I keep thinking about the Newport Uprising.
I didn’t know anything about the Chartist movement and the fight for universal male suffrage until I moved to Newport, South Wales, as a baby-faced eighteen-year-old back in 2010. Back then, the town centre didn’t have much going for it — and neither did we — but I think we all loved that town for its quirks and community and its bloody-minded refusal to forget. The Westgate Hotel might have been turned into a string of pound and vape shops, but the rebellious friends we made in the local art scene always reminded us that a dozen or so men died there fighting for the right to vote.
In my second year of university, bathing in a mixture of Oneohtrix Point Never’s salvagepunk constructions and the Caretaker’s hauntological traps, we’d make temporary sculptures in search of a psychedelia that kept the grey world outside at bay. Eventually, we would stumble outside, going on walks around town with cameras in hand. We were trainee photographers, after all, but mostly just poor students looking for some way to pass some slow drag of time. There, we found the Chartist mural in a tunnel that led out of John Frost Square. It was an enormous work of art — a true monument to something so momentous. It didn’t glisten like our collection of disco lights and crystals; it smoldered. The clouded stains of time and pollution didn’t make it look sad, however, but battle-worn.
The mural brought pride to everyone I knew, especially those who’d moved to this former polytechnic town to do an art degree and generally weren’t from the sorts of backgrounds where that choice was at all easy or without risk. Art and politics combined there to remind us of what was fought for and how vital it was to continue to represent the memories of movements past and present for all in the future to see.
After university fees were trebled by the coalition government, and my first ballot cast in a general election was met with a sense of dejection and betrayal, we all began to optimistically see ourselves reflected in that mural, as we were bussed to London to march on parliament. We became the penultimate year to pay £3000 a year for our university education, and we were all aware of how that decision, if made a few years earlier, might have changed to come to university in the first place. It’s not like we ever expected to escape the debt of £9000 for 3 years of education, but £27,000 was enough to make us pause. Debt was something I felt so afraid of. I still am. Would it be worth it? Probably not. But how long before that figure was as normalised as the one we were paying? It was free once…
We knew the importance of access and choice. To see that image of working men fighting for representation, rendered in mosaic by Kenneth Budd in 1978, over a century on from the moment it commemorated, and then see the photos we took of ourselves, made history open up for us, and we joined a current that swept from then to now and onwards. The stakes may not have been as high in 2010-11 as they were in 1839, but we were nonetheless fighting for even more choice in how to direct the course of our own lives regardless. Our refusal to be dissuaded by austerity was important. The mural reminded us why.
They knocked it down to build a shopping centre a few years later…
I hate my electoral ambivalence at the moment. The 2024 general election is just over three weeks away and I feel no passion for any party. I think about waking up on the morning of July 5th, fully expecting the first Labour government since 2005, but even after 14 years of Tory rule, I anticipate that I will take no solace in a Labour victory.
I think back to the three general elections since my first — 2015, 2017, 2019 — and remember the waves of dejection felt then. This time things feel worse. For whatever reason, it is still the election in 2015 that stings the most. There was no Jeremy Corbyn then, and Ed Miliband had run a shoddy and easily memeified campaign, but walking into work at Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff that year, I remember the disappointment being at its most palpable. To say there was a dark cloud over everyone sounds like a cliché, but it is true. I have been to cheerier funerals. A few months into my first entry-level arts job, I felt the despair of those more settled than I was and felt no hope for my own future, or anyone else’s. What little hope we held onto was dashed. I am quite devoid of hope at the moment.
A few months prior to the 2015 election, we had torn down an installation in the main café area, installed temporarily as part of an exhibition for an international art prize — wall-to-ceiling billboard prints of Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, with added Hitler moustache and the words “i KiLLED THE BRiTiSH WORKiNG CLASS”. A provocative choice, but an apt amalgamation of postmodern cultural references that reflected the chaotic rage of leftist politics. It also later felt like a horrible foreshadowing. We had a decade of twisted and misremembered Thatcher drag to look forward to from there on out.
A miniscule graffito was added to the toilets in the Chapter Art Centre a few months after the 2015 election, channelling post-punk discontent and twisting it into apathetic disintegration. It used to be that anger was an energy. Is our fury a new structure of feeling, a pooling affect to use for the construction to build a wider movement? Or is it the force of our frustrations that breaks everything down? Energy or entropy? What’s the difference?
The further disappointments that entropically followed were somewhat less affecting than the first one in 2015, at least in my memory. It is the initial blow that hit hardest, though what came later was far more disastrous. The left had tacitly hitched its collective wagon to an uninspiring candidate if only to curtail a twenty-first-century Tory party to a single shared term in office. The Lib Dem-Tory alliance was awful, but Tory dominance was worse. Unfortunately, that’s what we got, and the pain of that loss prepared us for the many more losses to follow.
Brexit was devastating too, of course, landing another hard blow shortly after the first, but then our dejection hardened into apathy. Yes, I wished Corbyn had won in 2017 and 2019, but his losses were just two more amongst a litany. We had already steeled ourselves for failures that felt increasingly inevitable, and today we continue to. I take no stubborn pride in the melancholy. It is just tellingly familiar.
2024 is not 2015. Keir Starmer is so much worse than Ed Miliband ever was. Indeed, Starmer is not uninspiring by dint of his general buffoonery, as if he were only insufficiently media-trained. Starmer has lied and misled his way to power through a blatant process of consciousness-deflation. I think this is notable. It is not simply that Starmer is a disappointment who has failed to live up to our expectations; he has actively dismantled those expectations of his own accord, purposefully alienating the left-wing of the Labour Party who had been convinced to rally around him in his bid for party leadership. He has repeatedly informed the left that he does not want to represent them, and now they in turn have declared in droves that they will not vote for him again.
But where does that leave us? I think, some days, that maybe I won’t vote at all. But then I think of the Chartists…
Maybe I will vote Green or for an independent instead — albeit unaware of what these prospective and presently unknown local candidates really stand for. Again, I think of the Chartists…
It is wrong to waste your vote, to squander a right that others fought for — that sentiment has been firmly instilled in me at this point.
But what happened after the Chartists won the vote? First, King William IV died, and parliament was dissolved along with him. The general election of 1837 saw the Whigs win by a narrow margin, and although they continued to be the progressive wing of parliament, they were not radical enough. First, they changed their name to the Liberal Party, then found a terse alliance with the Social Democrat Party, before their tandem stagnation over the next century led to coagulation of what is today the much-parodied Liberal Democrat Party.
All of these developments can generously be viewed as aftershocks of the Chartist movement. Though much was gained, the working class did not passively accept the system they now had access to, and sought radical changes from within. Yes, it was necessary to first win the vote, but then another fight began: the fight for proper representation; the fight for something worth voting for.
The history of the modern Labour movement is the history of this secondary struggle. In light of this, today’s collective apathy is regrettable, but if thousands reject their right to vote on July 4th, it will not be because they have squandered what was once fought for. It is the Labour Party that has squandered all that came next. It has failed to give working people something — preferably a future — to believe in. That is more of a travesty than any individual’s decision to stay home on election day.
Perhaps it is time for the Labour Party to go the way of the Whigs before them. There is a void where the left should be, but no entity yet stable enough to fill it. What would a viable opposition to the parties of capitalist realism look like in the twenty-first century?