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The letter by Clive Lewis (above) and Caroline Lucas says: Support and votes were lent to Labour, but people can and will take their votes back if they dont see a new politics emerge. Photograph: Martin Pope for the Guardian

Jeremy Corbyn could have been prime minister with a landslide majority if every progressive vote had counted, according to Labours former defence spokesman Clive Lewis and the Green party co-leader, Caroline Lucas.

In a joint article for the Guardian, Lucas and Lewis, who is tipped for a return to Labours frontbench, write of their frustration that so many marginal seats went to the Conservatives in last weeks election because of wasted progressive votes.

They suggest that the result could have been radically different if Labour, the Greens and the Liberal Democrats could have agreed more electoral pacts.

If every progressive voter had placed their X tactically to defeat the Tories then Jeremy Corbyn would now be prime minister with a majority of over 100, Lewis and Lucas wrote.

They added: We felt a profound sense of frustration and dismay when Tories won by narrow margins in places such as St Ives, Richmond Park and Hastings it really could have been so different.

Analysis by Compass, the thinktank that has pushed for a progressive alliance, suggests that 62 seats could have been won from the Tories if progressives had voted for the best placed left-of-centre candidate in each one.

In the election, more than 30 Green candidates stood aside for another progressive candidate who they thought had a better chance of winning. The Liberal Democrats stood aside to allow Lucas herself to comfortably retake her Brighton Pavilion seat. The Greens had offered to stand aside for Labour candidates in 12 other seats in return for Labour standing down in the Isle of Wight, but the Labour leadership refused.

Lewis and Lucas said the short notice of the snap election meant that there was not time to form more pacts. But they suggest that the next election could be different. If we work together there is nothing progressives cant achieve, they write.

Lewis, who was talked about as a possible future Labour leader before Corbyns poll surge, claimed a year ago that the party faced an existential crisis if it failed to embrace progressive alliances with other parties. His article with Lucas stops short of that assessment. But in a message to the Labour leadership, the pair warn that progressives will desert the party if they dont see a change in the way politics is conducted.

Support and votes were lent to Labour, but people can and will take their votes back if they dont see a new politics emerge, Lewis and Lucas wrote.

They added: People in Britain have embraced a more plural and open politics and its critical that what happens next continues to build that vision and listen to their voices. To do otherwise would be both a massive disservice to democracy and to misunderstand that the Corbyn effect is just one wave in the tide of change.

The alternative, Lucas and Lewis argue, is the kind of regressive alliance being negotiated between the government and the Democratic Unionist party.

Labour alone does not have all the answers, Lewis and Lucas argue. They write: Yes, the Labour party has been the main beneficiary of the hunger for change in our country, but this doesnt mean Labour alone owns it. Politics is now so incredibly volatile and complex. If progressives want to win big, not just to peg the Tories back, or be in office for a short period to ameliorate the worst excesses of free-market economics, then we must build a permanent and vibrant progressive majority for change.

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Corbyn could have been PM with 'progressive' votes Lewis and Lucas - The Guardian

The focus of most American commentary on the results of the general election held in the UK last Thursday is likely to be on the potential instability of Theresa Mays now much weakened Conservative Government, and on any impact that instability will have on the UKs divorce negotiations with the European Union. Much ink is likely to be spent exploring the depth of the damage that the vote did to the political standing of the woman who called it, and to the longer-term ramifications of a minority government now holding onto power only via a working alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party. Come to think of it, it will not only be in the U.S., but in the UK too, that much journalistic ink will also be spent explaining to a hitherto largely ignorant electorate what exactly the DUP is, and what its MPs stand for. Since what they stand for includes climate-denial, opposition to same-sex marriage, and a robust rejection of abortion, the more the British electorate discover about the views of this tiny Ulster-based party, the less likely they are to enjoy their new information.

But the other side of the Tory failure to increase its majority in Parliament last Thursday was the success of the Labour Party its capacity, under its most radical leadership for at least a generation, to confound its critics, increase its vote, and add 30 seats to its parliamentary tally. Going into the election, all the political chatter in the UK was on how a Labour Party led by Jeremy Corbyn would likely be all but obliterated; so that conservative commentators, both there and here, are left struggling now with why that obliteration did not occur. The New York Times Bret Stephens still insists that Corbyn has done as much to shove the Labour Party to the nasty left as Donald Trump has shoved the Republican Party to the ugly right; and the more moderate Richard Reeves at Brookings seems to find comfort in the thought that there is a good chance that this is Corbyns high-water mark. But with Labour actually leading the Conservatives by 6 percentage points in the first major post-election opinion poll, we now need to get our head around the possibility that on the contrary, and as Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal said in Chicago this weekend, Corbyns achievement was part of a global trend towards recognizing that progressive politics are the answer to a lot of the inequality, and a lot of the issues that young people and working families across the globe are facing.

