Jeremy Gilbert: Labour's Defeat & the Triumph of Johnsonism Open Democracy Jan 2020
Part 1: It was the Centrist Dads who Lost It
Before trying to examine the outcome of the 2019 general election, before any attempt to analyse the social complexities of the electorate that it reveals, it is
important to understand three things. The first is that the UK has always been a multi-party democracy: it is NOT, like the US, an actual two-party system. Unlike
other multi-party democracies it does not have a voting system that is designed to match the distribution of votes to the distribution of seats.
The second is that traditional social democratic parties have been in decline the world over. Almost everywhere where they were once strong, they have lost votes
in two directions: to the nationalist right among ageing, post-industrial communities; to parties of the green new left among younger urban and professional-class
voters. Indeed, arguably, from a long-term and genuinely international perspective, the real story of Corbynism may be that it managed to shore up and consolidate
the latter part of Labour’s coalition where so many equivalent parties have failed to do so, with fatal consequences: from Pasok in Greece to the French Socialist
Party (both of which saw support eventually collapse into single-figure percentages). By international standards, holding onto 32% of the vote is a pretty decent
result for a party like Labour in 2019.
The third factor is that despite all of those long-term and global circumstances, the 2019 election came only 30 months after Labour’s astonishing 2017 result, when
the party under Corbyn achieved the almost miraculous feat of remaking and enthusing almost all of its historic voting coalition, massively increasing its vote share
of just two years previously, and very nearly forcing Theresa May from office. There is every possibility that, without the most divisive issue of modern times (Brexit)
fatally splitting its electorate, Labour will be able to recompose that coalition much more quickly and easily than many commentators currently assume. But it might
not. And even if it can, it will face the same issue that kept Theresa May in Number 10 in Jun 2017 and delivered Johnson a landslide in 2019: a hopelessly
undemocratic electoral system.
This is the first of a six-part series of articles looking at Labour’s electoral defeat in December 2019, and what we can learn from it. In this first contribution, I will
consider the key question of what happened to Labour’s 2017 coalition of voters, that led to such an apparently catastrophic loss of votes and parliamentary seats
within 30 months.
I’m going to suggest that the evidence tells a different story from the one imprinted on many people’s minds already. It is undoubtedly true that Labour’s loss of
seats to the Conservatives in its post-industrial ‘heartlands’ was shocking and traumatic. But it is a myth that the largest bloc of votes that Labour lost was from
‘traditional working class’ voters who switched to the Tories. In fact there is some evidence that the single largest demographic switch away from Labour was
actually among middle-aged liberal voters, moving from Labour to the Greens and the Liberal Democrats.
First past the post punished Labour
The ‘first past the post’ electoral system dictates that parties only win MPs to the extent that they are able to win the mostvotes in specific, geographically-defined
constituencies. This system punishes savagely any party that cannot win such a plurality in any one place, or in many places, even if it has substantial support
spread throughout the country. It also punishes any party whose support is too heavily concentrated in particular places, even if that support is numerically equal to
or greater than that of its rivals. It therefore rewards the one party that is able to win pluralities in a large number of small towns and villages while being unpopular
in the major urban population centres: the Conservative Party. In effect, the UK electoral system gives far more weight to the votes of the inhabitants of the former
type of place – principally, white propertied pensioners – than it does to working-age people of any background, or to members of ethnic minorities, or to students
and young workers in particular. All of the latter groups tend to be more heavily concentrated in large towns and cities.
Because of this appalling anomaly, over 400 of the UK’s 650 parliamentary constituencies saw a majority of their voters vote Leave in the 2016 referendum on EU
membership. Over 400. Out of 650. The actual percentage split nationally was just 48/52 in favour of leave. Just let that sink in for a moment.
Labour was never going to be able to prevent the 2019 election being a re-run of the Brexit referendum. But in this case, it was a rerun according to a system that
was massively rigged in Leave’s favour. Conversely, literally 70% of Labour voters (and well over that proportion of Labour members) had voted Remain. Labour
was always going to have a problem fighting an election on those terms.
One might well ask, then, why the issue of the electoral system, and the evident need to reform it – if the entire country is not to be dictated to forever by white
propertied pensioners – was less in evidence during this election campaign than at any other in recent memory (which is saying something: it has never been a
major issue in any election campaign). This is probably a topic for another essay. Suffice to say, for now, that the ideological refusal of Labour’s Bennite left to
engage with this issue – despite the urging of such close political allies as Arthur Scargill – has been its greatest weakness since the early 1980s. It has finally paid
the price for that refusal, and we will all be paying it for many years to come. And yet, every other Labour leader before Corbyn has also pointedly refused to grasp
this nettle, in other words, has also refused to commit the party to proportional representation for the House of Commons. We can only hope that this long century
of idiocy ends now. But let’s try to analyse the result in a little more detail.
Which Voters Did Labour lose?
The December 2019 election result is the one that many of us expected in June 2017. It came as a surprise back then that so many of the Leave-Voting
constituencies of the North and the Midlands had mostly not fallen to the Conservative party: polls, and Teresa May’s strategists, had predicted they would.
The reasons why they might were always obvious. Labour’s vote had been declining steadily there since 1997, as the number of young workers in those regions
declined, as the number of propertied pensioners increased, no previous change of leadership having been able to reverse the trend. Corbynism had its social base
in the metropolitan regions, in an emergent culture shared by young urban workers and older professionals, characterised by social liberalism, cosmopolitanism and
an extremely-online lifestyle.
Anyone familiar with the post-industrial North knew that in many places this might well be a turn-off, for the older and more conservative sections of those
communities. Many of us who grew up in those places, especially in those areas with long socialist traditions, always believed that it would be possible to connect
the new working class of the cities with at least some sections of the older working class of the post-industrial regions, by showing them that we shared so many of
their interests and aspirations, so much of their anger and pain, so many of their losses and regrets. But we knew that it would take a particular kind of leadership
and oratory to bridge the gap, articulating that shared narrative and vision. And many of us always doubted that Jeremy Corbyn – as much as we loved him
personally – would be able to provide them. It was always hard to imagine him being able to speak to older people, back in the town that we came from, in a
language that would make sense to them. We feared, even in 2017, that the Tory strategy of appealing to their sense of loss and grievance would prove more
successful than Corbyn’s relentless story of hope and human kindness.
And it did. It is generally overlooked that in 2017 Teresa May did achieve a huge increase in Conservative vote share, a massive swing to the Tories in many of
those places, and a fair few significant seat-gains. In fact Johnson has only slightly increased her overall share of the vote and her overall number of votes. But it
was enough of an increase, and sufficiently concentrated in the same parts of the country, to have finally knocked down Labour’s ‘red wall’ of traditional ‘postindustrial’ constituencies.
From this perspective, it is important to understand that 2019 was not an earthquake but a tipping-point. And what really did for Labour in many of its ‘heartland’
seats were voters who did vote Labour in 2017, but in 2019 simply stayed at home, out of a distaste for Corbyn’s leadership and a feeling that they had to let
Johnson into office in order to ‘get Brexit done’.
It is crucial to emphasise again that the drift towards conservatism in many of these seats was a long-term trend and that it had not been magically arrested in
2017. That drift was slowed down in that year by the fact that a section of the ageing ‘traditional working-class’ population saw Corbyn’s commitment to
implementing Brexit as sufficient indicator that he was ‘on their side’. There is no doubt that many of those voters becoming disillusioned with Corbyn’s leadership,
and convinced that Brexit must be done at all costs, had a devastating effect on the 2019 electoral outcome.
The centrist dads
But – and this is absolutely crucial to understand – the more surprising and more numerically significant demographic change was in fact the number of voters in
their 40s and early 50s who supported Labour in 2017, and whose votes went in large numbers to the Liberal Democrats, SNP and Greens in 2019. Yes, I know
how strange this will sound, if all you’ve heard since 10pm on December 12th is that Labour’s vote collapsed because it lost its leave-voting supporters. But that is a
fallacy. It is part of the truth: but less than half. If you want to look at the best statistical breakdowns and analyses that I know of, then they are here.
Why exactly younger ‘Generation X’ voters decided to back Corbyn in 2017, and not in 2019, is an issue that has barely been discussed at all, given the
understandable obsession of commentators with the increasingly immovable Toryism of propertied pensioners, and with the striking leftward shift of younger voters.
But there is a good argument that in fact the single most significant demographic-psephological shift between 2017 and 2019 was the desertion of the ‘centrist
Dads’ who had reluctancy backed Corbyn in 2017, for the Lib Dems, the Greens and (again) abstention.
The most plausible and obvious explanation is that these are centrist-leaning voters, whose 20s and 30s were spent in the halcyon days of New Labour, who were
the very last cohort to benefit from the long property bubble, whose children are not yet old enough for the full implications of the resultant housing crisis to have
dawned on them. Heavily pro-Remain and heavily influenced by mainstream legacy media (the BBC, the Guardian), they backed Corbyn when a Labour-negotiated
soft Brexit seemed like the best possible outcome to the 2016 referendum. But by 2019, their patience with Labour’s need to appease its minority of Northern
Leaver voters had driven many of them back into the arms of parties who they felt represented their own views more unambiguously. It is crucial to understand that
under a first-past-the-post voting system, the loss of votes such as these can contribute as much to certain seats going Tory as can any actual transfer of votes
from Labour to Conservative. And in a number of places, this is clearly what happened.
So Labour lost votes in all directions. And it apparently lost most votes among middle-class, educated, centrist-leaning voters who could not be persuaded to accept
a compromise on Brexit in order to prevent a Johnson landslide. It must also be suspected that, contrary to my own expectations, such voters were also heavily
influenced by the constant media propaganda around Labour’s supposed ‘anti-semitism’. This discourse was always intended in part to alienate cosmopolitan and
socially liberal voters from Labour, and sadly it seems to have helped in doing that.
Generational Politics
But if Labour lost more of these types of voters than any other, it lost actual seats in places where such small shifts in support could make the most dramatic
difference. And this was in those Northern and Midlands seats where its support had been dwindling steadily since 1997.
Even in those seats, the best evidence is that voters had been moving away from Labour since the 1990s not merely for ideological and cultural reasons, but for
hard economic ones. The ‘baby boomer’ generation has been bribed and bought-off by successive governments like no other in history. The full beneficiaries of the
post-war welfare state settlement, Thatcher let them buy houses at knock-down prices in return for letting her tear up that very settlement. Every government since
has done everything it can to inflate the value of those houses, and to protect the pensions of their owners, even while everyone else’s have been flushed down the
toilet. At the same time, the erosion of the welfare state and the lengthening of life-expectancy has produced a situation in which voters in their 60s (or whom there
are very many, and they are very likely to vote) tend to be concerned that protecting their property wealth is the only plausible defence against penury in their 80s,
because publicly-funded social care cannot be relied on at all.
