Thomas Hogg says people want connection - and that's the Left's biggest advantage.
It has been almost a decade of Tory rule. We have been through cuts to government services, major changes to the benefits system and an increase in the number of food banks.
And now, after all this time, the Conservative position has just got a lot stronger: triumphing with a majority of Blair-sized proportions. Everyone on the Left knows a change of direction is needed, but the question is, which one?
Labour’s policies in the 1970s led to Margaret Thatcher. Labour’s hard-left response led to more Thatcher rule. Tony Blair won with his Third Way, which was politically successful, but which, in carrying on Thatcher’s neo-liberal agenda, felt like an empty victory for many on the Left.
Ed Miliband moved the party back leftwards, with little success, until Corbyn went all the way to international pseudo-Marxism. That too didn’t work. So, where next?
Sometimes it takes an outsider to see where your greatest strengths lie. Labour could ease to a landslide, but first it must look again at its core mission – look again at why they believe what they do.
To me, the Left in Britain, at its core, has always been about one very simple and beautiful concept: You’ll never walk alone.
Lord knows how tough life can be, and having to fight alone is toughest of all. But with a strong community supporting you, though, you can get through almost anything. When I watched Peter Jackson’s They Shall Not Grow Old, it struck me how men reacted to the war’s end.
Traumatised and exhausted, they still said they had found a family in their band of brothers; that they had a place they were valued. When they re-joined civilian life, many felt unvalued and lonely. It was hard to find a job and hard to find their place in society. To me, this really brought home just how important having a strong community is to people’s welfare.
This basic human need for connection can be found in drug addicts too. While there are clearly strong elements of physical addiction to some drugs, the evidence is growing that there is a major social side too. The idea is this: the opposite of addiction is connection, and you can see this with the effectiveness of groups like Alcoholics Anonymous, who use the power of connection and community to overcome addiction.
This one mission: You’ll never walk alone – this is the Left’s greatest strength. There has been so much focus on political theory, that this prime directive has been forgotten.
It’s not about whether to shift Leftwards or Rightwards; it’s not about theories like Socialism; it’s about All for one and one for all. Behind all the theory, the Left must always reflect on how to bring people together, make sure no-one is left behind, and that we are a close-knit group.
When Thatcher closed the mines, whole communities lost their ecosystem and collapsed. Replacing these jobs, and the pride that went with them, with call centre jobs and similarly empty work, was no substitute, and Britain lost a part of her lifeblood.
Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the free market couldn’t help these communities, and neither would Tebbit’s blunt instruction to “get on your bike”. Individualism has always been the Left’s criticism of Thatcherism, and its why the Blair years felt so empty – a feeling crystalised by the Blair-era comedy show Monkey Dust.
To answer the calling of this main mission, the Left has been looking in the wrong place. Socialism will never bring communities together: a faceless, distant State bureaucracy, nationalisation of industries and increasing centralised control over people’s lives is no help at all to a community spirit.
Members of a community need to feel motivated to care for each other. They need to feel connection and empathy towards one another. This is how we can crush the loneliness and isolation epidemic in this country.
The State has a clear role to play in that, but this should be a supporting one, rather than an imposing one. This article isn’t the place for solutions, but they do lie in the realms of social science and should be explored. This is where political success lies for the Left.
On a national level, the sense of community feeling is known as patriotism. In the minds of many on the Left, patriotism is linked with the Right, with jingoism and nostalgia. But patriotism is actually one of the Left’s best friends, because it is all about shared identity and connection.
This identity can cross ethnic and class boundaries and is one of the most important tools in making sure people care about each other. As Thatcher’s individualism, global capitalism and migration have increased, so too has people’s sense of loneliness.
A great anecdote of the power of patriotism is Churchill’s escape from the Boers. There was a massive manhunt underway and a large reward for his re-capture. Along the way, Brits hid him and smuggled him across borders at great danger to themselves, and when he reached the British consulate in a neutral State, local British volunteers protected him, waiting to escort him to British territory.
If ever there was a tale of You’ll never walk alone, this was it. The main lesson of patriotism is simple: we should be there for one another, before all others, because life is tough and we are family.
Politics has become debased over the last several years, and that is the fault of us all. We prioritise short-term winning over the moral fabric of our nation.
So that is why I am writing this article: because although I am a Conservative, I know that Britain needs the Left.
When at its best, the Left brings empathy that the Right sometimes lacks. It speaks for the vulnerable and those on the breadline.
It is an important part of our society. Never has it been more important for the next leader of the Labour Party to show the Right how to be graceful, to shun ideology in favour of the prime directive, to stop the short-term point scoring, and bring our four nations and disparate communities together through a single British identity. For the Left to return to power, these are the steps it needs to take.
Thomas Hogg is a Conservative Party member, innovation professional and former social science academic, focusing on the Welfare State at Bristol University.
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.
