Yeah, I agree with a lot of that of course.
I was looking at election forecasts the other day and noticed that the Lib Dems are predicted to go from 12% of the popular vote to 8%. Which would take them from 8 seats to 50. Did a double take at that. Then realised that, of course, they'd be going from second to first in a lot of Tory seats. It's a patently insane system.
I've never voted for the party that won my constituency. So my vote has never counted for anything.
I'll disagree on one thing - I agree with everything you said about the media but I think Brexit (and Trump in the US) are examples of (neolib) capital *not* getting its way. Part of what both of those things were was a 'fuck you' to the establishment from people who feel alienated from it.
There's a bit of a battle within capital between global financial capital, as represented by neoliberalism, the side that's in almost complete control of the media, and 'provincial capital' as represented by Trump, Brexit and the populist right in general.
I think we've got a similar problem brewing on the left. In abandoning and alienating the 'traditional' working class, we've left the door wide open for a socially conservative left populism, which we're seeing in various places across Europe and the beginnings of here with Galloway's Workers Party. I'm not expecting the Workers Party to do very well, *yet*, but it represents something the left *really* needs to address before it takes off.
But we'd need the unions, and Labour has them, and Labour seems to be irredeemably neoliberal.
I'd love to see something like the Populist Movement the US had in the first few decades of the 20th century, which was a properly left populism that was very broad and inclusive but focussed and coherent in its demands. Material conditions seem right for it. But we're all so atomised now. We experience ourselves as consumers rather than workers and that doesn't really provide a site of organisation.
I'm in this ambivalent state of pessimism + hope.
But yeah, absolutely agree that PR would be a good start.
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