Words: Grace Lally. Pic: protests outside East Sussex County Council last year.
Elections are being cancelled and opposition groups have been forced to resort to the courts to defend the democratic right to vote. In Putin’s Russia? In Trump’s America? No, this particular anti-democratic stunt is being pulled by our own local councillors here in Hastings and the opposition group trying to force the planned elections to go ahead in May is Nigel Farage’s Reform party.
According to a council statement “The four group leaders at Hastings Borough Council (Green, Labour, Conservative and Hastings Independents Group) … believe elections would present significant risks to the stability, continuity and capacity to deliver the local government reorganisation process, and also impose financial and administrative burdens when the council must be focused on a smooth transition to unitary arrangements.” So calm. So considered. Elections are expensive don’t you know. And it can be downright disruptive to business as usual if the wrong people get elected. So with a simple managerial flourish of their technocratic wand the councillors have vanquished the pesky election that could have seen them voted out of office.
No doubt it’s for our own good. “Stability and continuity” means that our bins will continue to be collected while councillors get on with smoothly transitioning into non-existence, and one should never miss an opportunity to tell people that every penny spent on democracy is money taken directly away from housing homeless people. With reasoning like this I wonder shall we ever be able to justify holding an election again?
Unfortunately many people’s opinion about the rights and wrongs of cancelling elections does seem to be based on who wants to cancel it and who wants it to go ahead. I might be more shocked about how many people are willing to accept the cancellation of an election if I hadn’t seen how gung-ho many of the same people were in trying to shut down a volunteer-run independent newspaper last year, simply because it published an article that they didn’t agree with. It seems that well-meaning people, who in all other circumstances consider themselves to be champions of liberal freedoms, are quite at ease with burning books if they express ‘wrong’ opinions, and are more than a little agnostic about cancelling elections if it means keeping out Reform.
But what a gift this is to Reform.
“Our fragile democracy can’t afford to ignore the people’s right to vote,” said Julia Hilton, then leader of the Green Party in Hastings, when the Tory council in East Sussex used the same pretext to cancel the county council elections last year. People do hate hypocrisy, but it’s more than that. Councillors who said last year’s elections were vital in order for people to vote on whether or not they supported local government reorganisation, are now saying we can’t have elections because it would derail that self same reorganisation, that we NEVER got to vote on.
Reform can now present themselves as the great disruptors, the champions of the people, the insurgent outsiders who want to do things differently, while all the other parties are obediently abolishing our local council, as decreed by this hated Labour government. When the elections finally come round I expect all of the parties which did such a blatant u-turn on cancelling elections to be roundly punished by the electorate. What a travesty it would be if it is Reform, the party that is trashing council services everywhere they have so far been elected, who reap the benefits of their stupidity and arrogance.
I think you do need a very particular kind of arrogance to decide that cancelling elections is fine so long as the people doing it are ‘good’ people, acting for ‘good’ reasons – a particular liberal arrogance that anything done in the name of liberal values is inherently morally right regardless how authoritarian the means used to achieve it.
I’m a socialist. I believe we need democratic control over every aspect of the economy in order to run society for the good of everyone, not just to enrich the few. But my general view on democracy – that more is good and less is bad – used to be a fairly widely held view among the vast majority of people far to the right of socialists. No more.
As the normal running of society is breaking down everywhere, radical authoritarian measures to keep things in order are becoming more popular. As the future looks more dangerous, uncertain and frightening, so large numbers of people are being won over to deeply undemocratic ‘solutions’ – expel people of foreign descent, lock up anyone who dissents, conscript our young people to prepare for endless war.
Radical socialist solutions, like taking wealth and power off the rich, are also gaining in popularity but looking around the world there’s no doubt that it is rightwing demagoguery – might is right, everyone for themselves and damn the rest – that is the order of the day. For people who yearn for a kinder society, for a collective and humane response to the myriad crises we face, there is a growing sense of panic.
But let’s be really clear: however terrified we are by the growth of the far right, we will never defeat them by mirroring them, or by using the repressive levers of this undemocratic state against them. If we rely on banning hate speech or proscribing far right groups or cancelling elections as the means to defeat the Right, then we cut the ground out from beneath ourselves, and pave the way for these kinds of repressive measures to be turned on us all. Strengthening the powers of the state in order to maintain the status quo is the problem not the solution.
The reality is we will not get rid of a system that breeds inequality and war and environmental destruction without massive upheavals and mass resistance against the people who benefit from that system. Changing society for the better will not be legislated for us by an enlightened elite or a benign dictator, it will have to involve people taking radical democratic action like mass strikes, protests, blockades, boycotts, and occupations to wrest power off those who hold it now. We don’t need to fear the chaos of more democracy, we need to fear the repression and violence that will be needed to maintain ‘stability’ and order in an ever more unjust world.
When millions of people voted for Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour party in 2017, they voted for a party that was promising for the first time in decades to confront the rich and powerful and empower the many. His popularity terrified the establishment and they threw everything at discrediting him, but we got a glimpse of how elections can be a mechanism for expressing people’s hopes for a better world.
If the left cannot win in an election against Reform right now then we need to look to our own weaknesses to figure out why. There will always be a minority of hardened right wing supporters for parties like Reform, or the Tories, and many will radicalise even further to the right as the crisis in our society deepens. But what about the 69% of eligible voters in the recent by-election that was won by Reform in Ashdown and Conquest – those who didn’t vote for Reform but didn’t vote for the other parties either? Maybe the problem is not just the lies told by Reform but the lies told by all the politicians from the right to the centre and the left, that if you vote for them they will make life better for you – the lie that has made people angry and disengaged and cynical about all politicians and about democracy itself.
There’s no easy answer but clearly just denouncing Reform is not going to make the conditions that feed its success disappear. We need to build a movement of the left that is rooted in the communities we seek to represent. We need to build grassroots power in unions and campaigns that can start to deliver higher wages, block damaging developments, win rent caps and price controls, etc. etc. – and we need to stand people to get elected who can give voice to that movement.
It is the freedoms that we have won in the past that will enable us to fight for a much greater democracy in the future – freedoms that we need to fight to defend. Freedom of speech, freedom to protest, a free press, jury trials, the right to join a union, the right to strike – and of course the right to vote in free and fair elections.
Write to your local councillor today demanding they allow our local elections to go ahead this May. Not having credible left candidates who we are confident can win in those elections is not an excuse to cancel them, it’s a wake up call for the left to get on and do the work that’s needed to ensure we are more ready next time.
Thanks for this – a great and far-reaching article