This post was first given as a speech to members of Oxfordshire Compass by Compass Director, Neal Lawson on 12th April 2025.

Winning office is never enough, we have to win power – and we have to do it when we live in turbulent and chaotic times. The madness of Trump, the horror of war, the  uncertainty of the economy and the chaos of climate; now if only there was a simple, handheld device that could help us navigate how to get us from here to a good society. Something that consistently pointed in the right direction?

To help us today I’m going to refer to two Compass publications – After the Riots, and Thin Ice.

I was pretty nervous when I published After the Riots because it’s easy to lay the blame at the feet of others: the Tories for under-investment, Farage and Tommy Robinson and the rest the stoking lies, fake news and hate.

Now all those things are true. It’s much harder to look at ourselves and work through what we got wrong.

The truth is simple – happy people in happy places don’t riot and aren’t racist.

If the progressive gamble is that given enough support, love and care then most people will do the right thing – then surely the opposite is the case.

Riots are what happens after decades of the deindustrialization – when dignity and pride in work and place are replaced by humiliating bullshit jobs or incapacity benefit.

Riots are what happens when you’re once proud and vibrant high street is simply shut down and boarded up.

Riots are what happens after waves of hostile change – first austerity, then Brexit, then COVID and now at the very least austerity-lite. Hit people are already struggling and only just hanging on.

Riots are what happens when the unelected, unaccountable Bank of England and the Office of Budget Responsibility decide how much money disabled people get – when politics is done to us by technocrats.

Riots are what happens when democracy doesn’t work, when your vote is taken for granted in the belief that you have nowhere else to go. When no one listens to you and anyway your vote never counts, when the state is remote and cold and everything works for the rich and powerful, not you.

Finally, riots are what happen not just when people are economically left behind – but when emotionally and culturally they are othered. When we look down on them, sneer at them and think they are mad for voting for Brexit when it was the only emergency button at hand to say, ‘not only have I been left behind the world is changing too quickly around me – my streets, the people, the culture’.  It’s not racist to want preserve aspects of your culture, community and life – we should empathise more and condemn less.

Yes, there are racists and there are thugs and we have to deal with them. But the majority of the public now backing Reform are not racist. They are lost, frustrated, and resentful and they have every right to be.

As the days warm up and get longer the riots will happen again – not least because Labour promised change and all we are getting it more of the same. If the Tories had cut benefits to the disabled then at least we could vent our fury against them. When Labour does it we just sink into despair.

All of this begs big and difficult questions for us about nation and patriotism, about immigration and the pace of cultural change, about how we face the future in the past, what we modernise and what we conserve, what we think about notions of class and how we find the resource to invest in jobs and communities, public services and places that enrich our social soil and not just degrade it. How do we understand the causes of extremism without condoning them? How do we regulate social media?  All this and more we have to work our way through.

It demands a politics and spaces that are tolerant and curious and people who are willing to say ‘I don’t know, I’m not sure’, and want to negotiate a better future rather than impose it. Welcome to Compass.

Turning quickly and finally to Thin Ice. Labour of course won big in July [2024] but the victory, while wide, was incredibly shallow.  Much to the frustration of Compass at the time, it was an election that was solely about kicking the Tories out: anyone was better than them. Few wanted to think about what would happen next. There’s always a price to be paid and now we’re paying it. There are no shortcuts in life or politics. We have to dig deep.

We know the figures. Labour won 64% of the seats with only 34% of the vote. That isn’t democracy, that’s a farce. And in 131 seats Labour’s margin of victory was less than 5000 votes. A 6% swing would see Labour lose its majority at the next election. Reform came second in 98 constituencies, 89 of which are Labour. The Greens came second in 39 seats, primarily again against Labour. Turnout was below 60% and the scale of tactical voting unprecedented – with 4 in 10 Labour voters expressing weak or tactical support for the party.  In almost 100 seats the winning candidate got less than 35% of the vote share. Again, this isn’t a democracy, it’s a farce.

In 202 seats were what we call ‘regressive tragedies’: seats where the combined Tory and Reform vote was more than the progressive winner.  All Farage and whoever the Tory leader is have to do is the same deal that Keir Starmer and Ed Davey did – stand paper candidates but don’t compete and the electoral map is transformed. Already there is much talk and pressure to unite the right. They would sweep the board.

With no plan and no vision Labour has quickly stumbled in to survive the day mode. Their poll ratings have fallen dramatically by around 10%, while  Reform have gained more than 10%. Look at the polls now and you regularly see five parties polling in double digits. We have a multi-party system squeezed into democracy designed for only two. It will create electoral chaos. Fairly small shifts in votes from one party to another will result in huge swings in seats.

So where is the hope in all this? It lies in two places. Something Compass calls the ‘progressive majority’, and what we call growing ‘systems consciousness’ in civil society.

In every election since 1979 (bar 2015) there’s been a progressive voting majority in this country that far outstrips the Tory vote. Just think – Thatcherism would never have happened if progressives had been working together. In a table that compares internationally how left- or right-wing party support is, the UK scores almost 60% in terms of support for left-leaning parties, ahead of Canada, Ireland, France, Germany, Sweden Denmark, and Australia. We are a progressive country.

But this progressive majority is not given voice by our electoral system. Not just because it divides progressives but because, to win, Labour panders to the voices and demands of rich party donors, media moguls and a few swing voters. They win by promising not to change anything very much.

There is another way. In the face of Farage and fascism there has to be. It is to unite the progressive voice of this country to work together not against each other. It’s to say on key issues like proportional representation, taxes on wealth and the regulation of the media and social media that we agree on the fundamentals and will work and vote together to make change happen.

The power of Reform and Farage and worse is that they tell people what they already know – that our economic and democratic systems are broken. That society is in decline. We don’t fight Farage-ism by pandering to it, by being a tribute act to it, by boasting about how many people we have deported, regulations we slashed or benefits we have cut.  People who want the real thing will vote for the real thing. This is a race Labour can’t win and should never try to.

Their’s is an elite revolt from above. Our is a popular revolt from below  – a Popular Front that gives voice to the progressive majority of this country and also gives voice to those in civil society and communities who know the system is broken and policies on the environment, equality, civil liberties – you name it – can’t be squeezed through a system that is so orthodox, centralising and controlling. This is the progressive majority to be mobilised inside and outside of parliament.

Prime Minister Farage has stopped being a nightmare and now looks instead like a reality. Doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome is a sign of madness that will simply deliver high office to the lowest people. We’re not mad but we are determined. Determined to present a vision of a better society, determined to deliver the policies that will underpin it and the alliances that will make it happen.

We’re Compass and we know of the test of a true radical is to make hope possible, not despair convincing.  Our time is now – so let’s get on and build on the work here in Oxford and across the country to make our dream of a good society a living reality.