I nearly ran for parliament, again

There will be a byelection tomorrow in the parliamentary constituency where I live, Holborn and St Pancras (often called ‘Camden’ in the press) The election’s happening because the current MP, Keir Starmer, is standing down now that he’s no longer Prime Minister.

I seriously considered running in the election as an independent, paradoxically to draw attention to anarchism. Any by-election gets more media airtime than any single constituency gets during a general election. By-elections are treated as a kind of opinion poll about the government of the day, so it’s perhaps an opportunity briefly to get a bit of the spotlight. My message was that I wasn’t running to win the seat. I didn’t want to serve in parliament. My point would have been that whoever is elected will not make any difference to the fundamental structures that shape our lives today.

Why?

My anarchist friends split into two camps. Some regarded it as an abject capitulation to the status quo and de facto endorsement of the broken system of so-called ‘democracy’. Others cited the example of candidates for ‘Class War’ who stood in by-elections in order, as I intended, to use it as a platform to make their point about inequality and injustice.

The election is being contested by Zack Polanski, leader of the Green Party. The Greens are consequently making a big deal out of the election. Some have succumbed to the hyperbole of calling the election a ‘turning point’ for the Left or, as some in the press are saying, a ‘referendum’ on Andy Burnham’s reign as Prime Minister, when it is neither of these things and will determine essentially nothing except, possibly, Zack Polanski’s political future.

I have known Zack for several years, since we were both members of the West London Greens (in those days, about eight people!). We also worked together, in a Whatsapp group, on Green policy on Gaza during the genocide, when I was then spokesperson for the Greens on foreign policy. When he learned that I might be running in the by-election, Zack called me to dissuade me. That was a private call, so it wouldn’t be fair to retail it here. Meanwhile, others encouraged me, mostly friends and relations since I did not publicise my intentions before dropping out.

Zack’s call wasn’t why I decided not to run. Instead, it was the realisation that I would be demonised by Zack’s supporters, particularly if he loses the election. Zack now has some prominent backers including Owen Jones of The Guardian, who has a large following, particularly on social media. The lines of attack against me are pretty obvious: that I was ruining the best chance for the Greens in however long, that I was strengthening Burnham to follow his ‘Starmer-ite’ agenda or, more ad hominem, that I was a white, privileged male indulging in my own self-aggrandisement. In effect, the ‘narrative’ about me would become a negative one as a ‘spoiler’ and saboteur of the Green Party’s ambitions, perhaps even a traitor since I ran for the Greens in the last election (an illuminating experience I tell here and here). Once a narrative is created about you, it’s very difficult to change, particularly if you are seldom in the spotlight. If in future you’d google me, that would be the story you’d find. I didn’t want that.

There were other reasons. Running for parliament is of course a paradoxical, if not to say contradictory, way to draw attention to the flaws of our present so-called democracy and the essential impotence of any MP, unless Prime Minister, to change the economic and political circumstances of people’s lives. Voters, correctly, pay very little attention to the trite leaflets that drop through their letterboxes in huge numbers at these moments. I doubt they would pay any attention to my arguments either. My only hope of achieving my purpose in highlighting the deep structural drivers behind people’s real life living conditions would have been if my campaign drew press attention as a kind of ‘wild card’ oddball candidacy by someone who used to be a Green or was once a diplomat. And that, to be honest, was a long shot. More likely was that I’d get no attention, just like the long list of no-hope candidates who tend to run in by-elections, presumably for exactly the same reasons that drove me.

On Friday morning, we’ll know the by-election result. The press is now saying that Zack is likely to lose. I don’t know why they’re saying that. Polling in one constituency is pretty haphazard at best. On the street, I hear all kinds of gossip pointing one way or the other. If he loses, the press will probably tie it the current furore over the Greens’ conference vote for ‘Zionism is racism’ or the more questionable chapters of Zack’s life before politics. If he wins, it will be a ‘shock defeat’ for Labour, a ‘wake-up’ call for Burnham etc.. Neither of these narratives of course reflects anything about the real wishes or preferences of the people actually doing the voting.

But, my point remains. Whoever is elected, it won’t make any difference to anything that really matters - our lives, our circumstances. Any changes that ‘ordinary people’ might experience would be marginal at best, and more likely imperceptible, not least because any government has precious little financial leeway to make a difference. It’s a great pity that the Greens have chosen to reinvent themselves as a leftwing party - wealth taxes, nationalise water companies etc - rather than raise the questions of how we got here in the first place and why these conditions persist. In other words, structure.

I am frustrated by this experience. The problem remains of how to get this message across. Unless we change the structure of capitalism itself, from private ownership to collective (not state) ownership, we will not get at the roots of inequality - a persistent injustice perpetuated, more or less permanently, by the imbalance between returns on capital and wages, as Piketty has argued. That basic structure of capitalism is protected and enforced by government - the state - through coercion (police, prisons, law), even if it also enables some mitigating measures (welfare, healthcare etc) to stave off the worst effects of exploitation, all of it allegedly legitimised by the absurd simulacrum of democratic participation - a single vote every five years.

‘Politics’ today is more and more disdained, politicians more and more assaulted, both verbally and, I’m afraid, physically. That disdain has a reason and it’s not the boats full of ‘migrants’ (a better choice of words is ‘desperate people’), but it is the structural injustice and impotence that almost everyone feels: the humiliation of unemployment, or feeling you have failed in a system that celebrates wealth and acquisition, or the seemingly unstoppable destruction of our planet or simply not being able to afford the basics. Perhaps above all, being ignored, not being heard - having no control whatsoever over the things that matter to us. And at a deeper level, something really important is missing. It was perhaps pretty stupid of me to believe that ‘politics’ was the method to get attention to these many failures of a profoundly decadent system.

And this points to a further feature of the ‘system’ of capitalism and so-called democracy. The press pretends that things like by-elections matter, as it does the interminable and demeaning jostling of ambitious men and women for what they foolishly regard as ‘power’. The press plays along with the facade as much as anyone, ignoring those arguing for alternatives, dismissing them as irrelevant or marginal, or just not ‘newsy’ enough for their podcast or TV show. They pay more attention to the petty wranglings of party politicians than to the profound and existential crises that humanity is now experiencing and which are tearing society apart. The failure of any politician to take these crises seriously is ignored and instead we must hear, yet again, about the ‘unaffordability’ of Burnham’s expenditure plans or Badenoch’s proposals for defence, policies which utterly fail to address, or even be honest about, the reasons why these problems exist in the first place.

These, surely, are the signs of a system in deep crisis. One analogy is of course the fiddler over a burning Rome. But perhaps a better one is that the king has no clothes. It’s not working, and it won’t whether Andy Burnham, Zack Polanski or Nigel Farage sits in Number Ten, another false conceit perpetuated by the press and of course those seeking that position. They, of course, will the last people to concede this reality for both the press and the politicians subsist upon the perpetuation of the fantasy. It is their very livelihood.

I find it striking that the people who seem to have reached the same conclusion are not the commentators in the press, let alone the politicians. They are the voters. It appears that they have concluded, like me, that whoever wins, it won’t make any difference to them, to their lives. The figure to watch in tomorrow’s by-election is not who wins, but how many vote. In the last by-election, which gave us our current Prime Minister, no more than 30% of the adult population voted for the winning candidate, despite the enormous amount of press attention that the election was granted. Let’s see what happens in Camden.

And I’m glad I’m not running.

If you enjoyed this post, please pass it on to a friend or colleague, with the encouragement to subscribe to regular posts.

My work is sponsored by Proton, whom I recommend for their (mostly free) end-to-end, zero access encrypted email, file storage, VPN and meeting apps.