Live
Audio Only
Last year saw several radical upsurges in the UK, the massive increase in support for the Green Party in the run-up to the General Election in May, and the landslide victory of Jeremy Corbyn as he was elected leader of the British Labour Party. These followed on from an upswell in Scotland that won the Scottish National Party 56 out of 59 seats in the UK parliament in the British general elections (they control the devolved government of Scotland as well).
How do these forces relate to each other, and do they have any chance of affecting policy or institutions in a lasting way?
The "Green Surge," which starting in early 2014, more than quadrupled the membership of the British Green Party in a year to over 60,000. In recent years, the Green Party has become a party of the left as well as a party of the environment. There was a huge spike in numbers (and in public support) in January 2015 after it became clear that British broadcasters did not intend to include the Greens in the television debates in the run-up to the May general election - a decision that was quickly reversed.
During the election, votes for the Greens also quadrupled, to over one million, but because of Britain's "first past the post" electoral system the party only retained its single seat in Brighton. Green Party leader Natalie Bennett insisted that voters had responding to the party's support for a £10 minimum wage by 2020, nationalizing the railways, banning private profits in the National Health Service, its "fair and humane" stance on immigration and its willingness to robustly confront the anti-immigrant UK Independence Party.
One factor driving increased Green membership up to May 2015 seems to have been a sense that the Green Party was an authentic anti-austerity party, while Labour could no longer make that claim. That changed dramatically in September 2015, when lifelong-leftwinger Jeremy Corbyn was elected leader of the British Labour Party with nearly 60 percent of first-preference votes (his nearest rival had 19 percent). Immediately after winning, Corbyn focused on the fact that people are "fed up with the injustice and the inequality" of Britain.
A new political group called "Momentum" has grown up inside the Labour Party to support Corbyn's policies. It seeks to work at the grassroots level "in every town, city and village" to "encourage mass mobilisation for a more democratic, equal and decent society". A Guardian survey of more than 100 constituencies in England, Scotland and Wales found that most of them had seen the "doubling, trebling, quadrupling or even quintupling" of membership.
Overall, membership of the party has almost doubled from 201,293 on 6 May 2015, just before the general election, to 388,407 on 10 January 2016. Much of this "red surge" comes from Corbyn supporters (either new members or people returning after the Blair years).
Some of this energy comes from young radicals who were previously part of the Green Surge, and who see Corbyn's Labour as a more powerful vehicle for the same kind of politics that led them to support the Greens.
There is a fluidity to anti-establishment politics. The Green Surge throughout Britain can be traced back to the agitation around the referendum on Scottish independence, which saw a huge leap in the membership of the Scottish Green Party. The failure of the independence campaign in September 2014 (by 45 percent to 55 percent) actually galvanized more people to join the Greens, the Scottish Nationalists (SNP) and other pro-independence (and anti-austerity) parties.
Between January and December 2014, membership of the Scottish Greens rose by 625 percent from 1,200 to 7,500. The SNP more than doubled its membership to 110,000, making it the third-largest political party in Britain, even though Scotland contains less than 10 percent of the British population.
The pro-independence and radical surge was a factor in helping the SNP to win an astonishing 56 out of 59 Scottish seats in the Westminster parliament in the British general election in May 2015.
The ability of the SNP to channel anti-austerity feeling into seats doesn't mean that it is an authentic anti-austerity party. In December 2015, the SNP government in Edinburgh refused to use its new tax-raising powers to defend public spending, cutting across the board in order to defend the health sector.
It is not surprising that there is a ferment of discontent as the Conservative Party imposes brutal austerity policies in the aftermath of the financial crisis, and the rich get richer while most people in the UK lose out.
It is also not surprising that a lot of the discontent manifests itself in anti-immigrant racism and in Islamophobia. This has fed the growth of the anti-European Union and anti-immigrant UK Independence Party (though after its failure in the 2015 general election the party is reported to have lost a quarter of its 50,000 membership).
One can point to UKIP-like reactionary parties in other Western European countries, including the Front National in France (which had 28 percent of the votes in regional elections in December), the Dutch Freedom Party (who recorded 29 percent support in early January, making them the largest party in the country), and the Sweden Democrats (19 percent support in the latest polls).
There are also European parties that have tried to channel dissatisfaction in progressive directions in recent years - Syriza, which won elections in Greece in January and September 2015; Podemos, which came third in the general election in Spain in December, and the Five Star Movement in Italy (which has 108 deputies, 54 senators and 17 MEPs).
One of the biggest challenges facing progressive anti-establishment parties and movements is that of persuasion. How do you reach a public with your analysis when they are inundated with right-wing propaganda through the media?
For example, Jeremy Corbyn's key focus as Labour leader is fighting austerity. However, polling in August 2015 found that most Britons accepted the neoliberal myth that 56 percent of those surveyed agreed, and just 16 percent disagreed, with the statement: "We must live within our means, so cutting the deficit is the top priority."
Another challenge is creating participatory democratic forms internally that will nurture the rebel energy of new members rather than choke it off. In both the Labour and Green parties, new (and younger) members who have joined in the last year in large numbers have found themselves struggling with formalities. Many local parties operate using procedures that date back to an earlier era, and which often feel unwieldy to people who've experienced a consensus-oriented activist culture that has been influenced by anarchism.
If we look back to the movement around Tony Benn in the Labour Party in the 1980s, that had both a radical agenda for government and an internal "Campaign for Labour Party Democracy" to try to ensure that the programme the party voted for would be enacted by a Labour government.
Can the new radical currents root themselves in these parties and help to actually win changes? A lot depends on whether, outside the party system, large radical grassroots movements develop which have deep roots and which can withstand the shocks that lie ahead, and which can both support the parties and hold them to account.
Newsletter
