Until the left gets over who people are and begins to engage with what they are saying it won’t deserve power
Labour has been smashed. The exit poll was definitely a surprise on Thursday night, but as an outcome of the last five years the popular vote difference of 36.9 per cent to 30.4 per cent looks about right.
Ed Miliband is of course right to go. I should declare an interest: he was fifth of five on my ballot paper in 2010, I’ve written that he looked un-prime ministerial throughout the intervening period, and he clearly wasn’t up to it. Indeed, for all the charges of arrogance and hubris levelled at serial winner Tony Blair, what now for an Ed Miliband who the electorate consistently (the polls on this at least seem to have been right) said was unelectable and who has proven a drag on his party’s vote?
This is harsh, but barring the two elections in the 1980s Labour has not done as bad as 232 seats in eighty years. While Ed Miliband has clearly taken an incredible level of unjust personal abuse from elements of the press during the long campaign, it would have been better if he had saved himself and his party this fate. Others with influence should have pressed this more firmly.
However, while it’s become a bit of a truism to say ‘the fault lies beyond the leadership,’ indeed it does. It also lies beyond the parliamentary Labour party.
I’m aware of the irony of using a blog piece to slam the commentariat but there is a big point that needs to be made here. As I wrote on this site pre-election in March, so much of the modern left combines pretty cringeworthy networking and engaging in ‘valuable conversations’ with the same fifteen members of the twitterati rather than actually taking a hard line on something substantial and sticking to your guns.’
This is true in the sense that shadow ministers too often retreated behind the comfort blanket of a positive write up from the Guardian and New Statesman, but actually the journalists peddling this stuff bear some of the blame too. The ‘opinion formers’ tweeting ‘notable intervention from X on Y’ after some nothing speech from Miliband or Balls need to think hard on what contribution they wish to make to our polity.
As I said last July, ‘you don’t win General Elections through Comment is Free.’ Left wing twitter has turned into LinkedIn.
The logical outcome of this myopic group-think is that saying the right form of nothing beats sticking your neck out on something. There are so many examples here, but three recent ones will do.
Firstly, Labour are pro-all women shortlists, women on banknotes, and increased female representation on FTSE 100 boards. Fine. But, for a party committed to helping the low paid, when it came to supporting the one in four women paid below the living wage Labour’s answer was in essence ‘we’ll see what we can do.’ Sorry, what?
The details of delivering a statutory living wage by 2020 would have been techy, demanded tactical/economic trade-offs elsewhere, been step by step over the parliament, and are not the type of thing you can fit on to a Whistles t-shirt. But if your wage is appreciably less than £10 an hour what does it matter if Jane Austen is on that tenner? In a sense, good for Nicola Sturgeon for undermining the politics of the pink van too.
Secondly, the size of the state has been a big talking point, with Osborne seeming to be about to take levels of government spending back to the 1930s (albeit rowing back from this at the budget). There is of course some symbolism here, but the corollary is that it just makes Labour look like they venerate the state above and beyond any assessment of its actual effectiveness. If a 35 per cent state could deliver increased prosperity and seemed to be working then that would surely be a good thing. What matters, as New Labour understood, is what works.
I’ve raised these questions before but what, ultimately, will Labour be about in the coming years? For a party historically of (income) tax and spend, what do you do when – due to an aging population – said receipts look set to dwindle? What happens to the state? Are Labour capable of conceding elements of Whitehall can be moribund? I’m not so sure.
And thirdly, in short, nobody cares where David Cameron went to school. Or Boris Johnson. Or George Osborne. Sure, it might raise the occasional groan, but nobody is going to vote based on that. Indeed, to keep banging on about it just looks odd. Attlee, Blair and Macmillan are just some in the long list of British political figures who went to public school. These were all broadly successful.
But to Labour’s identity politics view of the world, the fact that these men didn’t march out of the school gates at the age of eleven and refuse to return almost matters more than their actions in office. Until the left gets over who people are and begins to engage with what they are saying it won’t deserve power, much less win it.
As a slight ray of sunshine behind the clouds, there’s some good stuff in Chuka Umunna’s Guardian article. Unlike the usual powderpuff pieces we saw from many a Labour figure pre-May, it’s actually pretty challenging and to the point. Labour, he notes, ‘had too little to say to the majority of people in the middle’ and ‘as the party that believes in government’s ability to make people’s lives better, we should have been the ones championing…a pragmatic “what works” approach to get things done.’ Good.
Labour will need such thinking because this is a pretty cataclysmic moment. When the Tories win two elections they tend to go on and win three (1951-59) or four (1979-97). The next few months demand a coherent pro-business and pro-worker vision to emerge. It will require someone to win the leadership, ruthlessly impose that vision upon the party and then talk outwards to the electorate rather than win the backslaps of the commentariat.
If that means challenging existing shibboleths and sees the odd snarking from the far-left, bring it on. If it doesn’t, Boris might as well put the champagne on ice for 2020.
