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| Face the facts, Labour: you’ll need help to oust the Tories | Face the facts, Labour: you’ll need help to oust the Tories |
| (about 9 hours later) | |
| For more than a century of its history, an unanswered question has faced the Labour party. That same question will still apply tomorrow, no matter who is elected party leader. It will apply next week, next month, next year, and the year after, and it will continue to apply unless and until Labour can finally answer it better than it has managed to do in the past. The question is this: why is the British left so unsuccessful? | For more than a century of its history, an unanswered question has faced the Labour party. That same question will still apply tomorrow, no matter who is elected party leader. It will apply next week, next month, next year, and the year after, and it will continue to apply unless and until Labour can finally answer it better than it has managed to do in the past. The question is this: why is the British left so unsuccessful? |
| Much breath and ink has been expended on trying to find an answer, not least in the four months of the contest to succeed Ed Miliband. All too often, however, the answers have been far too limited in imagination. That’s because, whether they come from the Labour left, the Labour right or the Labour somewhere in between, they all share the assumption that only the Labour party can provide the true solution to the left’s problem. And that simply isn’t true. | Much breath and ink has been expended on trying to find an answer, not least in the four months of the contest to succeed Ed Miliband. All too often, however, the answers have been far too limited in imagination. That’s because, whether they come from the Labour left, the Labour right or the Labour somewhere in between, they all share the assumption that only the Labour party can provide the true solution to the left’s problem. And that simply isn’t true. |
| Related: Labour leadership race: 15 key moments of a dramatic campaign – interactive | Related: Labour leadership race: 15 key moments of a dramatic campaign – interactive |
| Anyone who knows anything about the history of this newspaper will know that this is not exactly a new error. It is more than a century since the Manchester Guardian’s longest serving editor, CP Scott, wrote of Labour and the Liberals as “two divisions of the party of progress” and warned against the possibility that “while Liberalism and Labour are snapping and snarling away at each other the Conservative dog may run away with the bone”. Labour and the Liberals have metamorphosed many times and in many ways since Scott wrote that in 1912, while other traditions have emerged too. Yet Scott’s warnings still apply in changed times. | Anyone who knows anything about the history of this newspaper will know that this is not exactly a new error. It is more than a century since the Manchester Guardian’s longest serving editor, CP Scott, wrote of Labour and the Liberals as “two divisions of the party of progress” and warned against the possibility that “while Liberalism and Labour are snapping and snarling away at each other the Conservative dog may run away with the bone”. Labour and the Liberals have metamorphosed many times and in many ways since Scott wrote that in 1912, while other traditions have emerged too. Yet Scott’s warnings still apply in changed times. |
| This is not to say that the face which the Labour party offers to the British electorate is an unimportant question. Labour has been confronted with that truth in the 2010 general election, which it expected to win but didn’t, and again in the 2015 election, where it made the same mistake, only in an even worse manner than before. And it will certainly discover the same thing a third time in 2020 unless it behaves very differently than it looks like doing in the wake of this summer’s contest. | This is not to say that the face which the Labour party offers to the British electorate is an unimportant question. Labour has been confronted with that truth in the 2010 general election, which it expected to win but didn’t, and again in the 2015 election, where it made the same mistake, only in an even worse manner than before. And it will certainly discover the same thing a third time in 2020 unless it behaves very differently than it looks like doing in the wake of this summer’s contest. |
| But the question that really matters, as David Marquand put it in his still important 1991 book The Progressive Dilemma, is not in the end about the Labour party alone. To paraphrase Marquand, the issue is how to assemble a coalition of political forces that is capable of offering a convincing radical alternative to the right while at the same time appealing to non-radical interests and opinions. In the quarter of a century since Marquand posed that question, there have been many innovative attempts to answer it. Today, in 2015, the question confronts Labour more starkly than ever, not least because the Conservatives seem far more adept and interested at answering the centre-right versions of the same questions. | But the question that really matters, as David Marquand put it in his still important 1991 book The Progressive Dilemma, is not in the end about the Labour party alone. To paraphrase Marquand, the issue is how to assemble a coalition of political forces that is capable of offering a convincing radical alternative to the right while at the same time appealing to non-radical interests and opinions. In the quarter of a century since Marquand posed that question, there have been many innovative attempts to answer it. Today, in 2015, the question confronts Labour more starkly than ever, not least because the Conservatives seem far more adept and interested at answering the centre-right versions of the same questions. |
| Two pieces of research this week have underscored why this is so. In the first, soberly entitled Can Labour Win?, Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice argue that the Miliband strategy of cementing an alliance between the 2010 Labour electorate and disgruntled former Liberal Democrats was “glaringly inadequate” to the task, not least because it failed to understand both parts of the putative alliance. It took the Labour part for granted, and based its view of the Liberal Democrat part on a “leftwing” caricature. As a result it had nothing to say to Labour voters who had turned to the centre, and to the Conservatives. And it still doesn’t. | Two pieces of research this week have underscored why this is so. In the first, soberly entitled Can Labour Win?, Patrick Diamond and Giles Radice argue that the Miliband strategy of cementing an alliance between the 2010 Labour electorate and disgruntled former Liberal Democrats was “glaringly inadequate” to the task, not least because it failed to understand both parts of the putative alliance. It took the Labour part for granted, and based its view of the Liberal Democrat part on a “leftwing” caricature. As a result it had nothing to say to Labour voters who had turned to the centre, and to the Conservatives. And it still doesn’t. |
