In the sixteenth of our video interview series #CanaryCandidates, we meet independent candidate Sean Halsall – standing against Labour’s Patrick Hurley
Sean Halsall is a councillor who is standing as an independent candidate in Southport in the general election. A former Labour Party member, he now says “it’s hard to justify why anyone would stay in” the party.
Sean Halsall: Starmer’s Labour will be “a midwife for fascism”
Explaining his discontent with Labour under Keir Starmer’s authoritarian leadership, Sean Halsall stressed that the leader “tore the soul out of the party” and that:
The Labour Party has definitely changed. It’s changed from sommat that’s meant to represent working people’s interests to sommat that is clearly there just for big corporations.
And he believes that the purge of committed left-wingers will have a negative impact on both the party and the country:
It is very much… back to briefcase Labour… And sadly, with that… the heart of the party’s gone…
They struggle for activists now. Because funnily enough, the people on the left who they spent years kicking out are the ones who did everything for them. We’re the people who care about getting things done and winning elections so we can actually deliver.
Cos it’s not good enough just to win elections. And that’s what I think a lot of people will find after this – that just winning power is not good enough if you’re not gonna use that to deliver transformative change.
And all Starmer will be doing is acting as a midwife for fascism in this country if he’s not careful. Because if we don’t deliver for working people, then unfortunately the far right will capitalise on that and use that as a way to mobilise people.
Despite Labour’s lurch to the right, however, he argued that:
There’s never been a time in this country, since the [Second World] War at least, when socialism’s been more relevant and more needed. And I think them messages now are gonna resonate with people better than before.
And that’s a key reason why he’s decided to stand as an independent.
To fight increasing authoritarianism, we need to increase democracy
One big promise Sean Halsall has for Southport is that there will be more democracy, not less, if he’s the town’s MP. He has been working with Assemble, which aims to bring people together in assemblies to decide their own priorities. As he explained:
It’s about getting communities together in spaces… to discuss what matters to them in their areas and come up with what their… top 5/top 6 problems are. And very much for me, it’s about me working with them to find a solution together…
It’s building community power… It will also start building that community cohesion again, and hopefully reverse a lot of the damage that Thatcher did with the ‘no such thing as society’ and breaking up of them communities. We can sort of get communities back together and working together and realising that we’re all actually pretty much the same, with the same problems, hopes and dreams…
But also, if elected [I’d] use them to direct me, rather than me directing them and sort of talking to them about what I’m doing, it’s listening to what they want me to do.
And when disagreements come up:
We can probably find some kind of workaround or happy medium where… we can all just get along. Because… grand scheme of things, when we’ve got a country where the economic model is absolutely crippling everyone… it’s keeping the lights on while we’ve got energy companies exploiting us all and supermarkets sort of price gouging…
These are the important things… There’s real power in communities and us doing things together rather than all writing emails and trying to address these things individually.
He has had “Reform bots on my social media going nuts about the assembly idea”. But he asks:
How can you be more mad about more democracy? I don’t understand how you can be upset. And it probably says exactly what Reform’s about to be honest – it’s less democracy and just have a corporation running the country.
“These spaces should be for everyone”
Sean Halsall doesn’t only have a commitment to democracy in politics, though. As a devoted trade unionist, he would also like to work towards greater democracy in the workplace. He told the Canary:
There’s massive power in people owning their own workplaces… Imagine how much happier you’re gonna be if you’ve got a say in your own destiny, if you can vote on how your company’s gonna act. How much stabler is your work gonna be if you’ve not got reckless people trying to make decisions trying to make money quickly?
If we’re all making these decisions, we’re probably not gonna do sommat that’s a fifty-fifty gamble – we might make loads of money but we might well be out of work next week. That’s not gonna happen. We’re probably much more likely to get policies like four-day working weeks, and proper sick leave, and proper maternity pay and paternity pay.
I think it would just be much more humane… place to work if we’re making the decisions. You’re probably not gonna see as much punitive nonsense from managers, trying to discipline people and stuff all the time… One of the massive benefits is you’re gonna have more resilient businesses. Businesses are gonna be less likely to fail if we’ve all got a vested interest in them succeeding.
Additionally, he thinks there needs to be a massive realignment of political engagement. Rather than allowing a small, privileged portion of society to continue dominating politics, increasing the involvement of ordinary people should be a priority. But unfortunately, he lamented, even he didn’t believe in the past that politics was for ordinary people:
When I got involved in politics, I got dragged to it kicking and screaming. I didn’t ever feel that this was a space for people like us – like, working-class people.
A key moment, however, was when he met MPs. At that point he realised “a lot of them shouldn’t be trusted with shoelaces”. That’s why he now insists:
These spaces should be for everyone. We shouldn’t allow just the people who’ve gone to Winchester and Eton and these places to represent us. They are not representative of the people of this country. It is nurses, care workers, child minders, people who work in hospitality, bus drivers – these are the people who actually represent the vast majority of this country’s interests.
So we should be not afraid to take these spaces and not ashamed to… fill them with our politics.
For more on Halsall’s comments see the full interview on our YouTube channel:
Watch and read all our #CanaryCandidates interviews here.