It is not surprising that such voters are largely unmoved by socialist appeals for a better, cleaner, greener future. As Keir Milburn has so decisively shown in his
book Generation Left, their interests are now, whatever their historic ideological commitments, objectively aligned with those of finance capital and the rentier class.
Labour might win back some of them by reassuring them that we will not tax their wealth and will provide social care to the elderly, as any decent civilisation should.
But most of them are not coming back to Labour, and chasing them too hard would be pointless.
On the other hand, all evidence also suggests that the Labour vote held up among working-age people in almost all of the lost constituencies. The real question for
Labour is how to reach poor working-age voters in those places, who still do not turn out to vote in large enough numbers to ensure Labour victories in those
places. The anecdotal evidence is overwhelming. The level of demoralisation and despondency in such places makes it impossible to convince people that Labour,
or anyone else, can help them. The institutions that used to convince people of that possibility – democratic local government, a robust labour movement, and (a
long time ago) relatively Labour-friendly media – have all been defeated, downtrodden and weakened since the 1970s. Labour – as a movement and a party – must
now recognise the need to start rebuilding and reinventing those institutions. In particular, I strongly suspect that unless the kind of energy that was put into
electoral canvassing for the 2019 election is now diverted into active campaigning to recruit workers to trade-unions, then Labour can never recover in those places.
The Crisis of Neoliberal Hegemony
Hegemony – or we could just say ‘leadership’ or ‘success’ – is always a function of the ability of a particular political force to bring together a coalition of social
groups and to take them in a particular direction. What happened between 2017 and 2019 is that Labour was unable to retain and extend its coalition. Over the
course of this series, I will explore some of the reasons why it was not able to do so. But it is also important to understand the larger context of hegemonic relations
as it has shifted over that time.
Broadly speaking, both Brexit and Corbynism emerged around 2015-6 as reactions to one key phenomenon. That phenomenon was the critical loss of authority
suffered by the professional political class since 2008. That technocratic elite had governed Britain (and most other countries) since the emergence of neoliberalism
as an international project to restore capitalist power in the 1970s. Neoliberalism in practice was a counter-revolution against the successes of socialism, social
democracy and communism over the course of the 20th century, and it never enjoyed very broad popular support. In its earliest realised forms, it relied on the
reactionary militarism of Pinochet, Thatcher and Reagan to win a political foothold. But for most of its history, neoliberalism was administered by a cosmopolitan
technocratic elite, exemplified by the Clintons and their political allies and imitators.
Relatively few citizens ever actually liked the neoliberal programme: why would most people want to privatise public services, cut taxes on the rich and suppress
trade unions? So the authority of the neoliberal elite always relied on being able to offer them high levels of private consumption (usually facilitated by expanding
consumer debt). After the 2008 financial crisis, it became increasingly difficult to offer this to large sections of the population, especially to the young. The neoliberal
elite was also generally committed to forms of social liberalisation that were typically popular with young people, the educated and the female; but less so with
everyone else. So as its authority waned, various social groups began to make demands for things that neoliberalism could not deliver: from the restoration of
social democracy, to the slowdown of global migration.
The crisis of this elite’s authority therefore created opportunities for both the political left and the political right. In 2017 in the UK, the emerging right-wing alternative
– nationalistic, conservative, anti-immigration, but theoretically anti- austerity – was still in its infancy. Theresa May was its wholly uncharismatic leader. Into this
context emerged the movement led by Jeremy Corbyn.
This took both the emergent nationalist right and the residual neoliberal centre quite by surprise, and in the election of that year, Corbynism came close to
establishing itself as the new politically hegemonic force. But ultimately it could not do that. Labour could not extend its voting bloc to enough of the electorate: in
particular, the 7% of voters who clung stubbornly to the Liberal Democrats prevented its voting coalition from growing large enough. Corbynism could not extend its
social coalition far enough outside its metropolitan bases to win. By 2019, under various pressures that we will discuss, its coalition had fractured and shrunk, while
the right had fully regrouped behind Johnson’s new type of anti-political nationalism.
I will discuss this bigger picture, and the shape of the emerging Tory hegemony, in the final article in this series. First I want to go through some of the specific
operational issues that caused Labour such difficulties in 2019. Apart from long- term social and organisational issues, and apart from the incredibly-complex issue
of Brexit, there is another key reason for Labour’s defeat in 2019 that was cited by more voters than any other as their reason for rejecting Labour at the polls. So in
the next article I will consider the vexed issue of Corbyn’s leadership, and of what kind of leader Labour might need now.
Part 2: Corbyn was Intensely Moral, But Never a Working Class Hero
The reason given by most 2017 Labour voters for deserting the party was not its Brexit policy, or its overall platform, but the leadership of Jeremy Corbyn. In the
first article of this series, I looked at how Labour’s voter coalition fell apart between 2017 and 2019. Over the course of the next few contributions, I will consider
why this happened and what lessons we can draw from it. In the third and fourth, I will look at the question of Labour’s campaign messaging and the tremendous
difficulties created by the Brexit issue for Labour. But here I will consider the basic question of Labour’s leadership.
It has already become a cliché, reported by thousands who canvassed for Labour during the election, that the reasons given for disliking Corbyn included both
specific issues obsessively promoted by the right-wing press, and a general sense that Corbyn appeared weak, indecisive and unaggressive: normally, it seems,
voters would give one of these two sets of reasons rather than the other. The first was usually justified with reference to Corbyn’s supposed historic sympathy for
the IRA or his ‘excessive’ sympathy with Muslims. The latter was more generally framed in terms of Corbyn lacking charisma, energy and fighting spirit.
Working Class Heroes
In fact, the difference between these two sets of reasons for liking or disliking Corbyn might reflect an ideological fault line that has always run through Labour’s
‘traditional working class’ electorate. On the one hand, there has always been a constituency whose identification with Labour derived from a historic tribal identity
as well as a general sense of collectivism and loyalty to social institutions (from trade unions to the monarchy). That constituency has often been allergic to
militancy (opposing the 1984 Miners Strike, for example) while attracted to nationalism, militarism and imperialism. Politically, Corbyn was always going to alienate
this constituency. But as the 2017 result showed, he could largely do without them.
On the other hand, the tradition of instinctive labour militancy lives on amongst sections of the working class more deeply influenced by the socialist tradition. This
tendency found expression in Labour’s astonishing 2017 result. But that tradition demands a certain standard of its leaders. From Ellen Wilkinson to Arthur Scargill,
from Tony Benn to Ken Livingstone, they have all been blessed with some mixture of oratorical skill and ‘the common touch’. With some combination of fiery
rhetoric, wise-cracking humour and common-sense class politics, they have been able to express the anger that working class people feel at the injustices for which
they suffer; and an appropriately steely contempt for their oppressors. If you want a contemporary example, just think of Bernie Sanders.
Unfortunately, Corbyn had none of these qualities. His intensely moral condemnations of the social consequences of austerity just never occupied any of this range
of rhetorical registers, and so working class people largely heard them as ineffectual hand-wringing. And so, eventually, he lost this second set of working class
voters as well. And so he was done for.
It’s not like nobody saw this coming. I was one of many voices sympathetic to the Corbyn project, publicly and privately worrying that Corbyn just could not channel
working-class anger effectively, from the beginning of his leadership. At one point in 2016 I was invited by someone around the leader's office to submit ideas for
future strategy, and I made this point then, suggesting that other voices (preferably with Northern accents) needed to be brought to the fore, just as John Prescott
had been given a prominent role in campaigning for Tony Blair’s premiership. That memo was, as far as I know, ignored.
Three and a half years later, two weeks before the election, when polls showed the party facing annihilation in the North, we finally saw former miner, Ian Lavery
MP, being brought out to address the Northern constituencies, featuring in a very moving video about the legacy of Thatcherism. He was a fine choice for the job
(others could have included Jon Trickett and Angela Rayner). But he should have been given it three years earlier. To be fair to those involved, I’m told by members
of Labour’s 20018-19 communications team that figures like Lavery were reluctant to take on this role once Labour had moved away from an unequivocal
commitment to implementing Brexit. Why John McDonnell – the most talented radical politician of his generation, and a Northerner to boot – was never
systematically deployed in this way, remains a mystery. Perhaps he was, and it was simply invisible to London-based people like me.
There is a crucial lesson here for any future Labour leadership. The sort of common-touch-charisma that I am describing, that Corbyn lacked, is difficult to quantify.
Livingstone had it, despite his nasal whine and unprepossessing appearance; and that was what allowed him to remain beloved of Londoners for a generation,
while always adhering to a radical socialist politics. Corbyn lacked it utterly, through absolutely no fault of his own.
Any future Labour leader must possess this quality: and simply speaking with flat vowels will not be what guarantees it. What it requires, more than anything, is a
kind of intuitive Marxism: an automatic ability to frame important political issues in terms of the class interests that animate them, and that unite diverse
constituencies of working people up and down the country.
What this would have looked like, in practice, during the 2019 election, would have been a Labour leader – at least sometimes – castigating Johnson as the scion of
a parasitic aristocracy, pointing out that, for example, the reason for the national housing shortage was the fact that his class had spent decades greedily cornering
the property market. It sounds incredibly obvious. How could we never once get to hear this, in any of the public debates? But we didn’t get anything like it from
Corbyn, even once; and as the campaign went on, it became impossible to imagine him doing it. Asked to comment on the housing crisis, Corbyn would appeal to
our sense of moral outrage at the social fact of widespread homelessness. It’s a fine sentiment to express. But it completely misses the point.
In case you want me to put this in much cruder terms, I will. To win over grumpy old Northerners, you don’t necessarily have to be a grumpy old Northerner. But you
do need to be able to tell them which bastards are screwing them and what you’re going to do about it; or they will listen to someone else who does (such as Boris
Johnson, telling them that the bastards who are screwing them are foreigners). Corbyn couldn’t do this. All he could tell his audiences was that some other poor folk
were getting screwed even worse than they were. Which really wasn’t what they wanted to hear at all.
This wasn’t his fault. This kind of antagonistic politics just isn’t Corbyn’s style. Which is why he was never really the right person for the job, and should at least
have had a stronger team around him much more often. And it is this that the next Labour leader must be able to do.
