France and Britain are two different national political realities. Different configurations of parties, of histories, of electoral systems and of ideological and institutional traditions.
At the same time, there is an interesting commonality.
The Labour Party’s big idea has been to use the rise of the radical right as a scarecrow at the same time as aiming to delegitimise forces to its left (including centre-left alternatives in the shape of the Greens). The smears about antisemitism and being traitors to the country were applied to the anti-capitalist left and to Jeremy Corbyn. Now the Greens’ Zack Polanski gets a lick from them.
“Après moi, Nigel Farage and you have nowhere else to go” has been Starmer’s message for six months-plus “and the left is even more extreme”. It’s all very similar to France and it predates Britain, given the earlier and sustained advance of the far and fascist right.
In Britain, the cynical strategy has broken, though it will still be used to confuse older, established Labour voters.
First in Caerphilly and then in Gorton and Denton in Manchester left- and progressive-minded people were mobilised by the call to stop the far right but refused the false argument that only by voting for the anti-left centre could they do so.
Thus, social democrats deploying the far right cynically as a scarecrow led to people voting for something better when that was seen to be a credible alternative.
Something of that happened in France on 15 March. Previous elections show that motivated radical left voters are far from being indifferent to the advance of the far right (and it advanced in the first round of the municipal elections) but are deeply worried about it. It’s just that they no longer see the hypocrisy and failure of the Republican Front and holding your nose, again, to vote for the centre left as a serious option.
Park for a moment the deeper question of anti-fascist strategy and building a movement against the far right between elections.
What this indicates, I think, is a further shift in the balance of conventional – that is electoral – anti-fascist politics towards something more radical, left and working-class oriented and away from the national Republican tradition of the ‘sensible’ parties of the centre-left and centre-right coming together every electoral cycle to deal with the ‘twin extremes’.
They still want to play that game at the card table. It’s just that their hands keep getting weaker and weaker.
It’s the same in Britain. That is not the same as saying things are moving in our direction. It is to say that the old is dying. And everything is now radically uncertain.
In short, and in the British context: Labour’s message of “Stop Reform” in Manchester could lead (under the right conditions) to people responding: “Totally. That’s why I’m voting Green”.
