have the right to live freely, as we are as long as we do so in ways that hurt no one else.
So far so straightforward. But of course, we’re actually human beings, not data points. So we don’t always have an awareness of how our individual choices hurt others. And ever, when we do, we don’t always care enough to change those choices - and nor are we, in fact, always right to.
Life is complex when you simply reduce it to our basic biological needs - breathing, eating, moving. Add in the fact that we have emotions, desires and wants, that we are greedy and selfish and sharing and altruistic and that all of this exists in all of us then no wonder we hurt each other so much.
Progressive politics shouldn't be about a system that removes or negates our humanity - flaws and all. But it should be about systems. And by that, it has to mean that our individual character traits will have to rub up against those of others and that progressive politics must be about negotiating this - not negating it. If you negate it, you will have winners and losers - not partners in progress. You will not always be on the winning side. Even if you weren’t a fan of collectivism, statistically, isn’t it better then to have a system where you always win a bit rather than one where you often lose utterly?
If we think about these basic points as they can and should be applied to politics, we see that it is absolutely not up to the Labour Party to give others permission to vote for us or to make doing so an act of redemption.
What the role of Labour is now is to make voting for us a logical step to take having taken a chance on the Tories in 2019.
That means we have to have an attractive forward offer, not just a critique of what is happening now and especially not of what has come before (that chosen by voters). Those who loved Corbyn must work with those who support Starmer - and those who are every place in between - to move beyond talking about what has happened inside Labour for the last five years to what should happen to Labour in the future. This is not to forget the need to strengthen disciplinary procedures and do the best to take factionalism out of them (not simply to transfer the power within them from one faction to another). Labour must be a competent and well-run organisation - something that cannot be said of it now and has not been able to be said of it for a long time. But it must be an organisation that deals with its past in able to look to its future. That has to be the driving force.
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What I’ve been up to
Well the big news is you can now have a watch of my play No Cure For Love if you want to! You can view a recording of it on YouTube here.
I have also been going to the theatre a lot. You can read my reviews here:
Albatross, Playground Theatre. (Plays to See)
Arrival, Royal Docks. (Plays to See)
One Man Poe, The Space. (View from the Cheap Seat)
If you would like me to attend and review your performance, please get in touch on the email below.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_.