But before leaving the topic of Corbyn’s leadership, it is important to say this. The very qualities that made him a poor public antagonist of the capitalist class are
those that enabled him to play the historic role that he did. I said this at the moment of his first accession to the leadership, and it was true: Corbyn had rallied the
left. He rallied the left in Britain for the first time since the 1980s, providing a focal point for our re-emergence as a significant political force. It was always too much
to expect that he could lead us to victory as well. After decades of defeat, despondency and disaggregation, it was Corbyn’s unique decency, his sheer humanity,
that enabled him to usher a movement into existence. Yes, that movement would have emerged anyway. But it might well have happened outside the Labour party,
or more likely in its ultimate ruins, had it not been for Jeremy Corbyn. And it might well have emerged less unified, less positive, less full of intelligent hope, had he
not been there to lead it.
Above all, I think: Corbyn’s kindness, gentility, and unflinching anti-imperialism gave many poor women and people of colour – used to suffering abuse, neglect and
micro-aggression as a permanent and institutionalised fact of social existence – a sense of a possible home in mainstream British politics. The fact that his rightwing detractors in the party have been unable even to concede that achievement, or to treat his decency as anything other than contemptible, is a symptom of their
own appalling cynicism
Part 3: Labour Should Have Argued Against the Last 40 years, Not Just the Last Ten
In the first two articles in this series, I looked at the break-up of Labour’s voter coalition between 2017 and 2019, and at the successes and failures of Jeremy
Corbyn’s leadership. In this third contribution, I want to ask a question about the way in which Labour made its case to the nation. With or without a different style of
leadership, was there anything that Labour could have done differently in this campaign, or the two years leading to it, that would have made it possible to hold
together its fractious and fracturing coalition? Naturally, I’m going to suggest that there was: Labour could have offered a bold, coherent narrative that promised a
decisive break with 40 years of British neoliberalism.
Against ‘Austerity’
I’ve made that case many times: here, in other publications and in personal discussions with senior Labour figures. But here goes again. Labour’s rhetorical focus
on ‘austerity’, as the name for thing that we would end, was always a mistake. ‘Austerity’ names the programme of public-sector contraction that has been
implemented by successive governments since 2010 in response to the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. So it refers to a set of circumstances that have had
the most immediately deleterious effects on social groups who felt that they were largely doing well until 2010. This does not speak at all to those who feel that their
communities in fact never recovered from the devastation of the 1980s. It implies no critique whatsoever of the long period during which New Labour spent lavishly
on public services, while implementing a wholly neoliberal policy agenda (semi-privatising services, introducing and maintaining punitive welfare regimes, enforcing
competition and hierarchy in the models of service-delivery, etc.), and failing to implement anything like an effective industrial policy.
Of course it is true that ‘austerity’ had the worst effects on the most vulnerable citizens: in particular those dependent on welfare or on the most resource-intensive
public services. So in effect, the ‘anti-austerity’ discourse addressed a coalition of these voters with those young people and public-sector workers who had felt
relatively prosperous immediately before 2010: which was always precisely the core coalition of support for Corbyn. But it did not address the problems of those in
provincial towns who had got by, but struggled, for decades. It did nothing to connect their concerns with those of that Corbyn coalition. It didn’t link the concerns of
both of those groups with the sense of unease that even affluent voters in the South often express, about the whole direction of our society and culture. It is very
common for people all over the country to feel that our national life has been saturated by greed, and robbed of any sense of purpose or direction, since the
Thatcherite triumph of the 1980s. This sense of loss can easily crystallise into forms of reactionary conservatism, if citizens are not offered some other way of
expressing it. The critique of austerity was always too limited a discourse to be able to do that work.
I warned repeatedly that unless Corbyn could learn to denounce this forty years of failure, and not only the not-quite-a-decade of austerity, then he would lose
support among older and middle-aged voters who had lived through the whole neoliberal period. The plight of those communities has been produced by that entire
history, and by far the greatest number of their votes were lost to Labour during the period 1997-2010, rather than during any subsequent phase. The obvious
appeal of the pro-Brexit narrative offered by the tabloids is that it offers a long-range historical account of that entire era, while promising a decisive end to it. This is
what so many people voted for, when they voted for Brexit and then insisted on seeing it ‘done’.
Corbyn’s Labour was making a clear break with that history, as no Labour leadership had done since the 1980s. There was every reason to make this case
explicitly, explaining to all of the many constituencies around the country who had never felt represented or empowered by neoliberal hegemony that we were going
to put an end to it now.
I spent years making this argument. I was told on good authority that it was raised repeatedly by some members of Corbyn’s key communications team, but that the
most senior officials dismissed it. I don’t know how much of this is true. Either way, we’ve seen the outcome. Time and again, canvassers in ‘heartland’
constituencies reported that voters showed no clear awareness of the profound difference between Corbyn’s Labour party and Blair’s, and gave their
disillusionment with the New Labour years as a reason not to vote Labour again. This was precisely the reaction that I had warned against. Even ‘middle-class’
liberal voters found our political narrative unpersuasive: ultimately, I would suggest, for the same reason.
Why couldn’t they say it?
I’m presenting this somewhat as if it were just my brilliant idea that Corbyn’s advisors were too stupid to take up. But the truth is obviously far from that. I think the
case I was making was so obvious that I can’t claim any particular brilliance for having made it. The real question is: why wasn’t it ever acted on? It’s worth thinking
about what some of the structural reasons might have been.
One point that was often made to me by people around Westminster was this. For Labour to take publicly the line that I was suggesting, would mean explicitly
criticising at least some elements of the New Labour legacy. As I often replied, this could have been done without dismissing all of New Labour’s achievements: by
not personalising the narrative, by pointing out the historic constraints under which the Blair government had operated. But I’ve been told by several MPs that a
large section of the Parliamentary Labour Party simply won’t tolerate any significant criticism of the New Labour policy regime, or its effects, from Labour leaders or
prospective leaders.
If it is true that this was really one of the obstacles to Labour adopting the only plausible narrative that could have successfully made its case to the country, then it
is all the more reason for the party to adopt measures making MPs accountable to the membership, as soon as possible. And this might stand as evidence to
support the views of those who believe that one of the great failures of the Corbyn leadership was not using the membership to discipline the PLP, by introducing a
system of automatic ‘open selections’ (in American terms: regular primaries), obliging incumbent MPs to be compete for their nominations before each election.
The failure to introduce this policy, despite Corbyn’s early and repeated promises of early democratisation of the party, is most plausibly attributed to the following
fact. Corbyn’s most powerful backers in the labour movement – the leadership of the Unite union – have never wanted to give members control of candidate
selections, but have rather seen Corbynism as one stage in their long struggle to win control of it for themselves, in opposition to the Blairite network that largely
controlled it up until 2010. This is one reason why some members on the left of the party have been reluctant to back Rebecca Long-Bailey as the next Labour
leader; they worry that she is too close to the same group of senior figures, loyal to the Unite leadership, that prevented the advance of Labour’s democratic
agenda. I don’t know if any of this is true, but all of it is highly plausible.
It’s worth asking if there are any other reasons why the case wasn’t made. Why the persistent over-investment in the presumed unpopularity of austerity? Why the
complete failure, rhetorically, to take advantage of the fact that Corbynism clearly did mark the first real rupture with Thatcherism and its legacy? I have a few
speculative thoughts about this, which may be entirely misplaced, but which at least shed a little light on the character of the current state of Labour’s factional
politics.
One is that Corbyn, McDonnell and their senior advisers were over-impressed by the significance of a single key moment in the process that led to Corbyn’s
election as Labour leader. This was the instance when, during the 2015 leadership election, most of the PLP abstained on a government bill introducing swingeing
cuts to welfare spending. Abstention was the position taken by the leadership of the time, and was seen as a necessary expression of fiscal seriousness by Labour.
This was seen as required, as the party was still suffering in the polls because too many voters believed the utterly nonsensical claims of the Tory press, blaming
the previous Labour administration’s ‘reckless spending habits’ for the consequences of the 2008 crash.
Party mythology maintains that it was the decision of ‘soft-left’ candidate Andy Burnham to follow the party line at that moment, rather than vote against the bill
with 48 of his colleagues, that cost him the leadership; the members had had enough of deferring to conservative ideology, and became determined to back the
only candidate who voted against the bill: Jeremy Corbyn.
That parliamentary vote retains a real significance in today’s leadership race, because the respective decisions of candidates in it are still regarded as one of the
best indicators of their political orientation. Of the remaining candidates, only Rebecca Long Bailey voted against. Personally I do not think it is remotely plausible to
claim that Burnham lost and Corbyn won the leadership of the Labour party primarily, or even significantly, because of that one vote against the austerity regime.
But if certain people do believe that, then it may well have coloured their approach to future campaigning.
On top of all this, a further factor reinforcing the importance of ‘austerity’ in the mind of figures such as Corbyn, McDonnell and their close supporters may have
been the relative popularity of the ‘People’s Assembly Against Austerity’ in the several years leading up to 2015. Although, if this was interpreted as any kind of
direct precursor to the Corbyn phenomenon, then I think this was an analytical mistake. The People’s Assembly was, to all intents and purposes, a typical far-left
campaign that largely mobilised only and exactly the same constituencies as were normally mobilised by such initiatives. Corbyn’s success in 2015 indexed
something quite different: a real break in neoliberal hegemony. Perhaps the leadership’s failure to grasp that fact, and its full implications, was their tragic strategic
error.
Gramsci Vs. Lenin?
Another related, but even more speculative, explanation for Labour’s excessive focus on ‘austerity’ is as follows. In the first substantial analysis I made of the
Corbyn phenomenon, I pointed out that at least some of the key figures around Corbyn had a conception of politics and strategy that was not ‘Gramscian’ but
‘Leninist’. My reference to Leninism here is a very crude caricature, but insofar as it has any bearing on this situation, I am pointing to the difference between two
different conceptions of politics. One is based on the idea that to achieve social change, radical organisations must patiently assemble grand social coalitions that
can eventually challenge the power of ruling elites: this is what Gramsci calls the ‘war of position’. The other more ‘Leninist’ way of thinking about politics is based
on the idea that the only way to get really radical change is by seizing at very rare historic opportunities with a decisive strike, while maintaining complete control
over a party apparatus (what Gramsci calls the ‘war of manoeuvre’). The latter, as I say, would certainly be a caricature of Leninism; but it will serve as a brief
description of its most distinctive features. There is no doubt that at least some key figures round Corbyn (Andrew Murray, Seamus Milne, Len McCluskey) have
been closely associated with Leninist political organisations and tendencies over the course of their political careers. Murray only stopped being a member of the
deeply orthodox (effectively Breshnevite) Communist Party of Britain in 2016.
Historically, within the factional mosaic of the British left and far-left, Gramscian approaches to political strategy and analysis – such as the approach informing this
entire series of articles – tend to focus on ‘middle-range’ historical scales: for example, the 40 years of neoliberal hegemony that I keep going on about in this one.
If you think that politics is a long-term process of coalition-building, then you’re likely to be interested in analysing changing social contexts on a medium-term basis.
