So what’s going on here? You might look at the above paragraph and call Singapore a dictatorship, but the reality is more complex and a lot more interesting than that. The centre-right People’s Action Party (PAP) has remained virtually unchallenged since 1959 not just because of its record in government (which can be characterised as increasingly mixed in recent years), but by way of a plethora of political, juridical, financial and discursive means that serve to entrench its power and stack the deck against opposition candidates and parties.
To begin with, the electoral
system is an unusual one. The island is
divided into Single Member Constituences (SMCs) – which will be familiar to my
British readers – and Group Representation Constituencies (GRCs) where each
party runs a “team” of 4 or 5 candidates (depending on the area), and whichever
party receives the most votes has all their candidates elected. It doesn’t matter how tight the margin of
victory is; if you receive 49.9% of the vote and the other lot get 50.1%, then
I’m afraid all of their guys are going to parliament, and all of yours are going
back to their day jobs. As you can
imagine, this has tended to inflate the PAP’s parliamentary majority out of all
proportion to its actual vote share (though I am duty-bound to point out that
there are examples of a similar thing happening in a regular all-SMC system, as
in the 2015 United Kingdom general election, where the Scottish National Party
(SNP) earned 50% of the vote in Scotland and won 56 out of 59 seats). Knowing that if multiple teams ran against
the PAP in these constituencies the government would sweep the board every
single time, the Singaporean opposition parties observe an agreement whereby only one puts itself forward in each GRC, thus creating the best chance of defeating the PAP
slate. Even then, the PAP has other
weapons at its disposal.
By law, election campaigns in
Singapore run for a maximum of nine days, which gives opposition parties very
little time to build momentum and to get their messages out their to a public
which usually has very little opportunity to hear what they have to say (imagine
the massacre the Labour Party, trailing badly in the polls when
campaigning for the 2017 UK general election began, would have faced if they’d
had so narrow a window to convince the public that their policies were
sensible and desirable). As in the UK,
candidates must pay a deposit to run for parliament, and will not have it
returned if they fail to gain more than 5% of the vote in their constituency. However, while in Britain you must fork out
£500 for the privilege of seeking office, in Singapore the deposit is a fat
S$13,500 (around £7,500). One can’t help
but feel that the intent is to discourage too much participation in
democracy. And if the PAP can’t hold the
prospect of a crippling financial hit over would-be parliamentarians and
their parties, they can empty their bank account once they’re elected.
Singapore has some pretty restrictive laws governing free speech (and governing everything, to be honest), and while officially the country’s MPs enjoy immunity from being prosecuted for anything they say in parliament – which in the UK memorably led to MP John Hemming breaking the terms of a court super-injunction to reveal that Premier League footballer Ryan Giggs had been cheating on his wife – the Parliament of Singapore itself has the power to judge whether its members have "abused this privilege". This means, in effect, that the PAP can open the door for its opponents to be sued for defamation based on their political discourse. This is what happened to J.B. Jeyaretnam, the Parliament of Singapore’s only opposition MP for a spell in the 1980s, who was a frequent target of civil defamation suits for statements made both outside and inside parliament – which Amnesty International branded “unreasonable restrictions on the right of Singaporeans to peacefully express their opinions and to participate freely in public life” in a 2000 statement – and eventually forced into bankruptcy. As former Workers’ Party leader Low Thia Khiang colourfully put it, the PAP’s strategy can be summed up as “sue until your pants drop”. Such strictures on opposition politicians’ speech remain common; in the most recent election Workers’ Party candidate Raeesah Khan was forced to apologise after two police reports were filed against her following the discovery of Facebook posts in which she alleged that police were biased against certain ethnic groups (her team was still elected in the Aljunied GRC).
In summation, the PAP enjoys a
pre-eminent position in Singaporean politics not just because of its record in
power and the benefits of incumbency as the only government any Singaporean
under the age of 60 has known, but through a concatenation of factors present
within the political sphere, the law and civil society, which serve to perpetuate
its dominance and disadvantage opposition parties. And yet Singapore is far from meeting the
definition of an authoritarian regime.
It is not a free and fair democracy, but it is a democracy nonetheless. The PAP does not rig elections as dictatorships
do. It has no need to. So how to categorise such a system?
