How did the Greens end up fumbling so many left and progressive votes to the Lib-Dem neoliberals?

Under the circumstances the Green Party did pretty poorly at the European elections.

Yes I know I'm going to have to explain this in light of the fact that they won their biggest share of the vote since they bagged 14.5% in 1989, and their most seats ever with 7 MEPs, and got the wonderful Magid Magid into the European Parliament to represent the Yorkshire and Humber region that was electing the BNP there just 10 years ago.

12% of the vote is an improvement on the Green performance last time around, but under the unique political circumstances it's actually a pretty poor showing.

The Greens should have done really well because they're unambiguously on the progressive side of the three most burning political issues of our time.

Their name alone is evidence enough that they're serious about combating environmental degradation, they've been campaigning against the blight of ruinous Tory austerity since well before Jeremy Corbyn took Labour back from the orthodoc neoliberals and put an end to the austerity-imitating gibberish that lost them the 2015 General Election, and they're unambiguously opposed to Brexit.

Add in the stuff like the Extinction Rebellion protests, the School Strikes for Climate Action, ever growing awareness of the mess we're making of this planet, and we've got to be left asking if 2019 wasn't the time for the Greens to break through into the political mainstream, when will it be?

There's plenty of ground for arguing that their obsession with an "another roll of the dice" referendum is a massive waste of Green political energy, but there's no doubt that if you're a social progressive who really wants to stay in the EU so much you'll gamble everything on a referendum despite the Tories still in power to rig the whole thing in their own favour, then the Greens are obviously the ones for you (unless you're from Scotland or Wales where the SNP and Plaid Cymru also have justifiable claims to represent progressive Brexit-sceptics).

But somehow the Greens got absolutely steamrollered by the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, welfare-vandalising, wage-repressing, infrastructure-underinvesting Lib-Dem neoliberals who were the venal self-serving charlatans who wilfully helped the Tories lay the groundwork for Brexit to happen in the first place by trashing our wages, public services, social safety net, and living standards between 2010 and 2015.

Somehow, out of the minority of those who could be arsed to vote in the Euro elections (just 35.6% bothered), the majority of the anti-Brexit vote went to the disgustingly unrepentant Lib-Dems, rather than to the Green Party who had exactly the same anti-Brexit stance, but with absolutely none of the austerity blood on their hands.
 

The rise of the Greens in Germany puts the UK Greens' failure into perspective. Despite no Brexit bandwagon to leap onto the German Greens doubled their vote to 20.5% and bagged 21 MEPs, meaning they finished in second place behind Angela Merkel's centre-right CDU.

In the days after the election the German Greens have risen further with the post-Euro election bounce lifting them to the top of an opinion poll for the first time in their history on 27%.

Meanwhile in the UK it's the austerity-enforcing, wage-repressing, renewable subsidy-slashing, public service-trashing, welfare-vandalising, Royal Mail-privatising Lib-Dems who are gleefully basking in the post-Euro election bounce at the top of outlier polls.

It's difficult to get down to why the Green campaign has faltered so badly in the UK, when all the factors seemed to be pointing in their favour. But as someone who is broadly supportive of their party (especially on stuff like opposing austerity, protecting the environment, and renationalisation) I'll have a go:

Mainstream media bias: The Greens have fought tooth and nail for years to try to get fairer representation in the mainstream media, but to no avail. They're continually locked out of election debates, denied party political broadcasts, and treated as a minor party, even though they went into the 2019 Euro elections with triple the seats of the supposedly bigger Lib-Dems.

Leadership structure: The Greens have an unusual joint leadership between Siân Berry and Jonathan Bartley instead of one high profile leader. It's possible that this unusual leadership structure make them seem more like well meaning political amateurs than a serious political party. However this doesn't explain the disparity between the UK and German Greens because they too have a shared leadership structure. Perhaps the polarised hyper-partisan, and divisive nature of British politics means Brits are somewhat less open to ideas like shared leadership and compromise?

Leadership figures: One of the German Greens' co-leaders is Robert Habeck who is an almost ubiquitous figure in the German media and a former government minister in the Schleswig-Holstein region, and the other co-leader is Annalena Baerbock who is a member of the Bundestag (the main German parliament). Neither Jonathan Bartley nor Siân Berry have anything like as high profiles (Bartley is a local councillor in Lambeth, and Berry has a seat in the London Assembly which is an institution barely mentioned by ordinary folk in London, let alone us yokels outside of it). Unfortunately Caroline Lucas is still the only major figure in the UK Green Party ranks, but it's understandable that she wants to concentrate on her duties in parliament rather than acting as party figurehead.

Naivety: All the stuff about forming electoral pacts with the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters before the Euro elections was extremely poor from a Green perspective. Instead of positioning themselves as making a more or less identical/interchangeable anti-Brexit offer as the two overtly neoliberal Remain parties, they should have strongly and clearly distanced themselves and made it clear that they were the only UK-wide Remain party willing to address the actual causes of Brexit in the first place (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, welfare vandalism, infrastructure underinvestment ...). Presenting themselves as Lib-Dem allies in the fight against Brexit allowed the ever cynical Lib-Dems to use "tactical voting guides" to lure people into abandoning the Greens and voting Lib-Dem as the supposedly biggest Remain party. Failure to heed the basic  political axiom "never trust the Lib-Dems" is remarkably naive stuff.

