Clive Lewis MP
@labourlewis.bsky.social1. For those attempting to make sense of Trump’s victory and the rise of the far-right across Europe - look no further than the PMs statement below.
Whether you like it or not, the far-right has a set of common narratives. We can probably all recite them…
2. Something like, ‘the reason you’re in an overpriced, damp rental; your gran lives in squalor; your job is low paid/insecure &your public services crumbling - is because elites declared war on workers, favoured immigrants & made your life more expensive with their ‘green crap
3. ‘Vote for us and we will deport the immigrants, stop the elites, cut the green crap & declare war on woke, Britain will be great again.’
4. This is a story. It has ‘beginning, middle & end or rather it sets the scene, explains why we are where we are and offers a solution. In other words it has goodies, baddies and happy ending.
5.Labour’s story, just like the US Democrats, doesn’t make narrative sense.
Rather than explain how 40 years of atomising, neoliberal plunder; the selling-off of & destruction of our public services; the undermining or our democracy, the hollowing out and selling off of our natural resources…
6. …at the hands of companies like Blackrock and other price-gouging corporations, billionaires & financial institutions, has led us here.
7. Instead we refuse to give a credible explanation for how we got here other than ‘it was Tory chaos’. Problem is when the political & economic permacrisis continues, that won’t be a viable explanation.
8. By refusing to identify who the culprits for this state of affairs is, we fail to make a convincing narrative story that explaims our predicament. Instead we become the defenders of the very elites/
- the business as usual brigade - that the right claim we are
9. Even though the far-right themselves are a core part of the very establishment that championed these policies.
10. Therefore we either develop a story as the agents of progressive change, identifying those responsible and pledging to fix it, or we make way for the inevitability of a far-right victory, just like in the US.