Such approaches also tend to be associated with a different current of the left to the ultra-orthodoxy of the Communist Party (and its allied paper, the Morning Star)
and smaller revolutionary sects. This Gramcian tradition is instead more clearly identified with those political currents deriving from the ‘New Left’ of the 1960s. In
terms of Labour party and wider UK left factional politics, this latter tradition is historically, institutionally, associated with the ‘soft left’, for complex and contingent
historical reasons. In fact, it would be more accurate to associate it with what we might call ‘the far left of the soft left’ (eg the lobby group Compass, the
journal Soundings), which in politics and spirit has more in common with the radical democratic wing of the ‘hard left’ – represented by John McDonnell and
his followers – than it does with the liberal reformism of, say, the Tribune group of MPs (which of course now has nothing at all to do with far-left Tribune magazine).
By contrast, with this Gramsican tradition, the orthodox, Leninist hard left tends to be uninterested in the sort of medium-range analysis that I’m making here,
preferring to focus either on very long-range topic, such as capitalism and imperialism, or on relatively short term issues: wars, government austerity campaigns,
etc. This is because it is primarily concerned with seeking out short-term developments that might have the potential to radicalise significant populations within a
short time-frame, provoking the kind of very occasional socio-political crises that create the only real historic opportunities for significant radical advance. I can’t
help suspecting that it is this intellectual orientation – with its lack of interest in things happening on the medium-term historical scale’ – that led Corbyn’s most
senior advisers never to attempt to any serious public critique of the 40 years of neoliberal hegemony.
But for whatever reason they didn’t do it: they didn’t. This was a terrible mistake. Because that 40-year period of disruption and (for many) decline was precisely
what the right-wing, pro-Brexit narrative honed in on, and promised a decisive conclusion to.
Demanding Democracy
What story, with what conclusion, could Labour have offered, that could have matched the dramatic promise of Brexit? Along with offering a decisive and clearlyarticulated end to the forty years of neoliberal failure, it could have offered a more authentic version of precisely what Brexit promised: a return of some kind of
effective democracy. The slogan ‘take back control’ clearly expressed a profound sense that democratic efficacy had drained away from our political system.
This is undoubtedly true. British representative democracy has not returned a government that did what most of the electorate actually wanted it to do since the
crisis of the 1970s. If this sounds improbable to you, then just think of it this way. Tory voters in the 1980s mostly wanted the Conservatives to take the country back
to some imagined version of the 1950s. They didn’t. Labour voters in the 1990s and 2000s mostly wanted a restoration of the interrupted project of post-war social
democracy. They didn’t get that either. Until the 2008 crisis, large sections of the electorate had largely given up on the possibility of any government doing
anything but manage the relentless march of neoliberalism; voters had remained acquiescent largely because of the ongoing increase in the level of private
consumption – fueled largely by credit card and mortgage debt – seemed to compensate for the gradual erosion of democracy. Once that source of compensation
dried up for many citizens (especially younger workers), democratic demands began to be made on the British political class or the first time in a generation.
This demand for democracy was always implicit both in the Corbynite political insurgency and in the mass support for Brexit. But Corbynism was never able to
express itself as an explicitly democratic movement, or to offer a narrative that both acknowledged the long-term crisis of democracy while presenting itself as the
solution to it. Although a commitment to a constitutional convention was always buried in some section or other of our manifestos, it was never a focal point of
campaigning. Instead, we promised people that if they granted Labour a parliamentary majority, we would be able to enact a major change to the country’s
economic paradigm, its socio-technical infrastructure and its underlying balance of class forces: all, apparently, without any necessary change to a system of
government that has not been significantly updated in England since the 1920s.
A certain naivety about the capacities of parliamentary government has always been a distinctive feature of the Bennite tradition. Tony Benn – Corbyn’s idol and
mentor – opposed proportional representation (unlike Keir Hardie), and seemed to believe in the historical vocation of the House of Commons as the singular
expression of the political will of the British people. This was always a sentimental and rather ludicrous attitude. It was quite out of step with the historic
understanding of the socialist movement that liberal democracy should only ever be seen as an antecedent to, and as a poor substitute for, the more substantive
and participatory forms of democracy that socialists would seek to build.
I’ve been saying this since Ed Miliband was first elected leader. I’ll keep saying it till it happens. No Labour leader will deserve to win another election who cannot
give a historic speech in which they admit the following (flat out, no prevarication, no fudging). British representative democracy has been broken since the crisis of
the 1970s, and has allowed a corporate elite and a professional political class to spend four decades pursuing a disastrous political project that never enjoyed an
authentic popular mandate. Our entire system must be subject to a process of radical and ongoing reform that will begin with proportional representation
(presumably through the introduction of an ‘additional members’ system) and radical devolution to the regions, but will have no prescribed final end. On the one
hand, a Ministry of Democracy should be created, that will have as its only and inexhaustible remit the permanent monitoring and extension of democracy into as
many spheres of public life as possible. On the other, a permanent constituent assembly should be established that ensures the full participation of citizens in the
working of that ministry.
Right Answer, Wrong Question
Unable or unwilling to make such bold claims, Labour’s narrative was ultimately entirely unsuitable to the radicalism of its programme. If you’re telling people that
you’re going to implement the most radical programme since 1945, then you have to explain in what sense the election of a Labour government is going to be an
epochal event on the scale of the end of World War II. We didn’t. The anti-austerity narrative framing our 2019 manifesto instead proposed a once-in-a-century
answer to a once-in-a-decade problem.
The programme was not the problem. But we did not tell a story of sufficient scope and ambition for such an ambitious programme to be a plausible end to it. We
didn’t frame questions that were profound enough for such a radical manifesto to be the answer. We had the right answers. But ‘how do we end austerity?’ was too
unambitious a question. The question should have been ‘how do we end 40 years of neoliberalism?’
We could easily have produced a popular narrative that framed that question, and gave a radical programme as the only common-sense answer to it. The long-term
crisis of democracy that had culminated in Johnson’s hard Brexit, combined with the immediate urgency of the climate crisis; the fact that a huge majority of the UK
population recognise that the country has been heading in the wrong direction for decades: all of this could have provided the backdrop to a radical call for national
renewal. This could have won over many of the greens and liberals who deserted us in 2019, as well as many of the Leavers. Instead, we basically just said that we
needed to reverse the cuts made by the Cameron governments. But if the problem was ‘austerity’ – in other words, the cuts initiated by Cameron and Osborne –
why was a major programme of re-nationalisation the answer?
Can this change? Will any future Labour leader have the courage and imagination to tell the story that Labour has to tell: a story about the destructive
consequences of four decades of neoliberalism (interrupted, to be sure, but never adequately concluded or reversed, by 13 years of New Labour)? A story that
acknowledges how badly our democracy needs repair? Time will tell. At the moment of writing, Clive Lewis has been making heroic and articulate efforts to get this
point across in the national media. What is depressingly plain from the responses of his interviewers has been that this isn’t an issue that most of the British media
class want to see talked about. This comes as no surprise. At the same time Rebecca Long Bailey has made a very welcome commitmentto radical constitutional
reform: although what that would mean in practice we have yet to learn.
For the next five years, we will face a government that may seek to further extend the neoliberal destruction of the public sector and the welfare state, but which will
more likely seek to draw a line under austerity and return to some kind of mildly Keynesian national capitalism. It will not reverse any of the structural
neoliberalisation of UK institutions, but it will probably slow down or partially reverse the overall decline in public investment. Johnson clearly sees a chance to
imitate that Victorian Tory hero, Disraeli: securing a base of support amongst the conservative layers of the working-class with some expansion of public spending,
articulating an ideology of socially-conservative nationalism, dominating British politics for a decade or more. Either way, there can be little doubt that climate
change denial will be a core element of his ideological programme, and that democratic renewal will be the very last of his priorities. None of the problems that we
should have highlighted at this election have gone away, and all of them will deepen. The one issue that we did focus on – austerity – is unlikely to remain as acute
as it has been.
We need a leadership willing to address, explicitly, the crisis of our democratic institutions, and the impossibility of achieving social and economic reform without
radical democratic reform, as much as we ever did. Of course, they must also be able to show how this crisis is linked to the everyday concerns that people have.
But the point is that there is simply no hope of people getting better jobs and a functioning NHS if the entire political structure that is supposed to deliver them is
broken. And I think the public knows this intuitively already; which is why they found our promises so unconvincing in 2019.
But apart from issues of narrative and leadership – that bedevil every political campaign of any kind – there was one problem that Labour faced in this election that
proved more damaging than any other. It is quite clear now that Labour should not have agreed to fight an election before some kind of resolution to the Brexit
negotiations had been arrived at. In the next section I’ll consider why this was such an irresolvable dilemma for the party and its leadership.
Part Four: Labour let the right shape both sides of the Brexit debate
This is the fourth article in a series of six, reflecting on Labour’s 2019 election. In the first three I looked at the issue of exactly why Labour’s electoral coalition fell
apart, the strengths and weaknesses of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the party, and the problems inherent in Labour in relying on an ‘anti-austerity’ narrative when
trying to justify a programme that would reverse 40 years of neoliberalism. Now, at last, we come to the defining issue of the vote.
Ultimately I am going to suggest that there was really no good way out of it. This was arguably the single most divisive issue in British politics since World War II,
and Labour’s voter coalition was hopelessly divided on it. In a way, nothing more needs to be said.
But of course, there is plenty more to say. Most importantly, it is crucial to understand the long-term political conditions that produced support for Brexit among
certain key constituencies, and extreme hostility to it among others.
There will not be space here to discuss all of the historic and political circumstances leading to this. But it is important to note one of the key reasons for the Brexit
vote. Ever since the 1970s, the British political class – left and right – had simply made no real effort to persuade the public that EEC and EU membership were
positive goods. The attitude of successive governments and party leaderships had always been to effectively deny to the British public that the European project
had any real political dimension at all; and to try to assert, both to them and to the rest of the EU, that the UK could treat it as a free-trade bloc rather than as a
project of political and economic integration. And, it must be understood, this is the primary objection to EU membership of most of the people who voted leave.
Most of them were not working-class Northerners, but middle-class, Conservatives: readers of the Times and the Telegraph. And frankly, their objection to Britain’s
participation in the EU project was always valid. The EU always was a project of political integration; and no UK government had ever sought or been granted an
honest democratic mandate for that.
The one historical moment when a government could have tried actively to sell the EU project to the British public was in the early days of the Blair government,
when an increasingly Eurosceptic Tory party had just been comprehensively rejected by the electorate. But instead of trying to popularise the idea of Britain as a
modern, western-European social democracy, Blair chose the contrary route of becoming Washington’s representative in Brussels, pushing for expansion of the
union and deregulation of its labour markets; trying not to make the UK more European, but to make Europe more American. The chance for a popular British
Europeanism was sacrificed on the altar of neoliberal Atlanticism.