General antipathy: One factor that it would be easy to overlook is the general UK public antipathy towards the Greens. We've all seen people dismissing them as mung bean-weaving, sandal-wearing, hippy-dippy fruitcakes over the years. Maybe the Greens seriously need to think about toughening up their image as seasoned battlers in the existential crisis that out-of-control capitalism is inflicting on our planet?

Lack of clarity: By presenting themselves as being basically inter-changeable Remain protest votes with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters, the Greens threw away their chance to explain why they were the better alternative and handed all the political momentum to the more establishment-friendly Lib-Dems.

Poor strategy: In the final days before the EU election practically all I noticed from Green activists on Twitter were efforts to pinch left-leaning Labour voters by attacking Labour's Brexit position, rather than focusing on convincing the sizeable and defined Remain demographic to vote Green instead of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems. Instead of appealing to a large well defined demographic as the best option with no austerity baggage, they were wasting their efforts on desperately trying to erode a final few Labour votes from a party already reduced down to its core support.
 

Ineffectiveness: Even though a lot Green effort was expended on trying to pinch Labour votes during the the final days of the Euro election campaign, the evidence suggests that far more Labour supporters deserted to the pro-austerity Lib-Dems than to the anti-austerity Greens! If the Greens failed to even convince Labour deserters to back them instead of the pro-austerity Lib-Dem Tory collaborators, they clearly failed quite spectacularly. Someone within the Green ranks would have to conduct the autopsy but letting millions of left and centre-left votes slip through their fingers to be gobbled up by the orthodox neoliberal Lib-Dems was a disaster.

Differences in the traditional left: The traditional left SPD party in Germany has completely lost its way and people are crying out for an alternative. Jeremy Corbyn has revitalised the Labour Party, binned the orthodox neoliberal tripe that was driving voters away in their millions, and returned to genuine democratic socialism. Even though the low-turnout Euro Elections were incredibly poor for Labour, they haven't been floundering as badly as the German Social Democrat Party for the past four years. Coming up against a stronger traditional left than the German Greens still doesn't explain how the UK Greens let so many votes slip through their fingers to the Lib-Dems though.

Brexit fixation: Perhaps the German Greens did so well not despite the lack of a Brexit bandwagon to jump on, but because of it? Perhaps jumping on the exact same People's Vote bandwagon as the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters ended up obscuring and diluting the core Green policies that differentiate them from the pro-austerity neoliberal parties they decided to side with? Perhaps Brexit brain worms cost the Greens their best ever chance at making the breakthrough to the political big time?

It would be a futile task to try to identify one single reason that the Greens faltered and fumbled millions of potential votes through their fingers in the UK to the benefit of a bunch of unrepentant neoliberals, while the Greens surged to position themselves as the 2nd party in German politics, but it's important for UK Greens to avoid celebrating marginal gains when they should have been making significant headway, and for them to get a feel of what went so wrong so they can learn from their mistakes.

If you've got any other ideas about why the Greens faltered so badly, feel free to share them in the comments.

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OR

Neoliberalism is in decline, but don't celebrate too soon

Just a few weeks ago the Tories suffered their worst local election results in a quarter of a century.

This week they're going to get so smashed at the Euro elections it'll almost certainly be their worst electoral result in history. Most of the polls put them battling with the Greens for 4th/5th place.

Over 80% of the public think Theresa May has done a bad job of negotiating Brexit, and she's so unpopular within her own party that the Tory top brass are trying to tear up the party rule book in a desperate effort to force her out within six months of the last effort to depose her*.

A malicious and incompetent leader selfishly clinging onto power for as long as possible while her political party disintegrates around her.

This is what neoliberalism in decline looks like.

For four decades the Tory party have relentlessly served the interests of the mega-rich elitists who bankrolled their operation at the expense of everyone else, and at the expense of the UK economy as a whole.

They were bad enough before 1979, but when Thatcher injected the toxic hard-right political virus of neoliberalism into Westminster and the UK government they've turned into absolute monsters, continually asset stripping the UK and transferring as much wealth as possible from the ordinary majority to the tiny mega-rich minority.

Entire working class industries shut down as part of their ideological war on trade unions, communities all over Britain left to rot, continual government attacks on workers' rights and working conditions, ruinous austerity dogma, unprecedented wage repression, devastating public service cuts, deliberate under-investment in infrastructure, housing and education, wanton vandalism of the social safety net ...

Meanwhile they've provided a continual banquet of tax cuts, lavish handouts, and privatisation scams for their mega-rich backers to gorge themselves upon.

The ruination they've inflicted on ordinary workers, the poor, the vulnerable, the disabled, and left behind communities all over the United Kingdom is finally coming back onto them.

Their neoliberal policies have left millions of people broke, stressed and looking at the future without hope, so it's nice to think that just for once these elitist toffs are in a complete mess and looking at the future with dread, because it means they're getting just a tiny taste of the panic and distress their neoliberal agenda has inflicted on millions of other people's lives for the last four decades.