If that is right, and I am sure that it is, then there are important lessons to be gleaned here for American progressives coping with the world of Donald J. Trump. These four in particular:

First, that there is a coherent and credible progressive alternative to the austerity politics advocated by U.S. and UK conservatives, one that is ready available and waiting. That alternative is not difficult to find, and it is definitely not nasty. There is nothing nasty about a Labour Party program offering free childcare for all two-year-olds and 12 months maternity leaves for their mothers. There is nothing nasty about committing to the building of 100,000 new starter homes, more funding for the NHS, the abolition of university/college fees, and the provision of maintenance grants for the students going to those universities. There is nothing nasty about higher rates of income tax on the top 5 percent of income earners, and nothing particularly nasty or even radical in advocating what many progressives in the United States also advocate. These include taxation on financial speculation, help for small businesses, the strengthening of trade union and worker-rights, greater infrastructure spending, and a new state-funded national investment bank to help start-up companies and alleviate regional disparities in economic development. You can find many similar proposals in the Better Off Budget proposed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus. This is not nasty politics. It is simply sound, sensible, progressive common sense.

Second, that this progressive common sense is not difficult to sell. Jeremy Corbyns modesty, his faith in people and movements, and his unwillingness to tack to every short-term political wind, was supposed to be his greatest weakness; but it didnt turn out that way. On the contrary, as John Harris put it in The Guardian, Corbyn shows theres a new way of doing politics. Straight talking is back. And it is back, and selling well electorally Jeremy Corbyn didnt win, but he has rewritten all the rules, as Jonathan Freeland put it because out there, in the cities, towns and villages of the UK, there are literally thousands of good people hungry for an honest politics and for a fair society. Anyone lucky enough to be in Washington DC as part of the Womens March on January 21, protesting the Trump presidency and program, knows well enough that there are legions of equivalent people here in the United States as well. In the wake of the UK election, what is now crystal clear is that center-left politicians will not consolidate support among such wonderful people by tacking to the right. If American and British voters want conservative policies, there are plenty of Republicans and Tories to whom they can give their electoral support. What progressive parties have to service are the armies of American and British voters who dont want conservative policies, and who find austerity programs to be both profoundly unfair and socially divisive. The Corbyn-led partys pulling of so many former UKIP voters back into the Labour ranks points to this more general truth: design policies that meet peoples needs while promising to reform the institutions that have previously failed to meet those needs, and the route to power is open again.

The third thing that the increased vote for the Corbyn-led Labour Party reminds us here in the United States is that the future is on our side. The uniquely British part of this general election was the collapse of the UKIP vote the going back to the main parties of the bulk of the 4 million people who had voted in 2015 for the United Kingdom Independence Party (the one keenest to leave the European Union). Theresa May called this snap election, thinking she could pull all those people back to the Conservative Party now that the Brexit vote was safe for them, but she was wrong. At least two-thirds of all the young voters in this election those under 25 voted Labour; and indeed, came out to vote in huge numbers, often angry with themselves for not having done so in the Brexit referendum of a year ago. What Labour took last Thursday was a majority slice of young professionals, and of college/university educated folk the bulk of whom wanted the UK to remain in the EU. What the Conservatives took was a majority slice of an aging white working class, and of young workers without further/higher education qualifications all of whom wanted to leave the EU. As election follows election in the UK, the demographics work in the center-lefts favor just as they do in the United States as the young replace the old, and as the education level rises. Which is why in both places, it is the Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyns of this world who are now sitting astride the gateway to our collective future: galvanizing the young, harnessing the single-issue focused movements, and challenging centrist Democrats and Laborites to move out of the way.

Finally, this. Jeremy Corbyns Labour Party confounded its critics not just because it tapped into the youthful energy of first-time voters who were mad at Brexit. It also tapped into a new electorate because it spoke directly to both their immediate and their long-term needs. As international economic organizations as august as the IMF and OECED have been quietly conceding of late, there is no austerity route to long-term prosperity for all. The route to that prosperity requires greater equality, not greater inequality. It requires the full mobilization of existing skills not least the skills of increasingly well-educated women and so needs policies in place that make it easier to combine parenting with full-time employment. And it needs an open and welcoming civic culture, one prepared to harness and share the capacities and aspirations of people from all kinds of different backgrounds, ethnic groupings, religious affiliations and sexual orientations. It needs an end, that is, to nasty politics; and the only really nasty politics currently on show in the UK lie with the DUP and UKIP, and in the U.S. with the alt-right and their ultra-conservative Republican allies. Donald Trump is a huge own goal for the American Right. Brexit (and the calling of this snap general election) is proving similarly disastrous for the British Conservative Party. Buyers remorse is growing on both sides of the Atlantic, as conservative politicians, through their own ineptitude, do all they can to give parties of the center-left a route back to power again. It is a route that we now need to take.

