Labour can’t allow itself to be swayed by interest groups that run against its values
I don’t want to be priggish. I accept that when you are fighting the fascistic you have to win and not be too picky about how you do it. But Labour’s victory over George Galloway in Batley and Spen should make you wonder how a centre-left party can ever win back national power.
The great realignment of politics across the west is meant to have left the left with one option: building a “rainbow coalition” of liberal graduates, ethnic minority voters, grateful for the educated’s opposition to racism, and all other victims of prejudice and discrimination. The US civil rights leader Jesse Jackson ran with the rainbow coalition slogan in the 1980s, as he tried to secure the Democratic nomination. He failed but offered the hope that eventually “the desperate, the damned, the disinherited, the disrespected, and the despised” would come together and win. Not today: the rainbow coalition is a coalition of losers now, whose members are too concentrated in the cities to beat a right that can win in constituencies across the country. But one day. Surely.