It's extraordinary to think that just four years ago all three of the main Westminster establishment parties went into the 2015 General Election with pro-austerity pro-privatisation orthodox neoliberal manifestos, yet now the godawful Lib-Dems look like they're going to be the last neoliberal standing!

Thankfully Labour have shifted back to their traditional pro-investment, pro-worker, pro-public ownership stance since Jeremy Corbyn became leader, and the Tories are on the brink of abandoning the neoliberal orthodoxy altogether in order to chase the repulsive extreme-right ultranationalist blue-kip demographic who have been abandoning them in droves since Theresa May completely banjaxed the Brexit negotiations.

Labour's position is to try to reverse the damage of the last four decades by investing in our public services and infrastructure projects, giving Britain a pay rise, and making corporations and the mega-rich stop dodging tax and pay their fair share.

Under whichever Brextremist replaces Theresa May the Tories are going to try to use the dire consequences of their own neoliberal policies in order to push an even more fanatically right-wing agenda.

And the Lib-Dems will be left in the abandoned neoliberal territory begging for a return to "more of the same" and facing the eventual choice of whether to help Labour undo the damage, or back the far-right Tories.

It's pretty damned obvious what they'll chose, given that they participated in the 2010-15 coalition government that unlawfully discriminated against and deported black British citizens, introduced deeply illiberal secret courts, imposed ruinous austerity dogma, unlawfully attacked workers' rights, stripped the police and fire services to the bone, trashed our future economic potential by under-investing in infrastructure, gagged charities, flogged the Royal Mail off at miles below its true value, turned Libya into a lawless terrorist breeding ground, gutted local government funding, delivered unprecedented rates of wage repression, privatised 3/4 of English secondary schools into the hands of unaccountable private profiteers, systematically abused sick and disabled people, and so much more ...

They're hardly likely to back a Labour government intent on undoing as much of this damage as possible, so they'll stand in opposition to Labour in order to protect this appalling stuff that they actually see as 'gains', and if the chance comes up to form another coalition with the Tories, they'll obviously jump at it, because if Theresa May's fascistic Hostile Environment and vile anti-immigrant hatemongering as Home Secretary weren't too much for them between 2010 and 2015, they'll likely be fine with whatever far-right antics Boris Johnson/Dominic Raab/Michael Gove get up to won't they?

The ongoing collapse of orthodox neoliberalism means there's going to have to be a paradigm shift in British politics.

Either we try to reverse course and undo the worst of the four decades of neoliberal damage, or we double down and embrace the far-right.

This means anyone attempting to occupy the rapidly evacuated faux centre-ground of orthodox neoliberalism is going to have to accept the risk that they're going to end up backing the far-right by default, because neoliberalism has an awful lot more in common with outright fascism than it does with democratic socialism.

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OR

* = I'm not even a fan of an "another roll of the dice" referendum but it's funny how the Tories think they should be allowed to vote again within a matter of months because they've changed their minds, but the British public shouldn't have another say after over three years isn't it?

Why are so many Remainers voting for the Lib-Dem austerity-enablers?

So apparently the UK political scene is so banjaxed that we're actually trusting Lib-Dems again, and it's not even four years since their disastrous coalition with the Tories came to an end!

Maybe Remainers flocking to support the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, social safety net-trashing Lib-Dems would make some kind of sense if the Lib-Dems had shown any kind of remorse for what they wilfully helped the Tories to do to the United Kingdom. But no. There's no remorse at all. 

• There's no remorse over the economically illiterate austerity agenda that led to the slowest post-crisis economic recovery in centuries, and which still hasn't eliminated the deficit despite the fact they said it would have done before May 2015 (over four years ago).

• There's no remorse over the deliberate wage repression policies that led to the worst sustained decline in UK workers' wages on record, and set up an entire decade of lost wage growth.

• There's no remorse over the privatisation of the Royal Mail property portfolio at an absurdly tiny fraction of its real value. In fact the remorse is so non-existent that they even elected the man who ripped the public off to the tune of £hundreds of millions as their current leader!

• There's no remorse about the soaring rates of child poverty, and in-work poverty, nor over the fact that the vast majority of austerity cuts were loaded onto the shoulders of women, especially single mothers.

• There's no remorse over helping Theresa May slash the police force by 21,000 and close literally hundreds of police stations, which has contributed to the violent crime epidemic we're suffering today.

• There's no remorse about their decision to oversee the lowest rate of house building since the 1920s, while using financial trickery to re-inflate the housing bubble and drive housing costs back up and beyond the unsustainable levels before the 2008 bankers' insolvency crisis.

• There's no remorse over the brutal Tory sanctions regime, nor the despicable disability denial system that has resulted in literally thousands of people dying within weeks of being declared "fit for work" and thrown off their disability benefits.

• There's no remorse over Lib-Dem votes in favour of deeply illiberal policies like secret courts, the gagging law, bedroom tax, dripa, Theresa May's Hostile Environment, and the catastrophic strategy of turning Libya into a lawless terrorism breeding ground like Blair and Bush did to Iraq.

• And worst of all there's no remorse about the way the far-right blamed the collapsing living standards these disgusting policies causes on immigrants and the EU in order to promote Brexit, and the Lib-Dems just bit their tongues, because any effort to explain that the real causes of the living standards collapse (austerity, wage repression, infrastructure under-investment, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net) would have illustrated their own complicity. So they just stayed silent and let the far-right win.