Richard Carr is a lecturer at the Labour History Research Unit, Anglia Ruskin University, and a contributing editor to Left Foot Forward. He wrote the book One Nation Britain last year.
To reach hundreds of thousands of new readers and to make the biggest impact we can in the next general election, we need to grow our donor base substantially.
That's why in 2024, we are seeking to generate 150 additional regular donors to support Left Foot Forward's work.
We still need another 124 people to donate to hit the target. You can help. Donate today.
155 Responses to “Comment: The myopic group-think of the left helped bring down Labour”
toneekay
‘Osbourne…to take levels of government spending back to the 1930s’. Hopefully not. The national debt in the 1930s was twice the level it is today as a proportion of GDP.
Duckman
The labour party is quickly becoming a fringe organisation that talks about “Social justice” where we must help the oppressed females, ethnic minorities e.c.t. e.c.t. ignoring economic inequality. The rise of the red aristocracy where political dynasties are made is just one part of my thesis that the Left is in decline in Brtiain and we have emerged as a Right wing country. R.I.P. Labour 1900-2015. Its a dark day for the left
Gerschwin
Is your thesis soft, strong and very long?
Gerschwin
Boris has already put the Bolly on ice, good lad, looking forward to it. Whilst you lot sit around picking your navels and discussing proletariat revolutions and bourgeoisie imperialism or whatever bollocks it is you talk about (see above for a perfect example) we’ll get on with running the country – smashing.
stevep
The Labour Party actually stands for the vast majority of people in the U.K. who don`t consider themselves as left, centre or right wing. The problem is getting them to realise it! It does not command great support in the printed media, most potential supporters don`t visit sites like this to help make their minds up, they rely on TV soundbites, personality politics and the biased opinions of the less reputable newspapers to make their minds up for them. Indeed, when questioned about politics most say they “can`t be bothered, anyway they`re all the same – aren`t they?” and then go back to discussing things they can be bothered about such as football, fashion, soap operas etc. Re-engaging and re-politicising such an indifferent populace is a huge task and should be the number one priority for the Labour party over the next few years.
New Labour almost got it right with the media, garnering accusations of good with spin but lacking in policy, merely re-hashing Thatcher -style capitalism with a bad cop, good cop sickly Tony Blair grin. meanwhile, in the real world of offices and factories (remember them?) despite the minimum wage, unless you were junior management and above, workers living standards fell. Today, after three and a half decades of capitalism, most workers in the U.K. are working harder for less money than they were ten years ago – if they can get full time work. This despite huge technological progress. Technology was supposed to free people ( good old Harold!), not funnel the proceeds into the hands of an increasingly few people. This doesn`t even seem to be up for debate any more.
The truth is, capitalism doesn`t work for the vast majority of people, it isn`t designed to. it is designed to enrich the elite and enslave the rest of us ( 800 people in the world are worth more than the rest of the world put together). The Labour Party need to end their flirtation with the notion that if they get into bed with capitalism they will garner favour with the elite and tribute will flow downwards from them. The elite are only interested in one thing, power. Thatcher understood this and that is why to secure real power the first step was to stifle and control the unions, the democratic voice and source of power for the ordinary working person. The rest followed.
Labour is not “smashed”, it just needs to regroup and reconsider what it stands for ( the clue is in the name), if it feels it doesn`t represent the vast majority of us anymore then it should be honest and say that and then drift around like sub-prime Lib Dems for decades luxuriating in back-patting at conferences and making vague references and promises towards improving the lot of us who aren`t Accountants , Doctors or Journalists.
However, if it feels that it does feel that the vast majority still count for something, then they should haul themselves out of the post-election sulk-tank, consider their finances, get wealthy supporters of socialism (Oh look, a dirty word – in such a nice journal as well!) to put their money where their mouth is within the context of creating a better society and put that money into a much better media presence on the internet, sales of newspapers are declining and their influence will wane. Then get the better society / better together society message across. It doesn`t have to be called socialism or any ism, Just a clarion call to the disenfranchised that individualism is fun but better fun can be had by being part of a community. A community that wants to have control over it`s destiny, whether in the neighbourhood, in the town/city, in the workplace, in or out of Europe, it`s place in the world. The message should be broadcast, shouted from rooftops, hundreds or thousands of weblogs started to discuss these issues. in short control would gradually be taken back from the mainstream media and real things affecting real people would be back on the agenda for discussion.
It may come as a bit of a shock at first that real discussion of real people`s lives and needs and aspirations are out in the open as opposed to the closely controlled very narrow media debate of today, but once out of the the can, the worms won`t want to go back in again. Once the population of the UK realise that there is a political party engaging in real debate about concerns we all share and can have a real say via blogs, journals etc. in shaping that party then we are on the way to re-politicising and re-enfranchising people. For most people, having endured the mainstream media demonisiation of anything remotely resembling socialism for the last three decades it will gradually dawn on them that they have been propagandised to accept a society alien to their aspirations.
If the media debate is won then it follows that support for the Labour party will increase. If the support exceeds the opposition then the Labour party will be elected. It really is that simple.