I am sad, and I am worried, but most of all I’m just really fucking angry. 

In the wake of the biggest Labour election defeat since the 80s will I personally be ok? Probably, will other people? Probably not.

The Conservative party have won an election on a base of social media targeted lies, propped up by unbelievable media bias, and overall because of Brexit. Yes, it is very evident that Corbyn is unelectable, and we can point out that 3 years of media smears perpetuated that, but the fact the likes of Dennis Skinner lost his seat is honestly quite heart breaking. Ex-mining constituencies voting in a conservative candidate is unbelievably fickle, and not as the BBC claims ‘fascinating’.Conservatives claiming this election was won on anything other than Brexit is akin to the when the Liberal Democrats thought they gained seats in Scotland due to anything other than protest votes against another indiref being pushed far too early after the first, that situation in Scotland obviously having been massively changed now by the Brexit that we’re clearly going to get now.

Where does this leave us now then?I am on the fringes, and sadly I find myself always swept up in electoral politics, despite my interest and identifying with post left politics. Did I like Jeremy Corbyn, I did, but his biggest flaws were that he refused to play the political game, and the parasites on the right of the party rubbing their greedy hands together at the thought of taking it back to the Blair years need to be watched. The swathes of young people joining and voting for a legitimate sense of change weren’t brought in by Corbyn, they were brought in by the idea that there can be something different, something other than food banks, waiting lists, and landlords. What the left needs now is to regroup, rebuild, and continue, find a new leader, willing to listen and learn from Corbyn’s mistakes.

This election further illustrated the generational divide in the voting populous. To me this brings into question the notion of our “free press”, how can a press be free when the majority of it is owned by select individuals with their own agendas? Free press used to be about individuals running small independent papers, with the current neoliberal idea of the free press I’m hard pushed to think of anything other than the society of the spectacle, generations swallowing up the narratives manufactured to fit into their own worries and fears; scared of immigrants?Yeah we’ve got a paper for that; Want to vote progressively but don’t actually want anything to change?Yeah we’ve got a party for that. When the most popular papers for those over the age of 40 are the Sun and the Mail, both of which push massively conservative agendas what can we expect other than people of that generation to overwhelmingly vote for Conservative representatives.

We can make pretence to how overwhelming this victory is for the conservatives, but the reality is that this is the working classes in the north punishing the bourgeois in the Labour Party. No matter that the working classes want to “get Brexit done” on the basis of lies, the issue is that Labour pandered to the Remainer, myself included, voters. It’s sickening to witness the BBC, the Guardian, and other neoliberal broadcasters fawning over this victory as something historic and unprecedented. The last time there was anything like this Scotland had no other progressive party to vote for, this isn’t my wanting to take anything away from my Scottish comrades as I have a lot of respect for both the SNP and Nicola Sturgeon, and though I naturally don’t agree with boarders I fully support Scotland’s right to leave the union of the United Kingdom should it wish to, that being said in the 80s the only logical choice for working class Scottish people was the Labour Party, so for the media to claim that this is a historic unprecedented victory for the Conservatives is just another way of manufacturing the narrative to fit all they’ve been pushing this entire campaign.

The real heartbreak in this election has been the loss of the northern red wall, the stabbing in the back of lifelong warriors for the working class like Dennis Skinner, in favour of conservative representatives, but I take some solace in the belief that this is simply a protest vote to “get Brexit done”, and that after we claw our way through the next five years we will hopefully see the wall rebuilt. This isn’t meant to deflect from the harshness that was new labour and it’s furthering of Thatcherite policies on the North either, and being frank the Blairites in the party crowding around shouting and blaming Corbyn have something to answer for when it was their pushing for a second referendum on EU membership that has left us drowning in a sea of smug conservative self-importance.

I’d also like to touch on the fact that this only further evidences the inadequacy of a First Past the Post voting system, the idea that a handful of people in the country can have votes that are count for far more than larger groups in the city really evidences the lack of democracy in this system, however when the party that benefits the most from this is in power, now with a larger majority than seen for the last 30 years, we can’t expect any sort of shift to a more proportional based voting system anytime soon.

How can this move forward? The party must act quickly to solidify a new leader, not a Blairite, and continue to push legitimate progressive policies, because we’re going to fucking need them after 5 more years of austerity.

A party who refused to take part in debates, refused to stand up to scrutiny, lead a campaign based on false allegations now holds the biggest share of seats I’ve ever been alive for, and that is a fucking terrifying prospect. We can’t lose any momentum in our pushing for a better future that’s been snatched away from us by a generation who already reaped the benefits.

image sources:

header image: www.metro.co.uk

Dennis Skinner image: www.independent.co.uk