Currently, therefore, the biggest problems on the center-left are not those of inadequate programs or poor-quality leaders. There are plenty of fine progressive politicians active in both countries, and there an emerging consensus amongst them about the kinds of policies that can both win them power and take the rest of us to a better, fairer and more prosperous place. All that is entirely to the good. The biggest problems now facing the Center-Left are effectively in-house: the continued presence within the U.S. Democratic Party and the UK Labour Party of both divisions and lack of confidence. Both parties are broad churches, with strong centrist elements in/around leadership roles in each and there are moments when it sometimes feels as though, for a certain kind of centrist, defeating their own progressive wing is more important than is defeating the party across the aisle. The speed with which certain UK centrists reached out to the media in the wake of the election results to emphasize over and again that Corbyn did not win, and that they could have won if only they were leading the party speaks volumes about the depth of division still afflicting the Anglo-American Center-Left. Let us hope that the confidence that U.S. progressives acquired as the Sanders campaign flourished, and that now Corbyn supporters inside the Labour Party suddenly possess, continues to expand. This is no time for progressives to moderate their ambitions. Rather, it is time for centrist Democrats and Blairite Labour MPs to leave leadership to others. For the biggest lesson of all, from the election in the UK last Thursday, is that to the brave go the spoils. It is time, therefore, to continue to be brave.

First posted, with full academic citations, at http://www.davidcoates.net

The arguments developed here are explored further in David Coates (editor), Reflections on the Future of the Left, to be published in September in the UK by Agenda Publishing and in the U.S. in November by Columbia University Press.

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American Lessons From A British Election Progressives, Take Heart! - HuffPost

Observer

New York Times Calls Sanders Progressives 'Militant' and 'Often Raucous' Observer The People's Summit took place in Chicago last weekend. Predictably, the establishment media is trying to attack the conference, which brought together hundreds of progressive and activist organizations. On June 11, The New York Times published an ... Progressives consider, or don't, life after Bernie SandersCNN Bernie Sanders urges progressives to seek more electoral winsReuters Bernie Sanders & The People's Summit Highlight Progressives' Future AgendaChicagoist Bustle -New York Times -The Resurgent -CNN all 125 news articles »

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New York Times Calls Sanders Progressives 'Militant' and 'Often Raucous' - Observer

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May. (Tiocfaidh r l 1916 / CC BY-ND 2.0)

What a relief it was to wake up Friday to news signaling that the hard-right march the West has been on for decades is being met with undeniable resistance.

Im talking about the United Kingdoms general election, of course, in which the Labour Party, under Jeremy Corbyns progressive leadership, made important gains.

Those who point out that the Tories are still the largest party in a hung Parliament are completely missing the point, as is conservative leader Theresa May, as she clings to power whichever way she can, seemingly deaf to the message her own people sent her during the snap election Thursday.

Seven or so weeks ago, after months of insisting she wouldnt call a snap election before the five-year term she won from her predecessor was up, May did just that. The unelected prime minister had surely been looking at polls that suggested she was a comfortable 20 points ahead of Corbyn, whod been maligned by media and even members of his own party since he was chosen as Labours leader in 2015. And so May decided to strengthen her mandate (read: do whatever she and her right-wing buddies damn well please) for the upcoming Brexit negotiations by asking the people of Britain to hand her more than the razor-thin majority she was working with in Parliament.

Brexit, my English partner Richard tells me, was never really about the E.U., regardless of what the pundits and politicians wanted everyone to believe. It was, as journalist Vincent Bevins wrote last year, the only tool handed to a rightfully disgruntled people to express their anger over a political system run by elites that has actively left them behind over the past several decades. Labour itself turned its back on the working classes under Tony Blairs leadership, becoming Conservative lite, as Richard likes to call it, until Corbyn stepped up and sent shock waves through the establishment.

