In a system as limited as ours we need a full spectrum on the ballot ticket. The Tories need to be free market capitalists, the Liberals a centrally located liberal/social democratic representing small businesses etc, and Labour socialists/trade unionists representing the workers. Labour deciding they want the patch immediately to the right of the Liberals has broken the whole thing.
I blame Labour for breaking the whole thing as whilst the Tories have shifted right into the world of alt-right popularism and even Trumpian conspiracy theory they are still at the right/authoritarian end of the map where one would expect them. The Libs are in their box too, though Labour leapfrogging over it means they are now well to the left of Labour in many respects (human rights, civil liberties, democratic reform, anti-nationalism etc). Labour are just not where they need to be and that has tipped everything to the right. Their core job is to produce a coherent left of centre option on the ballot paper. That they don’t do it can’t be blamed on the other parties.
Again Scotland proves beyond any doubt that a well argued left of Labour argument can win, and win to the point of slaying the two headed beast of Westminster. Corbyn almost got there, but was wiped-out by such a spineless and evasive Brexit non-strategy that pleased no one. The rest of the manifesto had some traction.
My point is no one can blame the Tories or the Libs for being where they are. They are where one would expect bar the Tories moving rather further right to Trumpton. Labour are the ones in the wrong place, and by being in the wrong place there is no ‘left’ option on the ticket that can win in England. The Greens are better in every respect, but they can not beat a system designed to exclude them.
While I agree with much of what you say, I see Labour more as being pulled to the right by the massive gravitational pull of Liberal economics that have been in existence for three or four times as long as Labour. To pin the blame on Labour for the impact of liberal economics is a bit like blaming an asteroid for gravity. Yes, Labour has agency where an asteroid does not, and no one is more disillusioned than me that Labour has not stood by it’s core principles, but Labour is not
the problem.
The problem is the black hole that sucks all social good into itself and leaves behind just private profit and rampant individualism of which Trump and Johnson are inevitable consequences.
We cannot look to Labour to restore the balance. Labour got sucked to the other side of the balance as far back as Wilson’s prices and incomes policy, and finally lost their grip on the right side of the see-saw with Callaghan’s acceptance of all things Milton Friedman.
Any weight to the other side of the balance will have to come from a reframing of the economic debate. It is the language of tax and debt that sucks social provision out of the economy leaving only that rampant private individualism. We need to free government spending from the constraints of revenue, we need to change the language of deficit into the language of investment, and we need to change the idea of debt from a private asset into a public asset, and from a social cost into a public utility.
If we can change the language of debate, we might then be able to lend weight to a politics based on human rights. A politics in which human rights and protecting the planet are the number one purpose of economic activity. If we can honour the human right to a job and a home and decent health care, and better education, we will have a much better balanced, and more moral, economy.
So while I agree that everything has been tipped to the right, trying to balance it with more of the left is, I fear, doomed to failure without a total rethink of economics, a rethink that should appeal to Tory One Nationism, the Liberalism of The Greater Good, and For the Many Not the Few in equal measure, but not using the language of any, using a new language and a new understanding of what is needed to save the moral and political good and to leave us with a planet on which to enjoy it