But this is only part of the story. The most important issue for us, and for Labour, was the fact that a significant minority of its own voter base also comprised a
significant minority of the Leave voting bloc. And crucial to the story is the question of why. Why did working class voters in some of the most depressed regions of
the country end up sharing a political position with the affluent golfers of the home counties? If they hadn’t, then Leave wouldn’t have won, and neither would Boris
Johnson.
In 2007 I wrote a book about the relationships between cultural theory and anticapitalist politics. In it I tried to survey the then current state of British politics, and
make some predictions about its likely near future. I suggested that the economic model of growth based on endless expansion of debt and inflation of house-prices
couldn’t go on forever. I then argued that when the crash came, the immediate beneficiaries would be the xenophobic political right: because they had been laying
the ground for victory for many years previously, whereas the political left – weak and disorganised – had still really never recovered from the defeats of the 1980s.
As someone working partly in the fields of cultural and media studies, I knew that the tabloid press had been consistently pushing the line that immigrants were the
cause of all Britain’s problems for decades, and that a worrying number of people believed them.
This is the key and crucial issue. The reason that many working-class people voted for Leave is that, with very few exceptions, they had become convinced by a
political narrative that both massively inflated the scale of actual immigration to the UK, and gave them a demonstrably false impression as to its economic and
social consequences. This had been going on since the 1970s. The left had made no systematic challenge to that narrative in working class communities, except at
moments of extreme emergency when parties of the far-right started to win elections, as they periodically did (for example, in Barking and Dagenham in the early
2000s).
The Labour party’s pro-Brexit faction had a problem. They wanted to persuade the party and its voters that Brexit was a good idea, as their great hero Tony Benn
had always believed. But everybody could see that Brexit was not happening because they had won the public argument, but because Murdoch and the Mail had.
On the other hand, those who opposed Brexit were faced with exactly the same problem. The left had done nothing like the necessary work of challenging the antiimmigration narrative of the right-wing press over the preceding decades; and by 2016, it was much too late to start.
So in 2017, we heard from canvassers, time and again, that Labour’s willingness to implement the Brexit referendum decision was a precondition for those
Northern ‘working-class’ voters giving us the time of day. During the 2019 campaign, we heard time and again that the same voters were promising to vote
Conservative, at least this one time, in order to ‘get Brexit done’.
Here is the key difference between 2017 and 2019. In 2017 Labour was formally committed to implementing the 2016 Brexit referendum result. By 2019 our policy
was to hold another referendum on the matter, having prevented May or Johnson from implementing their version of Brexit for the past two years of a hung
parliament. For voters uninterested in the niceties of customs unions and complicated treaty arrangements, this felt like Labour frustrating their democratic will.
Given that many of them had voted for Brexit, with little idea what it meant (apart from reducing immigration), for no other reason than to have the experience of that
democratic will being expressed, this was anathema.
So it’s not as if nobody foresaw the danger of Labour departing from, or qualifying, its commitment to implementing Brexit. The question was always: could that
danger be avoided, and if so how? Since the election, a chorus of voices both from the ‘Blue Labour’ strand of Labour politics and from the pro-Brexit hard left have
declared that weakening our support for Brexit is what cost us precious working-class votes. And of course they are right.
But the problem with their retrospective prescriptions is simple: we tried it their way. In full knowledge that this disaster might be coming, the leadership refused, for
over a year after June 2017, to accept the view of the vast majority of Labour members and voters, that Brexit must be seen as a terrible mistake, and that any final
deal must be put to a second referendum (with Remain as one of the options). The result of this insistence on respecting the 2016 referendum result was a collapse
in Labours polling and performance in local and European elections; as the urban, cosmopolitan, almost-uniformly pro-Remain section of its base became
increasingly dismayed, feeling unrepresented and taken for granted. By mid 2018 Labour was polling around 22% nationally. If Labour had not shifted its position
somewhat, then its vote would have collapsed in the South and the urban centres, as it did in the Northern towns because it did shift. Of course we would have lost
fewer seats in this scenario. But we would have lost too many to win the election, and would have lost even more votes overall than we eventually did.
Labour’s final Brexit policy – negotiate yet another new deal, put that to a referendum with Remain as the other option – was sane, rational and intelligent. But it
pleased nobody. The actual effect of Labour adopting this policy – and of the relentless campaigning of its heroic activists to promote it in communities around the
country – was to effect a significant recovery of its support among Remain voters. But not enough. Here is a crucial fact about the election result that has been
overlooked in many quarters. Labour lost 7.8 percentage points of national vote share. The Tories gained 1.3%. The Greens gained 1.1%. The Liberal Democrats
gained 4.2%. Obviously any inferences from these figures are speculative and abstract. But, put crudely, they show very clearly that Labour lost as much of its 2019
vote to the ‘remain alliance’ of Green and Lib Dems’ as it did to the Tories. We can safely assume that an explicitly leave-backing Labour party would have lost
even more. It is also true that, in all probability, Labour lost many votes to leave-voters who voted Labour in 2017 and then simply abstained in 2019. But the point
still stands. Labour lost votes in multiple directions. It shed votes from its coalition, whatever direction it moved in, and even while standing still. On some plausible
calculations, Labour would have lost almost 60 urban and middle-class seats to the Green / Liberal Democrat ‘Remain Alliance’ if it had not embraced the policy of
a second-referendum.
Many commentators, including myself, always felt that there was simply no point in Labour trying to pretend to be anything but a party of Remain. The vast majority
of its members, and of its voters, even in most Leave-supporting constituencies, supported Remain. Yes, there was always a vocal minority of party members who
had always taken a principled position against EU membership. But they were a small proportion of the membership and – this cannot be stressed enough times –
less than one third of our voters in 2017 were Leavers. The now-popular idea that a tiny middle-class elite within the party ‘betrayed’ the working class by
abandoning the party support for Leave is nonsense. The fact that a small, but highly visible, and strategically crucial section of that voter base – older, white
workers and retirees in former industrial areas – took a different view, cannot be allowed to obscure that fact.
Nor can it be allowed to obscure the fact that it is very clear why those voters supported Leave. In all but negligible proportions, they did not support it out of a
lifelong commitment to Bennite socialism and to Labour’s 1983 manifesto (that had promised to withdraw from the European Economic Community). They voted
leave because they had been persuaded by a right-wing nationalist narrative, fed to them daily by the tabloid press for decades. Within the terms of this narrative,
hostility to ‘immigration’ was not a coded way of expressing hostility to neoliberalism: it was a direct alternative to a genuinely anti-neoliberal politics. The tabloids
were not saying, and voters on the doorsteps were not saying ‘we hate the EU because we hate neoliberalism’. They were saying ‘we hate immigrants because
they take our jobs and homes’, because they had been systematically presented with an anti-immigration narrative, for literally decades, as a way of closing off the
possibility of an anti-neoliberal narrative winning popular support. Of course, as I pointed out in the second article of this series, neoliberalism and globalisation
were the true sources of the problems that voters were objecting to. But they were objecting to them in terms that were entirely shaped by the discourse of the rightwing press. As such, claiming that support for Brexit was simply an expression of anti-neoliberal sentiment is about as accurate as saying that support for Trump’s
wall in the USA is a direct expression of radical class consciousness.
This was a key reason why the compromise position recommended by so many commentators in 2018 – of committing Labour to a ‘soft Brexit’ – was clearly never
going to work. Not only was it too big an ask for the membership to continue accepting that any Brexit at all should happen, when they overwhelmingly felt that the
Brexit vote was a symptom of Murdoch’s decades-long propaganda machine. The ‘soft Brexit compromise’ theory was also hopelessly naive as to the predictable
reaction of the tabloids to Labour accepting any deal that did not end free movement: and there was zero chance of any remotely ‘soft’ Brexit being agreed by the
EU that did not preserve free movement between EU states and the UK. Labour’s 2017 manifesto had been able to fudge this because negotiations over the form
of the exit deal had barely begun. The idea that any version of that fudge could survive the negotiations is just fanciful, once the key role of the press in shaping
Leaver opinion is taken into account. And let there be no doubt. In a situation in which Labour was advocating for a form of Brexit that preserved free movement,
the tabloids would have had a field day, screaming that Labour’s ‘soft’ Brexit constituted a ‘betrayal’.
Those sections of the hard left most closely allied to the Morning Star and the Unite union continue to maintain that support for Brexit was not motivated by racism
and xenophobia, but constituted an incipient expression of class-consciousness that ought to have been respected. I have yet to see any of the advocates of this
perspective address the point that the vast majority of Black and Asian working class voters supported Remain. Is their class-consciousness to be regarded as
inherently inferior to that of retired white munitions workers in Cumbria? Nor have I ever seen them address the point that the majority of leave-voters were not
working-class or Northern at all, but were affluent, true-blue Tory homeowners in the home counties and other comfortable districts. These same sections of the
pro-Brexit left have been vituperative in their attacks on the ‘betrayal’ of the working class by cosmopolitan liberals, for which they blame Labour’s election defeat. If
their analysis is allowed to have any serious sway over the coming Labour leadership election, it will be unfortunate: not because the Lexiters are bad comrades,
but because they are simply factually wrong about why Labour lost.
The Case for ‘Lexit’
But while we’re on the subject, let’s not caricature the analysis of the Lexiters. Here is the most defensible version of it. From this perspective, the European Union
has always been a project to enforce free-market neoliberalism across the continent, and no socialist should ever have supported UK membership of it. The
Eastward expansion of the European Union was driven by the Blair government at Washington’s behest, deliberately seeking to shift the balance of power within
the EU away from Western European social democracy.
The resultant influx of Eastern European workers to the UK Labour market had very different effects to immigration from the former British colonies in the 40s and
50s. In that case, immigrants from countries and regions with strong traditions of anti-colonialism, socialism and labour organisation came to settle in our towns and
cities, transforming British culture for the better. Yes, there was ’racial tension’ at times, but over the medium-term, in many places this wave of immigration actively
contributed to the emergence of a multicultural politics of municipal socialism and cross-cultural solidarity, in the face of far-right and Thatcherite aggression
towards both trade-unionists and minorities of all types. By contrast, Eastern European migrant workers are more or less actively encouraged by the ease of
movement across the EU not to settle here at all, but to work, for low wages, for limited periods, while forming no significant political or cultural relationships with
their indigenous neighbours of any culture. (Trade union organisers have also told me that Eastern European immigrants have proven very difficult to recruit and
organise, normally attributing this to a suspicion of socialism on the part of those whose families lived through the traumatic experience of communist rule in the
region. I have no idea if this is true, but it seems plausible.)