Corbyn has been in Parliament since 1983, but hes been on the streets of the U.K. since before then, protesting injustices ranging from South African apartheid to the Iraq War and the National Health Services junior doctors salary cuts. Unlike many of his colleagues in power, hes been listening to the people he represents, a tendency that has kept him on the right side of history for decades. I have been at several events and rallies where Corbyn has spoken, and I can tell you that this is exactly the man that no one should have underestimated.

The establishments insistence on not taking the Labour leader seriously is his not-so-secret secret weapon. After winning two leadership contests while many in his own party repudiated him and the right-wing media continued to denounce him as a terrorist sympathizer, Corbyn understood what it took to win over voters as an underdog, and this snap election gave him another chance to prove it.

American anthropologist David Graeber has written convincingly about those who have feared Corbyns rise all along:

If the opposition to Jeremy Corbyn has been so fierce, and so bitter, it is because his existence as head of a major political party is an assault on the very notion that politics should be primarily about the personal qualities of politicians. Its an attempt to change the rules of the game, and those who object most violently to the Labour leadership are precisely those who would lose the most personal power were it to be successful: sitting politicians and political commentators.

The real concern among the Labour establishment [is the] fear [of] being made truly accountable to those they represent. [and] insofar as politics is a game of personalities, of scandals, foibles and acts of leadership, political journalists are not just the referees in a real sense they are the field on which the game is played. Democratisation would turn them into reporters once again, in much the same way as it would turn politicians into representatives.

As other politicians went through the motions of meaningless sound-bites, fearmongering and fundraising theyve become accustomed to in place of actually campaigning, Corbyn went back to doing what he arguably does best: He listened to the pain of the people. The Labour Party put out its most left-wing manifesto in more than 30 years, proposing a taxation plan that would quite literally take from the rich to give to the poortaxing corporations and the U.K.s highest earners to pay for social programs that include abolishing university tuition fees and boosting investment in the ailing NHS.

Mays party manifesto, on the other hand, proposed what became known as a dementia tax, a plan that would have the elderly who require home care pay for it posthumously with their property assets. But dont think about that, the prime minister seemed to say; we need to focus on Brexit, Brexit, Brexit. Thats what this election was called for, after all.

When tragedy hit in the form of attacks on Manchester and London in the weeks before Thursdays election, May promised to literally slash human rights in order to fight terrorism by increasing controls on the internet. Corbyn, on the other hand, focused on failed policies passed while May was home secretary: crippling cuts to the police budget that left 20,000 cops without a job and the connections between wars our government has supported or fought in other countries, such as Libya, and terrorism here at home. He refused to move right on foreign policy and immigration issues as his Labour predecessors had, finally putting to bed the tired argument that the left can only win elections by appealing to xenophobic sentiments in the center.

Regarding Mays awful comments on human rights, a Romanian friend told me, Why does this surprise you? Shes been infringing on our human rights for years now. Like myself, in order to stay in the U.K., this friend has been grappling with the increasingly draconian immigration laws May passed while home secretary. Hoops such as strict and arbitrary income requirements placed on British family membersbarriers Tories promised in their recent manifesto to raise higherhave literally torn families apart. This piece in the New Statesman lists just six examples of how xenophobic British immigration laws have kept partners apart and even parents from their children. With laws that emphasize income as a requirement for allowing people to bring their loved ones to the U.K., it seems only the wealthiest of Brits are allowed to fall in love and live with non-E.U. citizens in their own home country.

In the aftermath of the election, some conservatives tried to make sense of the vote, especially the high turnout among the young voters, by implying that the young were swayed by the idea of tuition fees being eliminated, again missing the larger issues at stake. Turns out my generation will not be blinded by numbers and bottom lines thrown at us like warning labels on a medicine called socialism. Many of my peers in the U.S. and U.K. pursued educations, only to subsequently drown in student debt and be thrown into job markets in crisis, where were consistently mistreated and underpaid. Socialist ideals promise health care, education, workers rights and yes, general protections of those pesky human rights to all members of society, regardless of class, race or gender. If anything is a recipe for mass appeal to young people struggling in a society that increasingly undermines these goals, it is this.

On Friday, I couldnt help but smile as I parsed the numbers showing that Corbyns appeal had increased the Labour vote by the largest percentage since 1945 and saw that even constituencies such as the wealthy Kensington district of London, and Canterbury, which has never in the history of British politics voted Labour, had turned Labours party color red on the voting map. The results were called a shock, but as someone whos been following the trajectory of Corbyns leadership, I was more smug than surprised. At those rallies where hed spoken, I had looked around the room and seen what the media and parliamentarians had willfully ignored: diversity. In attendance with Corbyn were people of all races, classes, ages and gender identifications. Like Bernie Sanders in the U.S., who supported Corbyn during his recent campaign, the Labour leader cut across these demographics to offer a message of hope for a better future.