While doing a bit of reading following the election in Singapore last month, I chanced upon the term “dominant-party system”, which seems to describe the nation perfectly. As distinct from a one-party state, a dominant-party system is one in which opposition parties are permitted to exist but one dominant party (hence the name) continually wins elections, and there seems little to no prospect of this changing in the future. Working definitions of the dominant-party system vary, but tend to emphasise that a dominant party is: “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time” (Gary W. Cox); “[a] party which enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system” (Hans Daalder); “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it presides is fundamentally changed” (Brendan O’Leary), and “that which public opinion believes to be dominant” (Maurice Duverger).
The PAP – which evidently
fulfils all of these criteria – appears in a list of dominant parties in the
introduction to the Wikipedia article on the dominant-party system, along with
United Russia, ZANU-PF, the African National Congress, the Rwandan Patriotic
Front, Hungary’s Fidesz, the Awami League in Bangladesh, and Turkey’s Justice
and Development Party. Yet there is one
political organisation notably absent from the article’s rather extensive list of dominant parties, and
that is the Conservative and Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern
Ireland. Just as Singapore is not a
one-party state but – in terms of who has a chance of governing – might as well
be, I would like to argue that you can say the same for the United Kingdom at the present time; the deck is greatly stacked against the left just as surely as it is for the Workers’
Party in Singapore, and the sooner we
recognise that fact the better. To misquote Captain Barbossa from Pirates of the Caribbean, you best start believing in dominant-party systems; you're in one.
Let me be clear; I’m not arguing
that our democracy is as (un)free as Singapore’s, nor that I would prefer to
live under the PAP-dominated system. What
I am saying is that when I saw that the Conservative Party was mentioned
nowhere in that Wikipedia article, I was genuinely shocked; particularly as one
of the parties mentioned, Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), has been out
of power more recently than the Tories have (2012 as opposed to 2010). Going through the above definitions of a
dominant-party system one by one, we can see how the Conservatives, where the
UK is concerned, occupy much the same dominant position as the PAP.
Firstly, let us consider Cox’s definition of a dominant party as “uninterruptedly in government, either alone or as the senior partners of a coalition, for a long period of time”. Cox suggests that this “long period of time” should be “three to five decades”, but as Patrick Dunleavy argues, “[e]mpiricist definitions of ‘dominant party systems’ incorporating ‘longitudinal’ time requirements risk tautology and create unacceptable lags in recognizing dominance.” Instead, he advocates for “an analytic definition that can identify parties as dominant independently from their tenure of office”. This not only cautions against defining dominance purely through tenure – it would be ludicrous to say that the Conservative Party in 1996, approaching two decades in office, was a dominant party when it was so clearly set to be annihilated at the next election – but allows us to consider kinds of dominant-party system other than ones where a party has remained in government for upwards of 30 years uninterrupted.
Dominant parties can suffer reversals, spend
a brief amount time out of office and come back just as strong as before at the
next election as voters, disillusioned with the former opposition’s time in
government, return to what they’re used to (the LDP fell from 296 seats
out of 480 in the Japanese House of Representatives in 2005 to 119 seats four years later, only
to see 294 candidates elected in 2012).
Additionally, while one dominant party can replace another over a long
period of time – in 1984 the Indian National Congress won 414 out of the 541
seats in the Lok Sabha, but now has just 52 MPs while the right-wing Hindu
nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has 303 – parties can rise from the
margins to become dominant over a very short period of time. As mentioned above, the SNP won 56 out of 59
Scottish seats in the United Kingdom House of Commons in 2015, yet at the
previous election had just 6 MPs (the stark and very unexpected difference can in large part be attributed to nationalist anger following the No vote in
2014’s Scottish independence referendum – and the UK government’s high-handed
manner towards Scotland in the year hence – coalescing support around the SNP, as well as its anti-austerity message). With that in mind, it certainly isn’t
inconsistent to term 2020’s Conservative Party the dominant party in a dominant-party
system, even though it has only governed with an absolute majority for 3 out of
the past 23 years. After all, the
conditions for the Tories to become truly dominant electorally to the same
extent as the PAP, while they have only recently borne fruit, have been taking
shape for a very long time.