In this context, the resistance of British workers to EU-enabled immigration may well be a feeling that Murdoch and his allies in the far right are able to prey upon;
but it does not derive from reactionary impulses. It is – the Lexit argument goes – a realistic, if intuitive, assessment of the politics of the EU as an institutionalised
expression of capitalist interests. At the same time, it is understandable that the descendants of those mid-century immigrants should themselves feel very
uncomfortable with any form of anti-immigration rhetoric. But this unease, and their entirely understandable sense of vulnerability, leaves black and Asian citizens
easy prey to exploitation by a neoliberal elite, who lure them into complicity with their own super-exploitation by promising (and to some extent delivering) a culture
of ‘diversity’ and free movement. The correct response to this situation is not to encourage this complicity, but to build solidarity among all workers, whatever their
origins, without reproducing the myth of the European Union as a progressive institution, or allowing the neoliberal technocrats to maintain a monopoly on
cosmopolitan and anti-racist politics.
This is the argument for ‘Lexit’ – left Brexit – as I understand it, and it is important that even those of us who don’t agree with it respect it. In fact my own position
was always that this was a more than respectable argument, and that the Lexit goal of redefining Brexit as a left-democratic project was a laudable one, as well as
being politically and intellectually consistent with a proud tradition of left opposition to the EU, that actually predated the Tory-right embrace of Euroscepticism in the
early 1990s. The problem with the Lexit strategy was never its intrinsic merits. It was the fact that it was always predicated on a certain naivety about how easy it
would be to persuade the Remain-voting majority of Labour’s supporters and members of its virtues. To grasp this point, it is important to understand why the Lexit
argument has ultimately never persuaded the vast majority of Labour voters or members. It is not, as Lexiters have repeatedly claimed, simply because Labour
party supporters are all hopelessly naive about the politics of the EU.
The Counter-Argument
There are serious intellectual arguments to be made against the Lexit position, even by those of us who are fully aware of the political role that the EU has often
played (above all, in the hideous treatment of the Syriza government in 2016). The most obvious of these arguments is that all of the claims that can be made about
the EU from a radical perspective can also be made about the British state: which is the mechanism that Lexiters propose to use to build socialism in the UK. If
there is no hope of ever building an international coalition to reform the EU, using its structures to discipline international capital rather than to enable it, then why
should anyone believe that there is any hope of an equivalent project succeeding at the UK level alone? Conversely, the history of social democracy in all countries
is the history of oppressive and entirely pro-capitalist state structures being, eventually, successfully used for partially anti-capitalist ends. Why should we expect
the story of the EU to be any different? And why, when radical socialists have spent almost two centuries calling for international solidarity between workers, would
we abandon the one institution that has ever seemed to hold out the possibility of a governmental structure within which the practice of such solidarity might
become possible?
And these are not merely speculative claims about the progressive potential of the EU. Rupert Murdoch notoriously admitted that his implacable hostility to the EU
derived from his awareness that it is too large and powerful a political structure for he and his newspapers to intimidate. The EU is to date the only organisations on
the planet — the US federal government included – to have successfully forced the Apple corporation to pay its taxes.
Finally, the major political reason why – consciously or otherwise – most Labour supporters never bought into the Lexit idea, is this. We were never convinced that
leaving the EU would actually make it significantly easier for a Labour government to pursue its political agenda. Advocates for Lexit had insisted that the EU’s rules
regulating ‘state aid’ or corporations would make it impossible to pursue an interventionist economic programme or a programme of significant re-nationalisation.
But most experts told us that in fact this case was not proven at all, because there simply was no legal precedent for an EU member state attempting to implement
such a programme. Privately, I was shown a report commissioned by an MP from the House of Commons library that made exactly this case. Under these
circumstances, it always seemed reasonable that a Labour government might deliberately seek to test the neoliberal limits of the EU’s regulatory regime from inside
the EU, with the direct objective of breaking them, if necessary.
In fact, ultimately, this seemed like a more plausible objective than simply leaving the EU, imagining that somehow by quitting its formal structures, we could escape
their influence and hostility. The persistent hegemony of neoliberalism within those institutions would continue to pose a major impediment to socialist reform in the
UK even if we left, as the EU would be able to impose all kinds of sanctions on UK trade if it decided to seriously oppose the political agenda of its government.
To put this more simply: the neoliberal dominance of the EU – by far Britain’s most important trading partner – was going to continue to pose a major problem for a
socialist UK government, whether Britain was inside the EU or not. The long-term political task was surely to build pan-European support for a counter-project to
European neoliberalism. Rightly or wrongly, few were convinced that such a project would be bolstered by Brexit.
Visceral cosmopolitanism
But more fundamental, if less rational, than any of these arguments was the real symbolic value of EU membership for many citizens who are not – and never will
be – members of the international neoliberal elite. This is a crucial point and it cannot be stated too often. There is a powerful mythology shared by many sections
of British political culture: from the far right to the far left, and at every intermediary point along the spectrum. According to this mythology, members of ‘settled’
working-class communities (be they former pit villages in Derbyshire or council estates on the edge of London) simply have stronger, more intimate bonds with
each other and with their established habits of life than do other people. These others – from immigrants to university students to metropolitan professionals – are
recognised as having a culture, and values, and preferences. But they are somehow assumed to be less attached to them, or to be more easily reconciled to seeing
their values traduced. Cosmopolitans, it is assumed, are rootless: aimless postmodern individuals, with no real commitment to anything. These assumptions are
central to the discourse of the ‘authentocrats’, as Joe Kennedy has namedthat range of commentators and pundits who claim to speak for the ‘authentic’ people of
Britain.
The problem with these assumptions is that they are completely wrong, and proceed from a sheer inability to grasp the changing nature of cultural belonging and
political community in the 21st century. Cosmopolitanism is not merely a symptom of rootlessness. It can be just as deeply entrenched an element of a person’s
identity as can attachment to a particular place and ethnicity. Those of us who live in cities, who have close friends and families with different-coloured skin to our
own, and with foreign passports, will feel an affront to our values – of which freedom of movement is a fundamental element – just as much as some cultural
conservative will resent the presence of ‘foreigners’ in his town. As the cultural historical Mica Nava has shown, cosmopolitanism can be ‘visceral’ just as
conservatism can. This is not merely an expression of liberalism and individualism; for many of us today, our communities are not rooted primarily in our
neighbourhoods or workplaces, but grounded in our dispersed and complex social networks. That doesn’t make us any less loyal to them.
Crucially, this is not just a ‘middle-class’ experience. In places like London, cosmopolitanism and libertarian social ethics have formed a part of vernacular working
class culture for centuries. This is more true now in more other places than it ever has been. Such cosmopolitan values may be alien to the culture of retired
workers who once worked in Britain’s industrial heartlands, but in the age of the internet, they are more widely shared among both ‘working’ and ‘middle’ class
people than ever before. It is true that, on the precise issue of Brexit, opinion polls showed that Leave voters placed it more highly in a list of issues that they cared
about than did Remain voters. But that didn’t mean that Remainers didn’t care about EU membership and free movement: it just meant that they cared even more
about the NHS. We saw in 2018 and 2019 what happened when a large part of that electorate felt motivated to turn their backs on the party that they felt no longer
represented them. Cosmopolitans of all classes – above all, of the multicultural urban working classes – felt betrayed and dismayed at the sight of Labour refusing
to endorse a second referendum, once it became apparent that May’s version of Brexit was untenable. This is why Labour support collapsed in 2018.
What were we to do?
My point here is not to argue that Labour necessarily should have adopted a more aggressively pro-Remain position. Any claims we can make about what might
have happened had a different strategy been pursued are ultimately speculative and unprovable. But what it is clear is that the emergent common-sense on this
issue is profoundly mistaken. Labour did not ‘lose the heartlands’ because it made a mistake by refusing to ‘honour the referendum’. Labour’s electoral base was
split, and the section of that base that was numerically much smaller than the other happened to be in a strategically crucial position because of the iniquities of the
electoral system. Of that smaller, leave-voting, section of its voter base, a large proportion has been drifting away from Labour for many years for purely socioeconomic reasons: it is made up of propertied pensioners with no material interest in defending or extending the public sector, reliant as they are on the value
stored in their homes for any sense of security in old-age, most of whom belong to a strand of working-class culture that has always been nationalist and sociallyconservative. At the same time, a large constituency of middle-class cosmopolitans in their 40s and 50s deserted Labour precisely because we
seemed too concerned with pandering to this ageing, conservative section of their traditional base. Finally, another section of that older ‘traditional working-class'
base could have been kept onside with more convincing, explicitly anti-capitalist leadership; while younger non-voters in the same neighbourhoods might yet have
been motivated to support the party by much the same thing.
So what were we to do? In theory, if we had taken a position in favour of a second referendum much earlier, we could have actively campaigned in leave-oriented
constituencies in order to actually try to change the minds of enough of our leave-backing supporters to steady our support. ‘Brexit is a con’ could have been the
slogan on which to hang a whole popular critique of the class-politics of phantasmatic nationalism (or some better slogan, that could have conveyed in a nonpatronising way the idea that, while the questions to which Brexit was an answer were all valid ones, it was an answer that was being supplied by reactionary
sections of the ruling class: entirely in their own interests). In theory.
We could have engaged in an open struggle against tabloid populism, presenting to voters the fact that Murdoch had been lying to them for decades, seeking to
replace their reactionary nationalism with true class consciousness: directing their anger at the elite of which Boris Johnson is so obviously a member. Then
perhaps we would have found out if it was true, as the Lexiters still claim, that support for Brexit was an expression of incipient class consciousness.
But in all honesty, I doubt that even now Labour has the capacity for this kind of sustained proselytisation and issue-based campaigning, outside of election-time
and far-away from the metropolitan centres. Maybe it does. And we certainly could have tried. And the results could hardly have been any worse than they finally
were. But this would have been a herculean task to undertake, especially given the way that Leave and Remain opinion was distributed between actual
parliamentary constituencies.
Frankly any political solution to this dilemma would have been risky and unlikely to work. It is easy to see why those on the left, who happened to support Brexit and
who feel that Labour ‘betrayed’ its working class voters by ‘betraying’ the referendum result, allow themselves the luxury of such delusion. But this is not a view of
the situation that corresponds in any meaningful way with the facts. Labour was stuck. If it stayed ‘leave’ it was going to lose half its voters. As it was, even with the
late promise of a second-referendum, it lost a large chunk of them for not being Remain enough.
