“There is a spectre haunting Britain,” Ken Loach warned a packed conference hall at the first national meeting of a political movement in its genesis. “It’s called Nigel Farage.”
There will be few more haunted by the spectre of Farage’s UKIP than David Cameron as he heads into conference season. With the European Parliament elections looming – traditional high ground for UKIP – the Prime Minister will not be able to ignore a boisterous Tory right, both nervous and emboldened by Farage’s forward march and all the more dangerous for it.
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At the beginning of this year, when Cameron was attempting to see off the UKIP threat and blindside Labour by promising a referendum on Britain’s EU membership, Miliband tacked to the left with a 10p tax rate funded by a mansion tax. The result of failed austerity and Labour offering the glimmer of an alternative was an 11-point poll lead for Miliband’s party. Since Labour’s capitulation to the Tory agenda and a summer of silence, that poll lead has collapsed.
The space is there to the left, the votes are there, and if Labour will not fill it, then Left Unity will.
Under first-past-the-post, parties to the left of Labour face an uphill struggle to gain electoral representation. But if Left Unity achieves what Loach and 10,000 others hope it will – struggling every day among the communities most affected by the cuts, defending public services, making a difference to the lives of the most vulnerable people in society and making the case for a more equal society – then it will make Labour fight hard for every single working class vote.
Labour may soon face the threat of its own UKIP. And if the left can just hold it together, then it will no longer go ignored.
Salman Shaheen is a journalist who has written for the Times of India, New Statesman, New Internationalist, Liberal Conspiracy and Left Foot Forward
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