Which brings us to Daalder’s statement that a dominant party is one which “enjoys a preponderant influence in a given party system”; not only do they dominate the elections, they dominate the system under which they are conducted and the discursive sphere through which the public comes to understand politics and appraise the fitness for office of political parties. Nowhere is this more apparent in the UK than in print media. The vast majority of daily newspapers essentially function as propaganda on behalf of the governing Conservative Party, with only the Labour-supporting Daily Mirror, milquetoast liberalism of the Guardian and centrist clickbait of the Independent bucking the norm. The BBC, meanwhile, seems to have been utterly cowed by a combination of now having a significant presence of government appointees on its board (an innovation of former Tory PM David Cameron) and the ever-present threat of licence fee removal and subsequent privatisation. As such, the officially neutral state broadcaster has increasingly proven itself unwilling to interrogate government narratives or to highlight opposition ones, with the result that reporters and editors have regurgitated Tory lies without bothering to check their veracity and, in a bizarre recent nadir, went so far as to depict Conservative Chancellor Rishi Sunak as Superman.
This Tory-dominated media class, as has been noted by many on the left, seems less interested in holding the government to account than holding the public to account for criticising the government (or agitating for progressive politics in general). As such, you can sit there in the Question Time audience, pink-faced and frothing with rage, demanding that the leader of the opposition commits to vaporising thousands of innocent Iranian civilians with nuclear weapons if the need arises, and the worst that will happen is that Twitter wags will make memes of you and call you a “gammon” (after which right-wing talking heads will defend you on the grounds that calling you a gammon is an example of classism and racism, two subjects which they have never previously pretended to give a flying fuck about). However, if you dare to ask the Conservative panellist a difficult question on the same programme then the ghouls at right-wing blog Guido Fawkes – run by Paul Staines, a self-professed Pinochet admirer who proposed an alliance with the far-right British National Party while a Tory student leader – will trawl through your entire social media history and get you suspended from your job for a very obviously sarcastic tweet saying that “Hitler’s abuse of the term nationalism […] is the most toxic part of his legacy” (a sentiment with which I’d have assumed the aptly-named Mr Staines would agree). And woe betide you if, as the worried father of a sick child on an NHS ward, you believe that you have the right to give the Conservative Prime Minister a piece of your mind regarding hospital underfunding while at the same time being a member of the Labour Party; contrarians with massive foreheads will call your emotional intervention “a political act” and “a campaigning stunt”, and the Political Editor of the BBC will doxx you to her 1,200,000 followers.
And while the speech of left-wing
activists in the UK is much less free than their right-wing counterparts, that
goes for opposition politicians too. I
remember shaking my head at the Raeesah Khan story I mentioned above; why
should someone have to apologise, I thought, much less face legal
ramifications, for alleging that the police discriminate on the grounds of
race? How unfree Singapore is. But now I see the monstering –
both online and in newsprint – that the Black Labour MP Dawn
Butler has received this month for having the temerity to suggest that the
Metropolitan Police might not be completely above reproach in this regard, and
I wonder how different the two situations really are. In both cases, female MPs of ethnic minority
backgrounds have been punished for speaking up about racial injustice. This comes off the back of Butler having been
forced to close her constituency office after racist threats and
violence against premises and staffers: a blatant suppression of political
activity about which the self-styled free speech warriors – your Brendan
O’Neills and Toby Youngs – have stayed curiously silent, as have the Tory press
in general. She should have gone full transphobe on Twitter, like J.K. Rowling did.
Maybe she could have got an open letter defending her right to free speech too.
This is the reason a large group
of Twitter leftists react to any opinion poll showing Labour behind the Tories
by posting something along the lines of “Any competent leader would be 20 points ahead of the worst government in history. Starmer must resign”: to mock all those
people who were saying this in complete earnest while Jeremy Corbyn was leader
of the Labour Party. (Don’t believe
me? Here’s a certain Mr T. Blair.) It was an absolutely ludicrous argument, as
has been borne out by Labour having never been even a single point ahead in the
opinion polls since Keir Starmer – a man who presumably meets the definition of
a “competent leader” by the standards of the Corbynsceptics – took over. Calling the Conservatives “the worst
government in history” (based on their handling of Brexit, Universal Credit or
whatever else) was one thing, but stating that Labour should therefore
be trouncing them in the polls fundamentally failed to reckon with the huge
advantages in public perception the media’s extremely right-wing bias allows
the Tories to enjoy, especially when set against Labour and Corbyn, who the
press never missed an opportunity to call a Marxist, terrorist supporter,
anti-Semite and much more besides. Such
is the nature of the dominant-party system.
