Independents and candidates from small parties are the hope of real change in the election. 

By Claudia Webbe MP 

Breaking the duopoly of British politics is not easy, but it is essential as working people are crying out for change, argues CLAUDIA WEBBE

IT IS A cliche, or perhaps a truism, of British parliamentary politics that in the “first-past-the-post” parliamentary electoral system, the odds are stacked against independent candidates and even against the smaller political parties.

The Greens, despite having a solid voter base and receiving more than a million votes in 2015, have only had Caroline Lucas in the House of Commons.

That view was borne out for decades. From the abolition of university constituencies in 1950 to the end of the 20th century, the only MP elected as an independent was former war correspondent Martin Bell, who became MP for Tatton after declaring his candidacy only 24 days before the 1997 general election.

Despite the incumbent Tory MP Neil Hamilton being mired in sleaze allegations, Bell’s win was a huge upset: Tatton is usually one of the safest Tory seats in the country, yet Bell went from nowhere to a 60 per cent vote share, on a high turnout, in just over three weeks.

Bell’s election, despite his overwhelming majority and the notoriety of his victory, did not mark a turning point in British politics. After his term in Tatton, he moved on to stand, again as an independent, against Tory Eric Pickles in Brentwood and Ongar, coming second and reducing Pickles’s majority by more than 70 per cent in the 2001 general election. But since Bell’s 1997 win, only a very small handful of MPs have been elected as independents — as opposed to becoming independent after being elected as candidates of major parties.

Many would argue that there is little room for doubt that the first-past-the post system has allowed the construction of a deeply unhealthy Westminster politics. Tony Blair spent 13 years, by his own admission, building on Margaret Thatcher’s political “achievements” rather than trying to undo the damage she and John Major had done.

Under the first five years of Tory-led government from 2010, Ed Miliband’s Labour thought it needed to become more like the Tories to be credible, leading to abhorrent promises to be “tougher than the Tories” on benefit claimants and the obscenity of Labour’s “Controls on Immigration” mug.

That consensus was threatened, against the Establishment’s expectation and to its horror, by Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership election wins and near-success in the 2017 general election. Corbyn became the first Labour leader in decades to promise real change, uniting the elites against him.

Once he was successfully removed, Britain’s political elites have closed ranks to try to remove real choice from voters. Keir Starmer’s Labour is almost indistinguishable from its Conservative “opponents” on immigration, public spending, war and imperialism, privatisation, policing, the treatment of the poor and their children, the continued fragmentation and rationing of our NHS and support for Israel’s mass murder of Palestinians. Labour is also indistinguishable in its treatment of black, Asian and Gypsy-Traveller communities.

The pledges Starmer made to win the Labour leadership involved real change. All have been cast aside completely, like the promise to renationalise the NHS and other vital public services, or watered down to the point of meaninglessness, like the promised package of workers’ rights.

This homogenisation of the two biggest parties to protect capitalism, imperialism and the status quo has left voters with a choice, in the bluntest terms, of which rosette colour they’d like their ruling party to wear.

Breaking that duopoly is not easy, but it is essential — millions of ordinary people in this country, especially in England, are crying out for real, radical change and for candidates who will represent them, not a narrow set of corporate and elite interests.

This change will not be easy, but it may be that now is the best time in three-quarters of a century to achieve it. The dissatisfaction with the pro-privatisation, pro-cuts, pro-capitalist, billionaire-friendly consensus among the political Establishment is running deep and wide — and it is being amplified and intensified by the visceral disgust at the knowing support for Israel’s genocide on the part of both the Tories and the Labour leadership.

The hundreds of thousands who turn out in all weathers every week to demand a halt to the slaughter of Palestinian civilians are just the tip of a very large iceberg of voters — three-quarters of the British electorate want the immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza that the main political parties will not demand, and the numbers are high no matter which party they usually support.

A YouGov poll last month showed that overall, 73 per cent of voters want an immediate ceasefire — and 55 per cent support stopping arms sales to Israel to achieve it. Even among 2019 Conservative voters, 67 per cent want a ceasefire and 40 per cent support an arms ban; Keir Starmer’s issue is even more serious — among Labour voters, 86 per cent want a ceasefire and 74 per cent support an end to weapons exports.

Common humanity and the revulsion among reasonable people, at the sights and sounds of maimed and orphaned children is combining with the anger at the continued degradation of everything that our class and its allies built across eight decades to make Britain a country to be proud of.

There is also disgust at the continuing destruction of decent jobs, wages and housing availability, all of which demands a real alternative and is driving the hunger for independent candidates — and those of smaller parties — who will stand up for the wishes and interests of ordinary people and for justice worldwide.

The expression of this hunger could be seen just last month in the local election results. While both Labour and the Tories went backwards compared to a year earlier according to electoral expert Sir John Curtice, independent candidates and small parties were the big winners in terms of vote share and the electoral calculations suggested a hung Parliament that would give left candidates a genuine influence over policy.

Before that, the same forces saw George Galloway trounce both Labour and the Tories in the Rochdale by-election for the Workers Party of Britain, just as he had done before in Bethnal Green (2005) and in Bradford West (2012) for the Respect party.

In a first-past-the-post election and its inherent bias toward the duopoly, the challenge is always to turn those percentage gains into seats. But with outstanding independent candidates in winnable seats — Jeremy Corbyn in Islington North, Leanne Mohammed in Ilford North, Sam Gorst in Garston where the Liverpool independents hammered Labour last year and others across the country, there is a real opportunity for independents.

If we can seize the chance and find the ways to reach people with a message of hope and real change, if we galvanise and build on public anger with the status quo, its cost in lives and quality of life and the refusal of either main party to offer anything different from the misery and stagnation of the last 14 years, then Britain might finally have a better future to look forward to again, as well as a chance to change the electoral system so that the Establishment stranglehold can be broken.

The challenge is a significant one, but for the sake of our people and especially for the future of our class, we have to achieve it.

Claudia Webbe is the independent parliamentary candidate for Leicester East.

You can follow her at www.facebook.com/claudiaforLE and twitter.com/ClaudiaWebbe