If anything could have worked, then campaigning for Remain early, explicitly and ideologically, from a socialist perspective, against the right-wing nationalism that
the Murdoch press had peddled to voters for decades, would have been more likely to than anything else. But it probably wouldn’t. Getting out to campaign in all of
these constituencies would have involved a mobilisation of activist on a scale much higher than that achieved in Labours incredibly impressive 2019 ground
campaign. And the effort would always been hampered by the fact that a significant section of our own activists and leaders – especially those with historic ties to
the Communist Party of Britain or the National Union of Mineworkers – actively supported Brexit, from their own distinctively socialist perspective. At the same time,
the absence of any very visible pan-European campaign for progressive reform of the EU also meant that the claims of those of us arguing for ‘remain and reform’
always rang rather hollow. And the fear on the part of many Leavers that ‘remain’ would only ever mean ‘more of the same’ was visibly reinforced by the fact that
the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign was led by the most awful representatives of Blairite centrism.
The Centrist Backlash
The pro-Lexit critics of Labour’s turn to a second-referendum position are wrong to see it as having been primarily driven by the machinations of these people; but
they are not wrong that those machinations took place, or that they were motivated entirely by the desire of the displaced technocratic elite to somehow regain their
power.
This is a very important point to grasp, if we are understand the reaction to the election defeat and the tendency of many on the left to want to blame the Remain
camp for it. Precisely the same elements of the Labour right who went to such lengths to propagate the idea that Corbyn was an anti-semite, also worked tirelessly
to paint him as a ‘secret leaver’, determined to deliver Brexit while pretending to his supporters that that wasn’t what he was doing. The narrative currently being
circulated by many on the Labour left maintains that it was these elements, in league with their own secret allies inside the shadow cabinet (Keir Starmer and Emily
Thornberry), who eventually pushed and bullied Corbyn into accepting a less resolutely pro-Leave stance.
This is a completely understandable reading, and although it is factually wrong, it is, in a certain sense, emotionally and politically correct. The problem with this
account, is that it ignores the real visceral, political and intellectual distaste that most of Corbyn’s supporters in the party always had for the policy of accepting any
form of Brexit without a second mandate on any final deal. It never required any pressure from the liberal centre to make them unhappy with the policy, for reasons
that I have already explained. But this account is also wrong because it overlooks the real damage done by the centrists to Corbyn’s cause and to Labour’s election
prospects. As we can see from the data I referred to in the first article of this series: there is good evidence that the largest distinctive cohort of votes that Labour
actually lost between 2017 and 2019 wasn’t any one group of leave-voters, but middle-aged liberal centrists. The only good reason for any such voters to abandon
Labour between those two elections was they had come to believe the relentless propaganda to the effect that Corbyn was an enemy of cosmopolitan liberalism. It
wasn’t in pushing Labour to adopt a less ‘Leave’ position that the centrist-Remain camp did their damage. It was in convincing a large section of their own audience
to vote against Labour.
The centrists ultimately would not reconcile themselves to the fact that the anti-Conservative coalition now had to be led from the Left. They did everything they
could to undermine Corbyn, in the hope of winning back leadership of anti-Conservatism. In the process, they broke the emergent coalition, and condemned the
country to a Johnson premiership. The centrist, anti-Corbyn commentariat should feel very proud of themselves.
The narrative according to which ‘Remain lost it for Labour’ is therefore factually wrong, insofar as it relies on the mistaken assumption that it was the loss of leave
votes alone that produced the electoral outcome. But it is politically and emotionally correct to the extent that it recognises the fatal damage done to Labour by the
obsessively pro-Remain camp in the wider political sphere. What is important to grasp here, however, is that a non-centrist, genuinely-Corbynite, but also
determinedly anti-Brexit stance was always an authentic political position, quite distinct from that of the centrist anti-Corbynites. In fact this is the main reason why
Starmer emerged as the most popular contender for the Labour leadership so quickly after the defeat: rightly or wrongly, he is the most high-profile MP to be
associated with precisely that position in the minds of most members.
Where Does This Leave Us?
But where does all this leave Labour now? As I have suggested, the single biggest structural factor that made the Brexit conundrum unsolvable for Labour was the
fact that it had, for decades, allowed the right-wing press to define the common-sense of a key section of its traditional base, on some issues of fundamental
importance. That doesn’t mean that Labour can’t start now to struggle against the 40-year campaign for the British press to promote xenophobic English
nationalism. It should. It must start campaigning in communities, not against Brexit (which is a done deal now), but explicitly against the ideology of conservative
nationalism that has cost it so dearly in this election. That, at least will be a programme that we can unite around: and must.
There was no easy way through this maze. But any route out of it must take account of all these factors. The implications are clear, even if they do fly in the face of
the assumption that what Labour must now do is to focus exclusively on winning back propertied white pensioners. Labour must rebuild and consolidate the
progressive urban base that shed so many voters to the Greens and Liberal Democrats. But it must do so on the basis of a leadership that is able to communicate
with the more radical sections of its older ‘traditional’ constituency and with those of the working-age population in the same communities who did not turn out in
high enough numbers to support it in 2019. The idea that the next leader must be a ‘leaver’ is ludicrous in the light of these observations: but so would any
suggestion that they must be a ‘remainer’. What they must be is able to speak a language both of class struggle and of national renewal, in terms that can resonate
with small-town voters without alienating urban progressives.
Is this an impossible task? It may be for one person. We would do well to abandon the myth of the single, all-purpose leader, in my opinion. Whoever becomes
party leader must not be afraid to promote a strong team around them, able to speak directly to different sections of the coalition that we need. But it is not an
impossible task at all for a leadership with the vision to see the scale of the problem. Honestly, all it really needs is a leadership who can grasp the point that Britain
has still not really resolved the crisis of the 1970s. The end of the post-war consensus gave way to a period in which neoliberalism was implemented by a
professional political class in allegiance with powerful sections of capital; but their project never commanded widespread public support, and anger and frustration
at its long-term implications now inform every shade of political opinion in the country. Any leadership who can grasp this can take us forward. Any that can’t, won’t.
Ultimately, I think, the Brexit conundrum, and Labour’s structural inability to respond to it, revealed deep weaknesses in Labour’s strategy that have been visible
since the earliest days of Thatcherism. The Lexiters wanted to ride a clearly reactionary wave to a policy outcome that they happened to agree with. When, in the
history of human civilisation, has that ever worked out well? Many of them ended up sharing platforms with figures with highly dubious politics.
Advocates of a ‘soft Brexit’ compromise were also simply ignoring the anti-immigration animus that all evidence showed to be driving almost all working-class
support for Brexit: the right were never going to let us get away with implementing a ‘soft’ Brexit ’without trying to convince their supporters that in effect we were
stealing Brexit from them. Again, the real issue here is the fact that the left has never been able to break the hold of the right-wing press over the common-sense of
a large section of the public; a section that the left really needs to ally with to win.
But Remainers wanted to overturn a democratic vote and defend a project – the European Union – that they had made no serious effort to challenge or reform
throughout its decades of administering neoliberal orthodoxy. By 2016, it was far too late to start trying to build an internationalist pan-European left project in time
for Labour to align with it successfully. They too found themselves contingently allied to highly problematic figures who had done nothing since the start of the
Corbyn project but seek to undermine it. And this was partly a symptom of a more fundamental structural issue: the fact that large sections of the middle-class left
had acquiesced to a cosmopolitan version of neoliberalism ever since the 1990s, partly because it seemed more aligned with their cultural values than did the
revanchist conservatism of some of the provincial working class. Indeed, arguably the liberal middle-class left had become lazy about confronting widespread
xenophobia precisely because we assumed that EU membership would always do the work for us of preventing governments from adopting reactionary positions
on immigration.
There is only one long-term response to these problems that can work: to rebuild a sense of class solidarity and class consciousness that can include everyone
from high paid salary-earners in the home-counties to warehouse workers on zero-hours contracts in the North. We know from hard experience that simply talking
to people explicitly about class, class consciousness and class struggle rarely has the required emotional appeal. Often we have to find other languages in which to
address these issues. But let us be in no mistake that those are the issues we have to talk about. And in fact, Sanders and Alexandra Orcasio-Cortez have made
themselves some of the most popular politicians in the USA by speaking more or less precisely this language. We must learn to speak it, and to use it as a hammer
with which to fight back explicitly against the propagandists of the right-wing press, as well as their allies in the digital media sphere. In the next article, I’ll reflect a
bit more on the implications of this assertion.
Part 5: To Take on the Right Wing Media, We Need to Build a Political Movement
For decades, Labour has been hampered by having to operate in a right wing media environment. 2019 was certainly no exception, and the question, as ever, is
what to do about it.
This is the fifth in a series of articles about Labour’s 2019 election defeat. In the previous essay, I suggested that one of the things that made Brexit so irresolvable
for Labour was the fact that the British left had never successfully challenged the authority of the right-wing media in many communities. The widespread belief in
the claims circulated by the tabloid press – blaming immigrants and immigration for almost all social ills – created a context in which it was almost impossible for
Labour to pursue a progressive policy successfully, whichever side of the Brexit debate it came down on. I think it is clear that this is a situation that Labour was
never going to be able to address without a strong movement of members and supporters – active on the doorsteps and in the public sphere – making counterarguments on its behalf. In this article I will consider how a ‘movement-based’ politics might overcome the right wing media.
Labour has faced a hostile media for most of its history, and consistently since the crisis of the 1970s. From that time it has been clear that the BBC has tended to
reproduce the ideological biases and priorities of the professional political class at any one time, while the press has been committed to an ideology of xenophobic
and authoritarian English nationalism. It became apparent in the mid 1990s both that the Tory leadership were not willing to make any significant concessions to the
latter, as Major refused to give ground to the Eurosceptic ‘bastards’ in his parliamentary party. At the same time, Tony Blair made explicitly clear to Murdoch that he
was willing to grant him an effective veto over every area of policy. So a section of the press (most notably the Sun) became willing to back Blair. Once he left
office, conditions returned to normal.
Media theorists and political sociologists have debated the influence of the press on voter behaviour for decades. It is true both that newspaper circulations are in
decline and that reading a Tory paper clearly doesn’t not necessarily turn a person Tory. But it is also clear – as many Labour campaigners learned on the
doorsteps in 2019 – that the press continues to play a vital role in shaping the perceptions of floating voters with low levels of formal education.
The question is, and has been since the 1970s: what to do about this?
The Redundancy of the Soft Left
One of the Labour party’s most persistent delusions is the idea that if only it finds a sufficiently telegenic leader and adopts a sufficiently ‘moderate’ programme then
the implacable hostility of the press can be assuaged. Arguably neither Kinnock nor Miliband were ever telegenic enough to play this role. But surely their
respective tenures as Labour leader have demonstrated conclusively that the ‘soft left’ strategy does not work. This strategy basically consists of putting forward a
moderately social-democratic programme, of a type that all opinion polls since the beginning of recorded history have suggested should command the support of a
majority of the British electorate, but one that is not too radical to incur the abject hostility of the press and the wider establishment.