Ask yourself: would you look at a foreign country where the national
newspapers are almost all controlled by owners loyal to the governing party and
who toe the party line almost to the letter, and conclude – even if you do not
believe the government of that country to be doing “a good job” of governing –
that the opposition have failed if they are not 20 points ahead in the polls? It’s like blaming Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov for Putin still being in charge of Russia.
That’s why I have only ever said
“Starmer should be 20 points ahead” in jest.
I may think Sir Keir is doing a crap job so far (and I do think it), but
because I understand that the UK is a dominant-party system I would never
state, as the intellectually dishonest Corbynsceptics did, that Labour would be
topping the polls if only they had a better leader. When I canvassed for Labour last year in
Pudsey, a marginal Leave-voting seat eventually won by the Tories with an
increased majority, I was essentially having to go door to door convincing
people that everything they had read about the party and Jeremy Corbyn for the
last 4 years in the newspapers and on Facebook was wrong. You can appreciate that it was a tough ask,
made even harder by Labour shooting itself in the foot by including in its
manifesto the promise of a second EU referendum that not a single person I
talked to – even those who had voted Remain – wanted. While walking the streets of Pudsey I
foolishly allowed myself to be heartened by the fact that I barely saw any
Conservative posters in people’s windows, whichever part of town I was
trawling. It was just as the nice man at
my Momentum meeting had told me; the Tories’ ground game was pathetic compared
with ours. But the simple truth I
realised when the results came in on 12 December is that the Conservative and
Unionist Party of Great Britain and Northern Ireland could win a general
election without canvassing a single voter, or even campaigning at all. Why bother, when you have newspaper editors,
opinion columnists, radio shock jocks and reactionary Twitter blue-ticks doing
the hard work of getting your message across and delegitimising the opposition,
24 hours a day, 365 days a year? I hate
to break it to the Starmtroopers, but it isn’t going to get easier now you have
a sensible lawyer in a suit to sell people, instead of a jam-making
peace campaigner.
Ah, I’m sure you’re going to say,
but weren’t Labour in an even more dominant position in 1997 than the Tories
are now? Were they not a dominant
party? To which my answer is “yes, on
the face of it”. Yet there’s a huge “but”. It’s true that Labour’s gigantic 179-seat
majority in 1997 (with a lead of quite a bit less than 20 points, incidentally)
was far higher than the 80-seat majority the Conservatives won last year. But to understand how dominance arises and is
maintained, you have to look at what political parties do when they’re in
advantageous positions. Apparent
dominance can be built on a foundation of sand.
To bring things back to wrestling, there
used to be a company called World Championship Wrestling (WCW) that not only
challenged the WWF’s status as the pre-eminent grappling purveyor in America,
but actually supplanted it, with its weekly Monday night broadcasts beating WWF
in the ratings 83 weeks in a row at one point.
In 1997 some estimates put the promotion’s value at as much as
$500m. Four years later WCW was dead,
with WWF purchasing the trademark and tape library of their hated rival for a
mere $4.2m. The company had made the
mistake of believing that the good times would never end, signing its ageing
top stars to hugely lucrative contracts which also gave them creative control
over how their characters were presented and effective vetoes over storylines
that made them look weak, with the result that younger performers were never
elevated to the point that they could be long-term replacements for the likes
of Hulk Hogan and Macho Man Randy Savage in the main event slot. WCW also got into hugely wasteful habits financially,
such as regularly flying all 160 contracted performers to TV tapings because
the shows were often written at the last minute and the creative team didn’t
know which wrestlers they’d need on hand, and paying soul legend James Brown $25,000 for an appearance that they failed to promote to prospective pay-per-view buyers
in advance; the sort of thing you can get away with when business is booming,
but not so much when it’s in terminal decline.
In short, WCW had mistaken a period of sustained supremacy over the WWF
for entrenched dominance as a market leader.
