Election puts us at the edge of the abyss

For many of us on the left, the result of last week’s General Election has taken a lot of sinking in. Generally most of us are in shock and horror. Have people really in their hearts voted for severe cuts? Were they really fearful of Labour in coalition with the SNP? And why in many constituencies did they punish the Liberal Democrats by voting for the party they went into coalition with?

In many ways the result was so strange it’s hard to put the finger on one particular reason for the result, unless people were too embarrassed to admit they were voting Tory.

As Trade Unionists we don’t for one minute swallow the line that people refused to vote Labour as they thought it was not a party of aspiration. Ed Miliband said on countless occasions he believed the country was doing well when the people were doing well. That meant all the people, including those running small businesses. With an unbiased media, this would have been the message largely received by the public. But as we know the media is not unbiased, with nearly all newspapers supportive of the Conservative Party. The Tories had their election broadcasts, leaflets through people’s doors and on top of this newspapers delivering the Conservative message.

As Liberal Trade Unionists, we are obviously not supportive of the centralised diktat socialism often delivers. But we do believe in fairness and the election campaign was probably the most unfair in living memory. The outcome is going to be an assault on the trade unions, on benefit claimants, the disabled and the poor.

But there is no point in dwelling on the past, when the future holds a huge struggle for people, for unions and those on the progressive left.  Clearly as trade unionists we must be at the heart of any fight against the Tories and their agenda. But politically we are fully supportive of groups such as Compass which wishes to bring together parties under the progressive umbrella. Compass states, ‘All progressive parties need to start to work to together. Clearly there is already a desire for this from progressive voters’. We urge all progressives to heed this message.

As the Conservatives are likely to use boundary changes to keep control, we need to think smart and put the tribalism of politics to one side. As trade unionists our key priority is to protect workers. Working with other progressives we believe is a key way forward in doing this by removing horrors of a Conservative government.