Labour downs a deadly cocktail of fatalism, fury and fantasy
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Version 0 of 1. Shortly after Labour’s calamitous collision with the electorate in May, Andy Burnham found a message on his voicemail. It had been left by an old friend from the north, one of the most senior figures in the party, a veteran of its 13 years in office. The message urged Mr Burnham, then tipped the favourite to become the next Labour leader, to stay out of the race. The burden of the warning from his old friend was that he would face five years of remorseless grind in opposition and he ought to spare himself that misery because he was doomed to fail. The Labour veteran was convinced that the party was already destined to lose in 2020 as well. This is the baleful shadow over the Labour leadership contest and it helps to explain why the atmospherics in the party are becoming so ugly. On 7 May this year, did Labour lose not just one election, but two? Is the inheritance from Ed Miliband so dire that Labour is facing a further decade in opposition? The deep fear that it might be out of power for a generation is generating a cocktail of fury, fatalism and fantasy. The fury, a characteristic reaction of parties when they have just been rejected by the electorate, is being expressed in the poison of the exchanges. The fatalism explains why the contest has lurched from the soporific to the sulphuric. The so-called debate about Labour’s future has, with one or two honourable exceptions, failed to address any of the challenging questions about how to be a successful social democratic party in the early 21st century. Why bother taxing your head with things that are really difficult if, in the marrow of your soul, you think you are bound for another defeat anyway? The fantasy is manifest in Corbynmania. It was quite brave of YouGov to publish a poll about the contest when the pollsters are still wiping off the face-egg left by the general election. What really struck me was not the headline that the MP for Islington North is currently out in front. Most revealing was the detail about the attitudes towards power of Labour members. Asked to identify the four most essential attributes when selecting the next leader, 53% of those surveyed said they wanted someone who could provide an effective opposition. Which is, of course, desirable. Just 27% said that it was important for the next leader “to understand what it takes to win an election”. If this is anywhere near accurate, a big chunk of the Labour selectorate knows Mr Corbyn is a loser but wants to hand him the party anyway. Little wonder so many senior Labour figures are becoming profoundly alarmed that a significant proportion of their membership is shrinking from any notion of trying to be a party of power and retreating into the politics of the protest march. I can see the attraction of that. It is a lot easier than confronting the scale of the electoral mountain facing Labour. The 2015 result was Labour’s third worst vote share since 1918. It didn’t have the excuse (as it did in 2010) of having been in government for 13 years and through the most severe economic crisis since the Great Depression. It didn’t have the excuse (as it did in 1983) of standing on a suicidally extreme manifesto and a chunk of its moderate wing having split off to form the SDP. Miliband Labour was a distrusted opposition with an unconvincing leader contesting with an unloved Conservative party. Yet it wasn’t even close. Labour won two million fewer votes than a disliked Tory party that had presided over five years of austerity. While Labour stacked up some extra votes in seats that were safe, it went backwards in nearly all of the target English marginals. It is down to just one MP in Scotland. By the time of the next election, the Tories plan to have introduced boundary changes that will make the mountain even steeper. A timely analysis by the Smith Institute projects that Labour will have to win more than 100 seats to secure a parliamentary majority at the next election. This is not entirely impossible under good leadership in the right circumstances, but it is an understatement to say that it won’t be easy. Though 1983 was a mathematically more severe defeat, in some ways Labour’s predicament is worse today. At least then there was a growing consensus about what Labour had to do. Junk the voter-repellent policies. Stop entryism by extremists. Cease behaving like an ideological sect and start performing like a party fit for government. It took a long time to get from the crushing defeat of 1983 to the landslide victory in 1997, but under Neil Kinnock, John Smith and then Tony Blair there was a positive trajectory. This time is different, not least because we have now experienced Blairism. In 1997, it was the future; now it is the past. Many Labour people seem to have a very vivid memory of the flaws of New Labour while recalling few of its achievements. This is partly, as I outlined last week, because the membership drifted leftwards under an Ed Miliband leadership conducted on the basis that the party’s 13 years in office were essentially a terrible mistake. It is partly the fault of the Blairites for not being more vigorous or persuasive in defending their record. It is partly Mr Blair’s fault for not being a better custodian of his post prime ministerial reputation. Generational change comes into it. It is intriguing that the 66-year-old Mr Corbyn, by far the oldest candidate in the contest, seems to be drawing his most enthusiastic support from the young. My tentative explanation is this. Older generations were seared in the crucible of their party’s near-destruction at the hands of the Bennites and its serial defeats by Thatcherism. For them, the imperative was for Labour to become an electable alternative to the Tories. Things inevitably feel different to younger generations, for whom Margaret Thatcher and the Militant Tendency are history that they never lived. The young have been shaped in reaction to the experience of New Labour in power and the failure of Miliband Labour to unseat the Tories. Seen through older eyes, the Corbyn surge is a nightmarish revival of demons that almost murdered Labour as a party of government. To younger audiences, I can see why the Piped Piper of Islington can sound like a refreshingly idealistic change from the robotic mantras of besuited career politicians. A clearly substantial strand of Labour opinion has convinced itself that Ed Miliband didn’t lose the election because swing voters distrusted him with both the economy and the keys to Number 10. He lost the election because he was what the SNP said he was, a poor impersonator of the Tories. So the way to win next time is to ape the anti-austerity pose of the Nationalists (I call it a pose, because their record in office is rather different). Win back Scotland by heading left and gather up the Green vote on the way and – just like that! – you are in government without needing to start any conversations with Tory voters in marginal seats. It is a terrible delusion. That is not a road back to power; it is a cul-de-sac at the end of which lies the brick wall of defeat. Give back to Labour all the Scottish constituencies lost to the SNP and the Tories are still ahead by 60 seats. Incidentally, pinning a future electoral strategy on a Labour revival north of the Tweed makes the dicey assumption that Scotland is still part of the UK by the time of the next election. Turn every Green voter at the last election into a Labour voter and the Tories still win more seats. And that’s before you start subtracting the centrist voters who backed Labour in May with varying degrees of enthusiasm, but are likely to go elsewhere if the party moves to the left of Ed Miliband. The only plausible path back to power runs through taking seats held by the Tories and that entails winning over Tory voters. In the speech he made last week, Tony Blair said: “Twenty one years ago I became leader of the Labour party. A lot has happened since then. We discovered winning successively. And now we have rediscovered losing successively. Personally I prefer winning.” To many people that will sound insufferably smug. The idea that Labour should be in the business of appealing to and representing a broad coalition of voters will be especially hateful to those who think the former prime minister and anyone who sees anything to admire about 13 years in office are mouthpieces of the neoliberal finance capital conspiracy. The more serious will grasp that Labour won’t be a plausible candidate for office unless it has the correct response to the big questions that Mr Blair always posed to his party. Is Labour merely a protest march or does it still understand that your principles are of limited value if you never have the power to put them into practice? Does Labour want to simply denounce the Tories or has it some interest in beating them? Is it at all bothered about being competitive at the next election? At the moment, much of the party is behaving as if it isn’t even vaguely interested in becoming a government again. |