Many political analysts made the same error when appraising New Labour’s position in the late 90s and 2000s, as – fatally – did many within New Labour itself. I’m sure many people thought the Tories were completely dead and buried, especially in 2001 when they gained a princely 1 seat in a general election notable solely for Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott decking a farmer who threw an egg at him. But Tony Blair’s main problem – well, besides waging a war in Iraq based on bogus intelligence that led to the deaths of over 100,000 civilians – was that he never attempted to build a party that, as O’Leary puts it, was “ideologically dominant [and] capable of using government to shape public policy so that the nature of the state and the society over which it preside[d] [was] fundamentally changed”. For all Margaret Thatcher’s faults – and there were many – she presided over a government that fundamentally reshaped the social fabric of the United Kingdom: crushing trades unions, flogging council housing to private buyers and letting the tendrils of the free market inveigle their way into damn near every aspect of the nation’s economy. Conversely, when New Labour came to power with a parliamentary majority that meant they could have passed virtually any legislation they wanted, they forfended to renationalise the industries Thatcher sold off – having loudly dropped the so-called Clause Four from the party’s constitution, which had promised to do so – and made no attempt to repeal the anti-union laws introduced by the Thatcher government. This is why the furore from old New Labour hands when newly-elected MP Zarah Sultana used her maiden speech in the House of Commons to demand an end to “40 years of Thatcherism” seemed so utterly confected; after all, Blair himself has stated, “I always thought my job was to build on some of the things she had done rather than reverse them” (I’ve already quoted the old Hague-dodger’s own words back at him once in this article, so why not do it again). Indeed, Thatcher herself remarked in 2002, with great perceptiveness, that she considered Tony Blair and New Labour to be her greatest political achievement. Such was the ideological dominance of the Tories of 1979-1990 that vast swathes of its dogma were accepted not just by the next Conservative administration but by the next Labour one too.
As such, New Labour’s claim to be a dominant party is deeply questionable, especially when we consider the nature of its decline and eventual ouster. It enjoyed “a preponderant influence”, to use Daalder’s phrasing, amongst the media, orchestrated skilfully by Press Secretary and later Director of Communications Alastair Campbell, but the favour of traditionally Tory-supporting publications was only granted temporarily (and very much contingent on Blair’s aforementioned unwillingness to depart too far from Thatcherism). As soon as New Labour outlived its usefulness to the press barons, newspapers reverted to supporting the Conservatives (see the Sun’s memorable “Labour’s Lost It” front page). All that buttering up of the right-wing press did nothing to create lasting dominance. And, like World Championship Wrestling, the party sowed the seeds of its own demise. As much as Blairites like to blame Corbyn’s far-left agenda for the loss of a swathe of Leave-voting seats in northern England (the so-called “red wall”), and as much as Corbynistas are more likely to lay the blame at the feet of the continuity Remainers – including Keir Starmer – who pushed so forcefully for the suicidal second referendum policy, the reality is that the rot had set in in such regions long before these men rose to prominence in Labour. To take one example, Bishop Auckland, won by the Tories for the first time in 2019, had a Labour majority of 21,064 in 1997, but by 2010 this had fallen to 5,218. New Labour created precious little in the way of meaningful work in deprived northern areas to replace the mining industries decimated by the Thatcher government, relying instead on casual call centre jobs and crumbs from the table of the booming financial services industry in London, and a string of Labour councils, scarred by memories of internal battles against the Trotskyist-led Liverpool administration that resisted Tory cuts in the 1980s, pushed through stringent austerity measures following the 2008 financial crash. Similarly, the national party meekly accepted the Conservatives’ successful attempt – abetted by the same newspapers that had been trumpeting Tony Blair’s virtues not so long ago – to paint the UK’s recession as a result of government overspending rather than a crisis of global capitalism. New Labour’s biggest achievements – the minimum wage aside, which can be said to have become a truly dominant ideology – were consequently swept away by a Conservative Party that had never abandoned the Thatcherite ideal of small government. What kind of dominance is it that is so easily reversed?