| Related: To survive, Labour must pick a strong leader who wants to be prime minister | Michael Ashcroft | Related: To survive, Labour must pick a strong leader who wants to be prime minister | Michael Ashcroft |
| Lord Ashcroft’s new study, which rejoices in the Maoist-sounding title Project Red Dawn, pushes this argument even further. After 2010, Labour believed that only poor communications had robbed the party of victory. They expected swing voters would see the error of their ways and reject the coalition. Instead, in 2015 Labour lost even more heavily than in 2010, with swing voters staying loyal to the Tories and even Labour voters showing little enthusiasm for the party. The question for the new Labour leader, says Ashcroft, is not just how the party can start to win again, but whether Labour as we know it will survive. | Lord Ashcroft’s new study, which rejoices in the Maoist-sounding title Project Red Dawn, pushes this argument even further. After 2010, Labour believed that only poor communications had robbed the party of victory. They expected swing voters would see the error of their ways and reject the coalition. Instead, in 2015 Labour lost even more heavily than in 2010, with swing voters staying loyal to the Tories and even Labour voters showing little enthusiasm for the party. The question for the new Labour leader, says Ashcroft, is not just how the party can start to win again, but whether Labour as we know it will survive. |
| A new leader can change a party but he or she cannot change the realities the party faces. Labour is slipping below 30% in public support, as other western social democratic parties are doing. It has little support in the Midlands and the south of England outside the cities. It faces another body blow in Scotland in 2016. Ashcroft’s polling shows that fewer than half of its own loyalists think Labour would provide the most competent government for Britain. These same loyalists are evenly divided between whether Labour’s priority should be to win elections or have the right principles. The next Labour leader cannot ignore these facts and hope to win, or even hope to dominate a putative anti-Conservative alliance of parties. | A new leader can change a party but he or she cannot change the realities the party faces. Labour is slipping below 30% in public support, as other western social democratic parties are doing. It has little support in the Midlands and the south of England outside the cities. It faces another body blow in Scotland in 2016. Ashcroft’s polling shows that fewer than half of its own loyalists think Labour would provide the most competent government for Britain. These same loyalists are evenly divided between whether Labour’s priority should be to win elections or have the right principles. The next Labour leader cannot ignore these facts and hope to win, or even hope to dominate a putative anti-Conservative alliance of parties. |
| Today, just as in the past, the progressive dilemma of how to govern effectively without the support of other traditions has two dimensions which cannot be disentangled from each other. The first is whether there is in fact a set of modern centre-left values and a programme around which a majority of the electorate can be sustained. The second is whether that majority can be achieved and sustained without cooperation between a number of different parties and their electorates. | Today, just as in the past, the progressive dilemma of how to govern effectively without the support of other traditions has two dimensions which cannot be disentangled from each other. The first is whether there is in fact a set of modern centre-left values and a programme around which a majority of the electorate can be sustained. The second is whether that majority can be achieved and sustained without cooperation between a number of different parties and their electorates. |
| Related: Labour leadership: all eyes on Jeremy Corbyn as voting ends | Related: Labour leadership: all eyes on Jeremy Corbyn as voting ends |
| This is a task to which the Labour party, particularly the left of the Labour party, may actually be peculiarly unsuited. This is partly because of Labour’s enduring belief in the efficacy of the central state, and partly because of Labour’s combination of blindness and disdain towards traditions other than its own. But above all, as Marquand said in 1991, it is because Labour struggles to shake off the view – for which there is little or no recent historical evidence – that a single hegemonic party of the left offers the only way to achieve progressive historical change. | This is a task to which the Labour party, particularly the left of the Labour party, may actually be peculiarly unsuited. This is partly because of Labour’s enduring belief in the efficacy of the central state, and partly because of Labour’s combination of blindness and disdain towards traditions other than its own. But above all, as Marquand said in 1991, it is because Labour struggles to shake off the view – for which there is little or no recent historical evidence – that a single hegemonic party of the left offers the only way to achieve progressive historical change. |
| In that sense, and in spite of the other obvious differences, a Corbyn-led Labour party would have important things in common with a Blair or Brown-led Labour party. While Blair and Brown made it hard for the different progressive traditions to cooperate because of overweening statism and contempt for civil liberty, a Corbyn party would make such connections more difficult because of its leftwing sectarianism and its entrenched labourism. All the while, the dangers of the drift downwards below 30% remain. | |
| Either way, until Labour learns to think beyond its own traditions and its own past, there is only one dog that will continue to run off with the bone. | Either way, until Labour learns to think beyond its own traditions and its own past, there is only one dog that will continue to run off with the bone. |
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