How we can learn the lessons of defeat and build a new movement of the Left

The @anthonypainter Labour movement column

“Tell Steve Jobs where he can stick his multicultural, multi-coloured iPod Nanos. Send ’em back! SEND THEM BACK,” Tweets @realnickgriffin. “Shame on YOU for eating brie, when the decent working people of Britain have democratically chosen Dairylea as their favourite.”

Unlike our cousins in the United States, the British left seems strangely reticent about using humour as a political tactic. At the count on Sunday night, the gaggle of BNP activists stood before me (if ‘gaggle’ is the right collective noun; maybe it should be ‘mob’?) seemed anything but amusing. Actually, thinking back, they were completely ridiculous. Jon Stewart would have a field day.

When the American community organising guru, Saul Alinsky, arrived in Rochester, New York to take on the discriminatory employment practices of Eastman Kodak, he quipped, “Maybe I am innocent and uninformed about what has been happening here, but as far as I know the only thing that Eastman Kodak has done on the race issue in America has been to introduce colour film.” His fourth rule of ‘power tactics’ was: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

Humour is not ‘man’s’ only weapon. The third Alinsky rule is: Wherever possible go outside the experience of your enemy. He devised a tactic to de-segregate a department store in Chicago. It involved 3,000 blacks going to shop in the store one Saturday en masse. It was perfectly legal and, unsurprisingly the department store got wind of it. Immediately, they opened up 186 shop floor and executive positions to black Chicagoans. In one fell swoop it achieved what months of protest never could have done – worth remembering as the eggs fly.

The anti-BNP Hope not Hate campaign was instrumental in limiting the swell of support for the BNP in these elections. Incredibly, and it is the campaign that deserves a large chunk of the credit, the BNP vote actually declined even though it went up as a proportion of the vote on a lower turnout. The biggest dam against a BNP flood is simply informing people of the reality of their views. That is what Hope not Hate achieves.

Now, more Alinsky-esque tactics need to be deployed in addition to the mass leafleting which has been so effective. Why not overload the new BNP MEPs with casework and keep an online tally of how they do? Perhaps ethic minorities could attempt to join the party en masse just to show how non-racialist they are? Why not send groups of non-white, non-heterosexual constituents to the European Parliament to meet their new MEPs and keep a video blog of what happens? How Alinsky would have loved the web and mobile telephony. Let’s use every tool at our disposal. So rather than mere protests and confrontation, a mix of mass campaigning, ridicule and smart tactics might well be more effective.

That’s the negative approach. It is fundamental but it is not enough. BNP voters are characterised as white, working class former Labour voters. Peter Kellner spots that 59% believe that Labour used to ‘care about people like me but no longer does.‘ He is careful to describe these voters as former Labour ‘sympathisers’ rather than ‘voters’. Labour’s vote crashed by 7% from 2004 while the BNP only increased by just over 1%. The problem is not Labour support going to the BNP. The problem is Labour support going all over the place.

More correctly, Labour support is going all over the place other than to the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats. The recovery of the Labour vote will be critical to defeating the BNP next time. The hard reality is that the BNP’s success was a direct consequence of Labour’s failure. Anti-BNP campaigners did their bit. It was the Labour Party that failed.

These election results have been characterised as a protest vote: mid-term blues, expenses, ennui with Labour in power. There is truth in all of that but it misses a larger reality. It is something touched upon by Eric Hobsbawm, “The European left relied on a working class that no longer exists in its old form, and in order to recover it will need to find a new constituency.” New Labour was ultimately a response to this. It was temporary compact with the very ‘forces of conservatism’ that it sought to eclipse and was fatally bounded as a result.

The alternative response is the ‘core vote’ strategy which attempts to cling onto an industrial age working class vote in a country that has been through a decades of deindustrialisation. It mixes ‘radical’ statist policies with an outer skin of democratic reform. This is aimed at a demographic that is now fragmented, diminished and complex. It just won’t aggregate so will fail.

So a New Labour strategy even if it works is undesirable. The ‘core vote’ opposite won’t work. There is an alternative.

A political project that combines social democracy with environmentalism and liberalism seems to be the best hope. It would seek to reach, for want of better descriptions, both the working class and liberal professionals. It is not about the Labour Party alone. It has to be based around a broad movement for social and environmental justice and rooted in the bonding institutions of civil society: trade unions, churches, community and environmental groups. Democratic reform will be essential to the emergence of such a force.

All this is easier said than done but political recovery cannot just be plucked out of the air. It has to be rooted in a genuine understanding of modern Britain. Saul Alinsky would have known how to take on the BNP. We can learn from that. But the real battle is with conservatism as it always will be. For that, we need a build an entirely new political movement. Oh, and that will see the BNP off too.