Since the election Ive asked Richard the same question every morning as soon as I wake up: Has Theresa May resigned yet? The answer has been a disappointing no, but Im not worried, and other progressives shouldnt be, either. As journalist Richard Seymour points out, the election numbers were a result of a slow and steady movement that has been growing over the years, and that movement is far from finished. May seems willing to make a deal with the far-right devil that is Northern Irelands anti-gay, anti-womens rights, Democratic Unionist Party in order to hang on to whatever vestiges of power are left. Its rumored that Tories are pissed off at her, but are reluctant to depose her or trigger another general election out of fears that the so-called unelectable Jeremy Corbyn would be elected prime minister. Those fears are not unfounded: Polls are already giving the Labour Party a six-point lead, much, Im sure, to Mays dismay.

So take heart, progressives in the U.K. and abroad. This war against austerity and inequality, as Sanders framed it in his congratulatory message to Corbyn, is only beginning. There are many reasons to believe that the U.K. is moving left, ranging from the results in Kensington and Canterbury to the fact that Tories only received 2 percent more of the vote than Labour (and if you count other progressive parties share, such as the Scottish National Party, the Green Party and Wales Plaid Cymru, that number grows) to the fact that there are more women, people of color and LGBTQ members in Britains Parliament than ever before. There are also signs that the Tory alliance with the Democratic Unionist Party is fated to quickly burn out. As British history lessons have shown, perhaps this will allow an opportunity for Labour to take power.

It turns out that Corbyns integrity and his message of hope are hard to erase from peoples minds and spirits now that theyve been exposed to them, against all establishment odds. And that is as much a reason to celebrate as any.

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Take Heart, Progressives: Theresa May Is Putting a Nail in the Coffin of the UK Right Wing - Truthdig

The Sunday NEW YORKTIMEScarried - on Page One, just below the masthead - what I regard as an extremely significant article about people of faith, from the Left, getting involved, as never before since the 1960s, in our nation's politics. The catalyst, of course, is President Trump, who enjoyed overwhelming Christian evangelical support, despite his personal life.

The problem for the "Religious Left", if that's what we should call this movement: It's much, much more diverse than the Christian Right. To a point, diversity can be a strength, but it can also lead to hopeless divisions which can handicap a movement as a potent political force. Then, there's the question of whether the highly secularized Left can make common cause with those animated by spiritual concerns. [As this article notes, President Obama at least tried outreach to evangelicals; Hillary Clinton snubbed them, rejecting interview requests from evangelical media outlets.]

A powerful quotation from Reverend Jim Wallis, founder of the SOJOURNERS community and magazine: "The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence."

Also, surely religious liberals/progressives don't want to ape the Christian Right anyway. Younger voters are far more secular than older voters, and arguably, the Christian Right has helped drive them away. And younger people who DO believe, such as younger evangelical Christians, don't exactly fall into the orbit of the Reverend Franklin Graham, an ardent Trump supporter.

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This article touches on the continuing polarizing effect of the abortion issue. Voters who largely agree with progressives on social justice, climate change, etc., just can't vote for a party with an absolutist abortion rights position. Plus, many mainstream Democratic politicians - in part, to protect themselves from Republican attacks as being "too soft" on crime and national defense - are often indistinguishable from most Republicans in supporting capital punishment, robust military spending, etc.

This leads to a pointnotfully treated in this article: The fully consistent, pro-life, "seamless garment" position (anti-abortion, but with a generous social safety net; anti-capital punishment; anti-war, but not necessarily fully pacifist; pro-social justice; pro-environmental) is represented inneither major U.S. political party,nor in any third party. Neither a U.S. Supreme Court stacked with liberal/progressive justices,nora high court stacked with strict, conservative "constructionists", i.e., Antonin Scalia wannabes, will interpret the Constitution in this direction. Not a single Delaware statewide official,norany member of the Delaware General Assembly, has shown such an inclination. [I'm open to someone who could persuade me otherwise!] Doubtless, this reflects a hard cold assessment of what voters seem towant. But in the looming battle between religious rightists and religious liberals/progressives, a third group will remain consistently in flux in our politics, spiritually divided between Republicans and Democrats, frequently alienated from both, plus all the third parties. Political limbo on earth.

Again, from the SundayNewYorkTimes....

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Time for Religious Liberals/Progressives to break the Religious Right's Grip on the nation's "moral" agenda? - WDEL 1150AM (blog)