And now just look at the delight on the faces of Danny Alexander, Nick Clegg, and George Osborne in the photo above.

These three men impoverished literally millions of their fellow countrymen, and deliberately trashed the future economic potential of the UK in order to fund a disgusting sequence of tax cuts and handouts to corporations and the mega-rich.

They raked in lavish six figure salaries while they were doing it, and now all three have quit politics to rake in even more extravagant salaries from private sector employers.

They don't give a shit about all the people they trampled into destitution, nor the fact that their ruinous economic policies created the dramatic collapse in living standards that led directly to Brexit.

But somehow, even when there are plenty of explicitly anti-austerity options for Remainers to choose from (Green Party, SNP, Plaid Cymru) Remainers are flocking to support the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems.

Assuming that people aren't completely gullible idiots with goldfish-memories, the only possible conclusion is that an awful lot of Remainers are the comfortably well off who never suffered the truly dire consequences of austerity dogma, wage repression, welfare cuts, and public service destruction.

They want to reward the party that enabled all of this malice in the first half of this decade because they were comfortably well-to-do during that period, and quite content at the time because the impoverishment was happening to other people below them on the social ladder.

They want to go back to the way things were before because they were perfectly comfortable when the destitution was being forced on "the lower orders" in order to fund tax cuts and handouts for corporations and the mega rich.

And they certainly don't want to consider that the vile poverty-spreading policies the Lib-Dems enabled were one of the main causal factors in the Brexit chaos in the first place.

They're like lung cancer sufferers dramatically increasing the amount of cigarettes they smoke in the hope that it'll somehow cure the disease they've given themselves.

By supporting a party that enabled so much ideological malice against the poor, working classes, disabled people, local communities, they're actually intent on making themselves look exactly like the aloof metropolitan elitists that the Leave camp always love to portray Remainers as.

Every time they turn up in comments sections to proudly brag that they're voting Lib-Dem because they "don't care about anything else except stopping Brexit", they're displaying their outright contempt for the people who actually suffered under the Tory/Lib-Dem coalition.

If these people can afford to not care about austerity dogma, wage repression, public service cuts, vandalism of the social safety net, etc, then they can hardly complain when left behind communities say that Remainers don't give a shit about them and their problems can they?

And what makes it so much worse is that they're so mindlessly optimistic that the Lib-Dems won't just completely shaft them again.

How exactly does electing a load of pro-austerity pro-privatisation neoliberals into the European Parliament do anything to stop Brexit when the only place it can actually be stopped is Westminster?

Voting for the austerity-enablers who helped create the Brexit backlash in the first place is nonsense, especially since boosting the number of austerity-enforcing neoliberals in the European Parliament does nothing practical to actually stop Brexit whatever.

But then the Brexit Party Faragists are ridiculous nonsense on the other side of the Brexit spectrum, so I guess maybe the thinking of these Lib-Dem supporters is as simple as "if Brexit supporters are going to vote for a polarised right-wing nonsense party, then so will we"!

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OR

The cynical Remainer plot to use tactical Brexit voting to wipe out the Green Party

Before Labour finally quit pushing the pro-austerity, pro-privatisation neoliberal orthodoxy with the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader in 2015 I was a big fan of the Green Party because they were the only major party in England that refused to buy into Tory austerity fanaticism (Scotland had the SNP and Wales had Plaid Cymru), but in recent years they've really lost their way.

Nothing demonstrates this Green directionlessness more than their dalliance with pro-austerity neoliberals as part of the campaign for an "another roll of the dice" referendum.

The case for another referendum looks questionable in its own right, given the possibility that Remain could easily conspire to lose again and end up creating an inescapable double-mandate for Brexit, but the loyalty pledges to Theresa May from the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters to keep the Tories in power while they roll the dice again makes it even more risky, because a Remainer loss under these circumstances would end up creating a double-mandate for the worst kind of hard-right, economy-tanking, job-destroying, Tory administered nuclear Brexit.

Whether you agree with the campaign for another roll of the dice or not, the anti-austerity Greens make very odd bedfellows with the Lib-Dem austerity enablers who caused Brexit in the first place by helping the Tories to trash our living standards, ruin our public services, under-invest in infrastructure, health, housing and education, vandalise the social safety net, and impose the longest sustained collapse in the value of our wages in centuries.

And then the CUK squatters are even stranger bedfellows for the Greens, given that they're promising to "change" politics by ... err ... promoting more of the same pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, millionaire-bankrolled neoliberalism that got us in this mess in the first place, even after the disastrous consequences of these policies are now all too clear.

Somehow the Greens have decided that collusion with these toxic austerity ideologues is in their best interests. But when you decide that it's a good idea to swim with piranhas, it's a little over-optimistic to expect not to get bitten.

So now the Remain campaigner and vocal advocate of Lib-Dem style "centrist" neoliberal orthodoxy Gina Miller has helped to launch a "helpful" new Remain United tool to tell Remainers how to vote in the upcoming regional elections, and somehow, they've calculated that Remain supporters in the South West should abandon support for the sitting Green MEP Molly Scott Cato, and vote Lib-Dem instead.

