All That’s Solid Melts in Air

HISTORIC IS A greatly overworked term wheeled out, often without much thought, to describe events as diverse as a last-minute goal in a cup final or the end of a political career.

However in the case of the Gorton by-election it is probably not an exaggeration to recall the famous words of The Communist Manifesto describing the dizzying speed of change of its time as “All that’s solid melts in air, all that’s sacred is profaned”.

The Manchester voters have just delivered a shattering blow to the cosy status quo of supposed “established” parties and their world limited by the demands and needs of the ever-present ruling capitalist class. That this class has an insatiable lust for money, power and the satisfaction of their personal
whims is being daily demonstrated in lurid headlines, high-profile arrests and an ever-widening circle of corruption and greed.

This then is a world in which one of the principal actors has told of having a payment of £70k put into his bank and totally forgetting it. Not an experience likely to be shared with many Voice readers.

What does rejection of establishment say?

So if the poll result is founded on the rejection — as it appears to be — of that comfortable paternalistic world as it collides with lived experience of casual work, cost of living pressure and all-round greyness ably set out by Green candidate, now MP, Hannah Spencer what does it tell us?

First while all progressive people will welcome Labour’s defeat and the rebuff delivered to the racists of Reform the picture revealed by the result is one of both opportunity and danger.

Welcome as the rejection of Reform and its openly racist politics is, the fact that they still gained 29% of the votes cast in what should have been a rock-solid inner-city Labour constituency amply illustrates the all too real danger of a Thatcherite government still waiting in the wings. And amidst the sound and fury generated by the contest socialists need to consider the implications of the miserable 1.7% vote share — and lost deposit — won by the official opposition in the shape of the Conservative Party.

Voice readers will recall the widely used description of the Tories as the most long-lasting and successful political formation certainly in the UK if not the Western world. This is the party of Churchill legendary war
leader, MacMillan who presided over the end of Empire and Thatcher who brutally refashioned British economic life with the aid of state power after smashing the miners’ strike. You don’t have to like them — few Voice readers will — to understand that their decades in power were used to steer the UK in the direction desired by their big business paymasters. Indeed much of the crisis we now face has its roots in the mass de-industrialisation and subsequent jobs slaughter, the liquidation of social housing and the privatisation of key services such as energy, railways, post and much more.

Yet how are the mighty fallen! In Gorton the once-mighty Tories could only get less than two in 100 voters to back them. Farage has made no secret that a key mission of Reform is to destroy and replace the Tories. The struggle for primacy on the UK right, however it is resolved, is likely to spawn a neo-Thatcherite formation set on reversing the minimal workers’ rights conceded by Starmer, more benefit cuts all laced with a heavy dose of racism.

We have been warned.

What of the ‘Left’?

But what of the — very broadly described — Left?

Given the thankless task of spinning Labour’s case in the teeth of the Gorton humiliation Transport Secretary Heidi Alexander offered listeners the usual fare of being in it for the long term with a plan that will make it all right on the night.

But the truth behind the spin was revealed when, questioned by Today’s Nick Robinson, she bridled at the suggestion that Labour was not a “progressive” party. Her problem was that a Labour Government that
backed the Gaza genocide tried to slash benefits and chases to ‘out-Reform’ Reform UK sound bites is rather low on any claims to be “progressive” and, tough for them, the voters know it.

As real progressives take heart at the Gorton result they should not delay in the task of building a movement capable of translating the mass yearning for change into ideas and action.

At the heart of such a movement must be the mass trade union and Labour movement which goes well beyond the hand-wringing of some general secretaries and translates into action in workplaces, streets and communities.

The weekly confrontations with racist anti-refugee demonstrations across Scotland is one model for such unity but from jobs and poverty to saving the planet a bigger broader movement for real change must be built. The fight for change cannot be a spectator sport if the menace of the far right is to be defeated and real change won