14 Responses to “Patriotism and ‘you’ll never walk alone’ – a Tory member on what the Left must do to win again”
Alice Aforethought
@ John Pearson
“the Tories and the right-wing press will continue to lie, divide and rule”
DMAFF
This is a big part of why the left lost so cataclysmically: its attacks damage itself more than the target. If you accuse others of being liars, you have to be as pure as the driven snow yourself. If you’re not, and the left is not (“only the top 5% will pay more tax” my arse), then you come across as liar, and hypocrite, and introducer of insult into the public discourse.
Funnily enough, you cannot win elections by telling people who didn’t support you that you hate them and they’re stupid racist liars. In fact, when you’re being investigated for institutional anti-semitism, probably the less said about other people’s supposed racism the better.
Peter Billington
I do not accept their is a shared national identity and I do not accept the concept of ‘partiotism’. I have hardly anything in common with those who have just supported another Conservative government. Patriotism to me just signifies fairly mindless acceptance of British militarism and nationalism – that’s just not rational.
Luca Schiavoni
There’s only one huge problem. It depends what we mean by community and family here. If we develop an inclusive meaning of it, great. If it’s an exclusive one, I’d rather see the Labour party completing the shift and going towards a totally different type of voter.
To be clearer, I’m referring to Paul Mason’s analysis of the vote, which can be found here in case anyone missed it: https://www.paulmason.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/12/After-Corbynism-v1.2.pdf
Mason argues that Labour lost twice as many votes to progressive parties (Lib/Green/SNP) than it did to the Conservatives. At page 8, he says:
“In the end, we lost because part of the former industrial working class in the Midlands and the North has detached itself from the values that are now core to our party. That is the result of a decades long process, which began under Tony Blair, and was never going to be turned around in six weeks. But between April and June 2019 we also managed to alienate a part of the Remain voting skilled working class so badly over Brexit, that up to 1.5 million of them switched to the Libdems, Greens and SNP.
Let’s be frank: a minority of the working class abandoned Labour for authoritarian conservatism and nativism. It may be temporary, but it should not be a surprise – since this is a phenomenon being experienced by social democratic parties all over the world. Could they have been won over by Labour overtly supporting Brexit? I doubt it.
Because in towns like Leigh, where I campaigned, the main reason people want Brexit has always been to stem economic migration. We can go a long way to addressing the cultural insecurity of people whose lifestyles and industries have been destroyed. But when they complain there are “too many foreigners” in the queue at their GP surgery, we cannot meet the implicit demand behind it, which is for two queues.
Suppose we had, as the Lexiteers demanded, supported the Tory Brexit in the Commons? As the polling slump of June-October shows, it would have collapsed our support among what is now the core of our vote: the skilled and educated workforce, the BAME communities and the youth.
If we had adopted the second referendum position early, and enthusiastically, selected talented candidates, and spent the summer campaigning in the Midlandsand the North, maybe it might have been different.
If the neoliberal right of the party had been kicked out years ago, not allowed to depart spitting hatred and sowing confusion, that too might have helped. But the real deficit of Corbynism was its refusal to listen to, and provide answers to, the cultural insecurity being expressed by people in ex-industrial towns.
I am no latecomer to this view. I warned in May:
“To win back the ex-industrial towns … Labour needs to talk about more than economics. It needs to fight personal insecurity, crime, drugs, antisocial behaviour and organised crime as enthusiastically as it fights racism.
“It needs to sideline all voices who believe having a strong national security policy is somehow ‘imperialist’. It needs to forget scrapping Trident. The reluctance to speak this language this is, I believe, what left Labour over-reliant on triangulating to accommodate the pro-Brexit views of some voters in these towns.” (Guardian, 28 May 2019)
For writing this I was accused by Unite’s leaders of “pandering to social authoritarianism and foreign interventionism” and “speaking the language of the right”.
Remember that when you hear them blame the internationalist left for this defeat.”
Out of the long Mason quote, and into my short conclusion: Labour can stay very much left in economic terms, maybe avoiding promising too much in one go. I would have got out a slimmer manifesto. Strong on social care, with little else. Definitely none of the “free broadband” nonsense. That would have made its pledges more credible, and it wouldn’t have alienated the remainers that ended up voting Lib-Dem or even staying with the Tories. Because many remainers did just that.
Tom Sacold
Take advice from a Tory? You must be joking.
Julia Gibb
Not a good time for such an article!
I am Scottish NOT British. The sight of the Union Flag makes me sick. It is an Imperial symbol of colonisation. It is known in Scotland as the “Butchers Apron”. Have you every read “The Empire where the Sun never sets and the blood never dried?”.
The English cannot distinguish between the UF and the cross of St. George. To me it represents Right Wing Politics, aggression and intimidation.
The Gaelic language was destroyed. English History was taught in our schools until recently. After Culloden our people were slaughtered and banned from wearing tartan. Our sovereignty was taken by bribes and threats.
Does that give you slightly different view of our beloved Union? The Irish were treated the same way and the Empire treated them even worse.