In London where the Greens have another MEP, guess what, the "Remain United" campaign is advising Green voters to ditch their party and vote Lib-Dem instead in the hope that the Lib-Dems nick their seat!

And in Yorkshire and the Humber where the Green's leading candidate for one of the six available seats is the fantastic Magid Magid, once again the Remain United advice is to abandon the Greens and vote Lib-Dem.

And in the 10 seat region of South East England where the Greens already have a sitting MEP, and have the best mathematical chance of retaining a seat, guess what the "Remain United" advice is?

Well it's obvious, just like every single region of England, it's to abandon the Green Party and vote Lib-Dem so that the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems can wipe the Greens off the map and bag themselves two seats in the region!
 

This cynical attempt to use the Tory Brexit farce as an excuse to pinch Green votes on behalf of the austerity-enabling Lib-Dems (who helped create Brexit in the first place) is precisely what you's expect from a bunch of self-serving neoliberals, but then somehow the Greens have been too naive to see this threat coming, and by willingly colluding with these cynical opportunists, they've been wilfully handing out the nails that are being used to seal them in their own political coffins.

In fact they're still actively colluding with the Lib-Dems and CUK squatters over a plan to field a joint Remainer candidate in the Peterborough by-election!

The Greens are still colluding with these nasty neoliberal charlatans even as they're being stabbed in the back by them.

If this cynical effort to use Brexit to turn anti-austerity Green voters into pro-austerity Lib-Dems succeeds, and the Greens end up getting completely wiped out at the Euro elections, they'll unfortunately only have themselves to blame.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

OR

Don't believe the mainstream media over-hype about Vox

In the buildup to the Spanish General Election elements of the UK press, especially the BBC, were absolutely determined to talk up the prospects of the far-right party Vox.

But as the results came in a lot of mainstream media hacks failed to adjust to the actual reality. Vox only bagged 10% of the vote and finished 5th, and there were a lot of other extremely important stories, several of them much bigger than the extreme-right gaining a foothold in the Spanish parliament for the first time, but somehow the media continued their fixation on Vox.

In this article I'm going to run through a few of the stories and issues that got lost behind the Vox hype.

PP's worst result ever

Partido Popular are the Spanish version of the Tories. They're the shockingly corrupt, pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker, right-wing establishment party who have switched power with PSOE ever since the end of Franco's fascist dictatorship in 1975. They ruled Spain in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis, imposing ruinous austerity, overseeing huge unemployment rates, attacking workers rights and individual liberties, and creating an unprecedented exodus of the younger generations who spread across Europe looking for work and opportunities.

On Sunday 28 April 2019 they suffered by far their worst electoral result in their history, collapsing from 32.6% of the vote at the last election in 2016 to just 16.7% and 66 of the 350 seats.

To put the scale of this defeat into perspective their previous worst result was in 1989 when they got 25.8% of the vote and 107 of the seats.

In the UK we can only dream of the Tory vote collapsing in half, and them returning to parliament with less than 20% of the seats in parliament.

PSOE win

PSOE are like the Spanish version of Labour, they're significantly to the left of the PP, but in recent decades they've failed to really live up to the "socialist" name, often opting for Blair-style neoliberalism-lite. They'll generally protect workers and champion socially progressive causes, but when it comes to rolling back privatisation and reversing tax handouts for the mega-rich they're nowhere near living up to their socialist name.

28.7% of the vote and 123 seats in Congress is a long way from the best performance in their history, but since 2014 Spanish politics has fractured from two main parties to five, and finishing 12 points above their nearest rival under these circumstances is not bad at all.

123 seats is still well short of a majority, but it's such a comprehensive lead over their rival parties that it's inconceivable that they won't form the next government.

PSOE majority in the senate

PSOE fell short of winning a majority in congress, but they secured a clear majority in the Spanish senate with 139 of the 265 seats, their first senate majority since 1989, and their best senate performance since they won a senate landslide in 1986.

A first left-wing senate majority in three decades is clearly a huge story, but one that's flown under the radar in a lot of mainstream media coverage, thanks mainly to all the Vox hype.

Ciudadanos

One of the major reasons for the collapse of PP was the rise of the right-wing Ciudadanos party which formed in Catalonia in 2006, but only really became a party at the national level in 2014.

After absorbing most of the anti-independence vote in the 2017 Catalan regional elections to become the single biggest party in the Catalan parliament, they were projected to do very well in the next General Election, but they've fallen back significantly since their peak in mid-2018 when they were actually leading in multiple polls on almost 30%, to finish in 3rd on 15.9%.

It's still technically the best result in their short history, but in light of the spectacular PP collapse, and where they were in the polls just a year ago, a modest 2.8% increase in their vote is clearly an under-performance.

With 57 seats a PSOE-Ciudadanos coalition is mathematically possible, but highly unlikely given the unpopularity of their leader Albert Rivera with PSOE supporters.

Unidas Podemos

Despite forming a political alliance with another left-wing party (Izquierda Unida) Podemos has fallen back significantly from their high point in 2016 to finish in fourth place with 14.3% of the vote and 42 seats.

Unidas Podemos would have been the most likely coalition partners for PSOE, but they dropped so many seats that even together they're still well short of a majority.