So now we come, finally, to our last criterium by which a dominant party is defined: a party which is simply, in Duverger’s words, “that which public opinion believes to be dominant”. I think the preceding few thousand words have made clear the extent to which small-c and big-C conservative ideology completely suffuses the UK’s politics right now, and I would put it to you that only absolute wingnuts think anything different. I mean, imagine how right-wing you would have to be to look at an 80-seat Tory majority, a populace of which almost 50% willingly admit to having little to no sympathy for destitute refugees crossing the English Channel, a media class which seems to regard even the most minor expressions of “wokeness” as akin to a new Spanish Inquisition, a public sphere in which a prominent newspaper columnist and wife of a current cabinet minister feels empowered to tweet a photo of their shared bookcase including a history book by convicted Holocaust denier David Irving and a now-debunked pseudo-scientific tome which purports to “prove” that black people are inherently less intelligent than white people, and come to the conclusion that the left controls all levers of power throughout the country and its institutions. (As it turns out, exactly as right-wing as Peter Hitchens.) And if you still aren’t convinced, take a look at the opinion polls that have been released during the COVID-19 pandemic, during which the Conservative government caused the preventable deaths of tens of thousands people who would still be alive if they’d locked down one week earlier, and seemed at once point to be more than ready to let the disease spread through the population unchecked, letting 250,000 people die to protect the economy. Is Labour in the lead? By 20 points? By 1 point? No, it isn’t. The Tories are more popular, and it’s not even close.
It’s staggering how little
negative impact the government’s (mis)management of the pandemic has had on its
ratings. But this is what happens in a dominant-party
system. A system where the government
enjoys a “preponderant influence” on a media that seems more interested in slavishly defending the ruling party than scrutinising it; look at Evening Standard
columnist and Times Radio presenter Ayesha Hazarika’s now-infamous “hipster analysis” tweet – somehow still not deleted – in which she decried the
public’s insistence on wanting to know the rationale for not locking down
(concerns which I would say were extremely well-founded, in the light of all
the deaths and what have you). As for “ideological
influence”, you only have to look at the sheer spinelessness of Keir Starmer in
opposing the government to see that, just as Blairism worked within Thatcherism’s
new status quo rather than dismantling it, Labour seems to have decided on a
policy of “constructive opposition” that looks more like critical
support, and not just where COVID-19 is concerned. From taking to the pages of the right-wing Mail
on Sunday to demand that the Conservatives enact a policy they have already declared they are in favour of, to taking the knee in symbolic
support of the Black Lives Matter movement before announcing his disagreement with all of its political goals, to standing by while his party takes a step back from advocating trans rights (an issue Corbyn’s Labour wasn’t even
particularly good on to begin with), it seems there are no lengths to which the
Labour leader will not go in order to signal his party’s acceptance of the
paradigm the now-dominant Tories have created.
I hope it works out for you, mate.
Good luck winning a majority once the press turns on you, the leftists
you’ve alienated go back to voting for the Greens or the TUSC or no-one at all, the
Conservative voters you’re trying to woo decide they’d rather have the real
McCoy than a watered-down version of Boris Johnson’s programme, the Leavers in
the red wall remember that you were the guy who tried to take Brexit away from
them, and your chances of winning back Scotland further recede into the ether. And don’t assume the
canvassers with whom I froze my arse off pounding the doorsteps last year are
going to want to repeat their efforts on your behalf. Not that it'll make any difference if they do.
I’ll say this for conservatives; they know how to build dominant parties. Whether it’s the Republicans in the USA trying brazenly to gerrymander their way to endless rule, the Conservatives making sure that austerity measures fall most severely upon the shoulders of deprived areas with Labour councils (who can then take the blame on election day), or the PAP’s wielding of every weapon at its disposal to prevent Singapore’s opposition parties from gaining momentum, right-wingers understand at a fundamental level that governments have the power to dictate how the political game is played in the future. It’s something that liberals, with their naïve faith in due process and their belief that conservatives and the media moguls who cheerlead for them can be mollified on a long-term basis, are yet to grasp. The consequences, within my country’s context, are plain to see. Despite what I stated in this article’s provocative and ultimately inaccurate title, the United Kingdom is not a one-party state, but it might as well be. I hope to see Labour in power again: even Starmer’s Labour, which, notwithstanding all my critiques, would be an improvement on the current mob. But from where I’m standing right now, there’s just as little chance of another Labour government in my lifetime as there is of dear Mr Pritam Singh becoming Prime Minister of Singapore.
So what are we going to do about
this? How are we going to advance
leftist ideals if the Labour Party isn’t getting a sniff of power ever again? How are we going to fight the Tories? Well, you’re a smart person. You’ll figure it out.