There are many reasons for the Unidas Podemos fallback, including former-PSOE voters going back to their previous allegiance, a lot of bitter public infighting between different internal factions, and some ridiculous behaviour from their leader Pablo Iglesias.

All is not lost though, because although 14.3% of the vote is a poor result compared to their achievments in 2015 and 2016, it's only a fraction behind PP in second, which is hardly terrible for a political party that was only formed in 2014.

Vox
 

Vox are a far-right ultranationalist party that were founded in 2014 by defectors from the ruling PP. Until this election Vox had won nothing at the national level, just a few seats in regional elections.

Bagging 10% of the vote and 24 seats in congress represents a significant stride forward for the extreme-right in Spanish politics, but in reality they're only slightly to the right of PP, they're just more open and overt about their bigotry, misogyny, extreme-right politics, and desire for the centralisation of political power in Madrid than the establishment right-wing party they split away from.

10% is clearly better than the 0.2% they achieved at the previous election, but anyone trying to make out that the story is all about them when 90% of Spanish voters rejected them, and they finished in fifth, with fewer seats than the Catalan Independence parties, is clearly pushing an agenda, rather than reporting the news.

Results in Catalonia

There are two ways of looking at the results in Catalonia. From an independence perspective, and from a left-right perspective.

The left-wing pro-independence Republican Left group won the most votes and most seats for the region.

It's difficult to argue that their popularity hasn't been driven by the fact their leader Oriol Junqueras has been held as a political prisoner by the Spanish state since 2017.

And it's also difficult to argue that a party led by a political prisoner taking a massive historic win isn't a huge story that should at least have got a look in instead of the Vox over-hype.

Anti-independence PSOE came second in Catalonia and the more neutral Podemos group in the Catalan region slipped to 3rd, meaning all three of the most popular parties in Catalonia are on the left or centre-left.

The right-wing Ciudadanos party had an absolute disaster coming in 5th, less than a year and a half after coming first in the Catalan regional elections.

PP collapsed to 6th place bagging just 4.9% of the Catalan vote, meaning that they're essentially a dead political force there, which is hardly surprising given their former leader Mariano Rajoy's ridiculously arrogant and incompetent mishandling of the independence issue back in 2017.

Coalition or minority government?

Since PSOE and Unidas Podemos have fallen just short of enough seats to build a majority, they'll need support from smaller regional parties. The Catalan Republican Left party have 15 seats, but it's unlikely they'd collaborate without significant concessions, including the possibility of an officially sanctioned Catalan independence referendum.

The other option is for PSOE to go it alone as a minority government, then call another general election if the opposition parties vote down their budget again. Obstructionism would be a bold move from the likes of PP and Ciudadanos given that the political momentum is with PSOE.

It's hard to see how PP and Ciudadanos wouldn't be punished by the electorate if they forced the Spanish people into a 4th General Election in the space of four years through obstructionist tactics.

The Spanish right is split

It's often the case in politics that splits in the opposition end up handing power to the political right, but in Spain in 2019 the right has splintered into three (PP, Ciudadanos, Vox), while the left vote is divided between two (PSOE, Unidas Podemos).

The reason PP have collapsed so badly is that their vote is being eroded from both sides. Vox have pinched 2 million+ votes from PP by pushing far-right ultranationalist bigotry, while Ciudadanos have pinched a significant proportion of "centre-right" PP voters.

Between the three right-wing parties they bagged 42.9% of the vote, which is only a slight decline on the 45.8% the three parties' combined vote at the last General Election in 2016, but because the right-wing vote is more evenly divided between three right-wing parties, rather than being concentrated mainly with PP, they've fallen even further short of building a right-wing coalition.

Conclusion

Elements of the British press really wanted Vox to do well because "fascism is rising again in Spain" is a story they can really hype. The far-right did indeed bag a foothold in the Spanish parliament, but 10% is significantly below people's worst fears, but the UK media seemed unable to adjust their footing, drop the far-right overhype they wanted to present, and cover other significant and historic aspects of the election.

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We need to talk about groupthink

Groupthink is a condition that tends to manifest in all organisations and all political movements, but some cases are obviously worse than others, especially when the groupthink ideas that are spreading like wildfire are strategically inept and counter-productive nonsense.

The groupthink propensity 

The Remain campaign is particularly prone to groupthink for two big reasons.

One is that they've developed an extraordinary echo-chamber on Twitter based on the FBPE hashtag, meaning all kinds of nonsense, misinformation, lies, abuse, and strategically inept gibberish gets spread through the cult-like uncritical amplification by other #FBPE activists.

Not everything written by FBPE hashtaggers is bad, obviously, but it's become so infested with abusive people and partisan liars it's extraordinary that anyone with any basic human decency would still want to be associated with it.

Another reason for the propensity to groupthink is that an awful lot of Remain activists seem to hang on the every word of the clueless centrist hacks who have been wrong on virtually every major political issue over the last decade.

• They told us to vote Lib-Dem in 2010 which enabled the malicious and incompetent Tories back into power, and led to the disastrous austerity policies that trashed our living standards and eventually led to the Brexit backlash.

• Then they chickened out of properly opposing economically illiterate Tory austerity fanaticism and all kinds of other Tory malice (Wage Repression, Bedroom Tax, Secret Courts, Hostile Environment, Workfare exploitation, systematic disability denial, infrastructure under-investment, annihilation of local government budgets, Academification, disastrous prisons and probation service privatisation scams ...).

• Then they actually convinced themselves that Labour should push "austerity-lite" at the 2015 General Election and leave the public the impression that the entire political establishment was colluding to rip-off the poor and ordinary in order to further enrich the gilded class to which they belong.

• Then they bitterly opposed and derided Jeremy Corbyn for his unambiguous anti-austerity agenda, smearing everyone who supported him as Trots, and Marxists, and Stalinists, and dangerous extreme-left freaks. A hate campaign that backfored spectacularly when Corbyn won a landslide victory in the 2015 Labour leadership election. 

• Then they ran a lazy, complacent, condescending, and downright inept Remain campaign in 2016 that was so bad they somehow managed to lose to a bunch of bloody charlatans who didn't even have a plan for what to do if they actually won!

• Then in the immediate aftermath of this extraordinary defeat they focused all of their political energy on a spectacularly failed Anyone But Corbyn coup instead of holding the Tories to account for the Brexit farce they'd just created. 

• Then they were so convinced that Labour would be wiped out as a political force at the 2017 General Election that they completely failed to see the Corbyn surge coming.

• And for the last year or so they've been utterly fixated on the idea of re-running the EU referendum despite absolutely no reforms to properly punish electoral cheats and liars, no new regulations for online social media dark ads, and no real outreach to left-behind communities to explain that it was Tory austerity fanaticism that trashed their wages, living standards, and communities since 2010, not immigrants and the EU (with absolutely no acknowledgement of the fact that losing another roll of the dice with the Tories still in power would create an inescapable double-mandate for ruinous hard-right economy-tanking, chaos-causing, job-destroying Tory administered Brexit farce).

An awful lot of people in the liberal media are so economically insulated from real world issues (wage repression in-work benefit cuts, sanctions, workfare, disability denial, child poverty, public service cuts, the housing crisis, exploitative employment practices, food banks ...) that they simply can't grasp what's actually going on in the UK, why people are so angry, and why "more of the same" just won't cut it any more.

And what's more is that they suffer no actual consequences for their perpetual wrongness. They just rapidly settle on another absurd groupthink narrative to push until that one collapses too, then it's onto the next reality-averse narrative, and on, and on, and on, with nobody ever asking why they deserve their bloated six figure salaries considering the fact they're so repeatedly wrong.

So when a lot of people uncritically rote learn and repeat the political opinions of these economically insulated mainstream media bubble dwellers with vested interests in not rocking the neoliberal boat too much, it's hardly surprising that strategically inept groupthink nonsense ends up infesting mass movements like the Remain campaign.

Euro election groupthink

The latest display of absurdist Remainer groupthink centres on the European Parliament elections that Theresa May and the Tories swore blind that the UK was not even going to participate in just a few weeks previously.

This new groupthink narrative is that the five very different hard-Remain political parties should scrap off all of their existing policies and hastily cobble together a "Remain coalition" in order to turn the Euro elections into a de facto referendum on Brexit.

This Remainer coalition of convenience is a spectacularly stupid idea for so many reasons. Especially the fact that Euro elections have historically suffered very low turnouts; the recklessness of turning elections into single-issue ballots and referendum reruns; the failure to acknowledge that pro-Brexit activists have a huge advantage having finished first in the previous Euro election; the nonsensical expectation that pro-austerity and anti-austerity parties to join forces is (and ignores the fact that austerity fanaticism is one of the root causes of Breixit in the first place); the absolute fantasy that the rabidly unionist Lib-Dems would happily join forces with the SNP; and the intense ignorance of the fact that parties like the Greens, SNP, and Plaid Cymru have democratic structures that simply wouldn't allow the leadership to unilaterally join forces with rival political parties, even if their leaders were daft enough to think this absolute nonsense was a good idea.

The idea seems to be that if all five of the minor hard-Remain parties (SNP, Plaid Cymru, Lib-Dems, Greens, and CUK) were to join forces they might have a slight chance of coming first in a fight against the various shades of Brexit which range through the "no deal" militancy of UKIP and Farage's Brexit Party, hard-right Tory Brexit, and Labour's soft-Brexit and confirmatory referendum compromise position. 

But despite all of the flaws, this blatantly absurd "let's turn the Euro elections into a de facto Brexit referendum" has become the widely accepted groupthink for Remainers to mindlessly parrot at each other.

Self-defeating nonsense

The consequences of this groupthink nonsense are quite extraordinary: When the Green Party tried to point out that turning the Euro elections into a de facto Brexit referendum is poor idea the FBPE mob turned on them in an instant, spitting torrents of bile and abuse at them for their lack of ideological purity to their brand-new Remainer groupthink idea.

Countless Guardian articles have been written pushing this absurd strategy, none of which highlight the importance of opposing the ruinous austerity fanaticism that caused Brexit in the first place, or acknowledge the absurdity of expecting anti-austerity parties and their activists to throw their support behind undisguised pro-austerity neoliberals like the Lib-Dems and the CUK squatters.

In one article the Guardian columnist Marina Hyde complained bitterly about the split Remainer vote being "a masterclass in political incompetence" without a single mention of the "centrist" political incompetence of failing to oppose austerity when they should have, nor providing any sensible perspective either on the fact that the Leave vote is also extremely divided with Farage's Brexit Party and UKIP promoting a ruinous "no deal" meltdown, the Tories pushing hard-right Brexit, and Labour going for soft-Brexit and a final say referendum.

These groupthink Guardian articles, including the Marina Hyde piece, are also infested with massively-upvoted below the line comments from toxic Remain extremists bitterly smearing all Brexit voters as bigots, Racists, and Faragists (as if shrieking "bigot" and "racist" at people for three years because they made a mistake in a hastily conducted referendum that nobody understood the full consequences of at the time isn't infinitely more likely to cement their existing position, rather than win them over to your cause).
What's the strategy here?

So the groupthink is that the five minor hard-Remain parties should scrap all of their pre-existing policies in order to form a coalition of convenience in the vain hope of topping the Euro election polls. 

But what if they combine forces and still lose? How would that failed gamble look to the rest of us?

And even if this hard-Remain coalition of convenience were somehow able to finish first, everyone would easily see that they'd just benefited from the fact that hard-Leave was divided between three parties (UKIP, Brexit, and Tory).

Why is a hard-Remain coalition of convenience so damned important? What's the actual strategic objective of forming one? What happens if they turn the Euro election into a de facto referendum and still lose? And how is having groupthink tantrums because this fantasy isn't happening doing anything to enhance the Brexit-sceptic cause?

Why not just give up?

• The unfathomably popular Remainer strategy of turning the Euro elections into a de facto referendum on Brexit (which they'd still probably lose in a low turnout election) is a catastrophically shit idea.

• Screeching hate at the Green Party (your hard-Remain allies for God's sake) for pointing out the practical unworkability of an undemocratic five year coalition of pro- and anti- austerity, pro- and anti-privatisation, pro- and anti- Scottish independence parties is an unbelievably terrible idea.

• Elevating toxic political figures like Anna Soubry and Chris Leslie as your political heroes despite the fact they promote "more of the same" pro-austerity, pro-privatisation, anti-worker neoliberalism that caused Brexit in the first place is an appalling idea.

• Spitting hate at anyone who tries to disarm Tory Brexit by ruling our a "no deal" meltdown and developing a compromise fail safe Single Market +Customs Union Brexit (just in case Remain manage to lose the next roll of the dice they've invested so much effort in campaigning for) because any sign of compromise fails your Remainer ideological purity test is an absurdly counter-productive idea.

• Endlessly abusing and repeatedly lying about the very people you desperately need to convince to support your cause in another referendum (especially 2016 Brexit voters, and the Labour left) is an unbelievably inept strategy.

• And how can anyone believe that it's constructive or strategically coherent to arrogantly sneer at people in left-behind communities rather than reach out to them to talk about how collapsing living standards have been caused by the malicious domestic policies of the Tory government (austerity, wage repression, public service cuts, infrastructure under-investment, appalling inaction on the housing crisis, vandalism of the social safety net,  ...) rather immigrants and the EU as the far-right Brextremist liars keep pretending?

Given that people who are prone to this despicable behaviour, condescending arrogance, absurd over-optimism, strategic ineptitude, and ridiculously counter-productive idiocy are jockeying for position at the forefront of the Remain campaign, how are they ever going to win?

Their ideological purity shrieking is so repulsive, and their groupthink desperation to gamble again is so strategically inept that they're actually turning Brexit-sceptics away from their cause, let alone actually convincing 2016 Leave voters and abstainers to join their cause (like they absolutely need them to).

Under the circumstances it's hard to not just give up and accept that Remainer strategic ineptitude, and the toxic antics of the #FBPE mob is actually likely to make Brexit far worse than it could have been because if the hard-Remainers burn all efforts at compromise and de-escalation in order to create a final clash of civilisations showdown between them and the hard-Brexit militants, they're highly likely to lose it. 
They're likely to lose because despite how dreadful the Brextremists are, their far-right propaganda, and misinformation, and conspiracy theories, and hate-mongering, and outright lies they keep pushing actually have a clear strategic purpose.

If you're stuck in the middle between ideological fanatics on one side who know exactly what they're doing, and exactly who they're trying to convince to join their movement, and exactly which lies are beneficial to their cause, and exactly how to stoke hatred and division to their own advantage ... and a bunch of ideological puritans on the other side who insist on spitting hatred and derision at the very people they need to convince, and fantasising about ridiculous absurdities, and having pathetic groupthink tantrums because their absurdities aren't happening, and endlessly bickering between themselves over failed ideological purity tests ... then only the foolish would end up backing the latter to win, no matter how much you might actually tend to agree with their cause.

Apologies for the pessimistic conclusion, but it's increasingly difficult to have any faith that Brexit ruination can be avoided given the blinkered, counter-productive, and strategically inept groupthink nonsense that continues to infest the Remain movement.

 Another Angry Voice  is a "Pay As You Feel" website. You can have access to all of my work for free, or you can choose to make a small donation to help me keep writing. The choice is entirely yours.

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