The problem with this strategy is that it assumes that there is such a thing as a moderately social-democratic programme that is not too radical to incur the abject
hostility of the press and the wider establishment. This has simply not been true since the mid 1980s. Following the historic defeat of the labour movement and the
collapse of the Soviet Union, following the full restoration of the power and prestige of finance capital at the end of that decade, why should any section of the
capitalist class be willing to accept even moderate limitations on its ambitions? The behaviour of the media and the other institutions that they control have made
clear ever since that they will not, and will savagely attack any political project that threatens to force them to. That is why both Kinnock and Miliband were
mercilessly and relentlessly attacked even for their moderately social-democratic programmes.
The Movement Solution
The obvious democratic and socialist response to this dilemma has always been to seek to mobilise a movement of supporters capable of challenging the authority
and ideology of the establishment, and the parasitic elite that it serves, on the doorsteps, in communities and in workplaces. Today, that also means using social
media and movement-generated content to challenge capitalist ideology in the virtual social sphere. In this regard the success of Corbynism must not be
overlooked and cannot be overstated. These were precisely the conditions for the surprisingly positive election result of June 2017.
But, yet again, the failure to build on that success can at least partly be attributed to a failure of the party leadership and of Momentum to heed the warnings of
some of us who have been concerned with these issues for a very long time. The first time I ever gave a seminar for the Momentum full-time staff and key cadres
(some time in 2016, I think), I stressed that in my view the failure of the party and the Labour movement since the 1970s to undertake a direct and explicit campaign
to de-legitimise the Murdoch press and the Daily Mail was our most significant failing, and one that would eventually have to be addressed. I pointed out that the
campaign against ‘the Sun’ in Liverpool, while obviously being very much dependent on local conditions, did seem to have had some success in weakening the
popularity of the xenophobic politics that has been that newspapers’ stock-in-trade since the 1970s. I suggested that we would need something like that on a
national scale, and that without it, the influence of that politics would inevitably undermine our capacities to win people over on the doorsteps.
Whether anything like that was really logistically feasible in the time that was available to us between 2017 and 2019 is debatable. But I do think that the
unexpected success of 2017 also persuaded many that no such strategy was required: that clever use of social media and a vigorous doorstep campaign during
elections would be all that would now be required to topple the Tories. That view was always perfectly understandable. But it is clear now that the failure to
challenge the tabloid narrative about Britain’s recent history – the story according to which immigration is the source of our social ills – was ultimately fatal to our
hopes.
The question this raises is whether the apparent success of 2017 was entirely an illusion. Was it the case, as right-wing critics always claimed, that Labour’s
success in that election was entirely down to May’s incompetence and lack of personal charisma? Doubtless those factors played a role. But so did the fact that a
section of our ‘traditional’ base in the ‘heartlands’ could be told on the doorsteps that Brexit would happen and free movement would consequently end (as stated
clearly in the 2017 manifesto). By 2019 they could be told no such thing, by a party whose conference had voted to preserve free movement at all costs in
September of that year. By 2019 we could no longer present ourselves as falling on both sides of the immigration debate at the same time; and we had done
nothing like the ideological work necessary to challenge the idea that immigration was the problem people should be worried about.
What was not illusory was the raw numbers, and the fact is that Labour won considerably more votes in 2019 and 2017 than at any general election since 2001.
This is surely a testament to the relative success of the movement-building strategy that the Bennite left had always argued for, ever since the calamity of the 1983
election. Beyond this, the sheer scale of Labour’s mobilisation of activists during the 2018 election was astonishing. I am 48 years old and I cannot remember
anything like it. I canvassed and leafletted for Labour in 1992 and 1997 and this felt like something on a wholly different scale. It felt like the beginning of a return to
mass democracy, of a kind that had been in long-term decline in the UK since the middle of the 1950s.
It would always have been wildly optimistic to expect that this new political movement, a mere four years in the making, could hope to reverse those decades of
democratic decline, in just a few short years. And it is surely obvious, just by comparing the relative electoral success of Labour under Corbyn and under previous
leaders, that a determination to maintain this movement-building momentum must remain a central element of any Labour strategy going forward. Any future leader
must have the capacity to enthuse and inspire the membership, as Corbyn did; or at least to lead a team including some charismatic individuals who can. If this is
sacrificed for the sake of a more apparently establishment-friendly persona, then we know perfectly well what to expect. Members and voters will desert the party in
their hundreds of thousands; and unless every progressive element of the programme is dropped, the press will find a way to smear and undermine the leader. If
you think they can’t do that to Keir Starmer, just because he has a knighthood and looks good in a suit, then you really have not been paying attention to the politics
of the British press in recent decades.
What is a Movement Anyway?
But it’s easy to say that Labour needs a movement. The question is: what kind of a movement does it need? Corbyn often talked of his desire for Labour to become
‘a social movement’. To be fair, one always knew what he meant by this. He meant that Labour should be a mass organisation, embedded in communities, seeking
to use its collective power to change public attitudes and fundamentally alter the power relations shaping British society. But, technically speaking, the idea of the
Labour party becoming ‘a social movement’ is a nonsense. It is a phrase that betrays a lack of understanding of what a social movement is, and that elides the
necessary differences between a social movement, a political movement, and a political party.
A social movement and a political party are just not the same kind of thing. By its very nature, a social movement (such as women’s liberation), must be too diffuse,
too spread out across society, too internally diverse, and yet too ambitious in its aims, for it to be able to simply coincide with a single political party. A political party
may very well become the main institutional vehicle carrying the hopes of a social movement at a given time and place; but it can never be the same things as the
movement as such, and must be much more focussed and much more specific and limited in its objectives, which must always involve winning elections.
A political movement can perhaps be understood as sitting somewhere between the two – never simply reducible to a single organisation and its institutions, but not
necessarily acquiring the scale and characteristics of a social movement as such.
From this perspective, Corbynism has certainly acquired the characteristics of a political movement. Going well beyond institutional confines of the Labour party,
incorporating institutions such as Momentum, The World Transformed, Novara Media, the Canary, Red Pepper, New Socialist, Tribune etc, this political movement
has made great strides. This is the formation that the next Labour leader must be able to hold together and help to keep expanding.
To become a social movement would require something more. It would require the specific institutions of Corbynism to become more porous to, and more
connected with, the wider ecology of campaigning groups, alternative media, and political institutions that all share more or less the same long-term objective. That
goal can be summed up as the creation of a more democratic society that is collectively capable of tackling the climate crisis, while reversing the redistribution of
wealth and power to the most privileged that has taken place since the 1980s, without collapsing into authoritarianism. To actually build and lead a social movement
committed to this goal would require the Labour party, amongst other things, to accept that it might be able to play a leading role in this movement, but that it could
not hope to contain it or control it. It would require the partisans of Corbynism to accept that they must build alliances wherever they can find allies, and that in many
places that might mean working with members of other political parties (or none).
Of course, both expanding the political movement and contributing to the emergence of a social movement would require other things as well. There is a great deal
of talk at the moment, as there always is when Labour has just lost an election, about the need to engage in deep and sustained ‘community organising’. I keep
hearing that Labour did better in 2019 in those constituencies the community organising unit was active (especially Putney); I haven’t seen the evidence yet, but
this seems plausible. Community organising is powerful and important because it creates a sense of collective agency and possibility, and there is absolutely no
way to convince people that socialism is a viable project if they do not have that shared sense of potential. Of course, ‘community organising’ can mean lots of
things, from street parties to all-out strikes. To some extent, though, all of these activities are valuable if they create, however momentarily, a sense of shared
power and possibility for their participants.
At the same time, for Labour to keep developing as a radical political movement, it must, as I have already suggested, be able to mobilise around a project of
explicit counter-propaganda in the face of right-wing media attacks. This is something that Labour simply hasn’t made any serious attempt to do over the past halfcentury, although it would once have been considered the most obviously primary form of political campaigning to engage in. It is worth reflecting on this. What if,
for example, local parties and supporters groups took it upon themselves to publish and deliver local newsletters, specifically identifying misleading, inaccurate and
ideological claims in the press? The fact that so many people now have in effect, full printing facilities in their own homes makes this a viable material possibility as
it would never have been in the past. The party nationally could provide templates, content, even complete pdf files. I’m not saying that this is necessarily what
should be done: this is just an example of the kind of initiative that would now be plausible. And we must think along these lines.
Devolving Power
For any such initiatives to succeed would require a significant devolution of power and resources to local parties and regions. In fact, some of the most
intelligent commentary on the conduct of the election campaign that I have seen has stressed the need to devolve the conduct of election campaigns and to
facilitate more distributed and autonomous production of substantial social-media content by supporters. And this would require a cultural and institutional change in
the party that Corbyn was never able to effect. Primarily what it would require is for the most powerful actors in the complex ecology of modern Labour politics – the
trade union representatives, MPs and the leaders’ office – finally to grasp the point that those of us arguing for distribution of power and resources across the
membership are not trying to take something from them; we are trying to create the only conditions under which the realisation of their political objectives is
possible.
Corbyn was only Labour leader for four years. During that time the party, and the organisational ecology around it (especially Momentum), made considerable
strides in the direction of a party and a political movement that would be capable of undertaking the tasks that I have been enumerating here. But there remained a
crucial imaginative threshold that it was never able to cross. It was never able to face up to the reality of its historical situation, and the extraordinary difficulty of
overcoming both an institutional apparatus and a media machine that was overwhelmingly biassed in favour of its enemies. Instead, too many of Corbyn’s
supporters mistook the first, faltering steps of a revival of the British left for some kind of pre-revolutionary moment, in which our sheer will to fight and loyalty to our
party leadership would be enough to sweep aside the apparatus of neoliberal and Conservative hegemony. This is by no means to downplay the extraordinary
successes of the movement. But if those successes are to go down in history as a foundation on which a new socialist future was built, rather than a glorious
diversion from a century-long history of failure, then their limitations, and the causes of those limitations, must be addressed. I’ll try to do this in the final article of
this series.
Part 6: History is Clear: Labour Must Lead an Alliance for Democratic Reform
Since 2017, the political right has successfully regrouped around a new hegemonic project which links public disillusionment with democracy to a nativist
nationalist agenda. Its objective is pretty clear: to prevent any threat to finance, real estate or extractive capital emerging in response to the looming climate
crisis and the demands of young people for jobs and homes. There is little question that the fight for these things and for democratic renewal will be central
to left struggle for the decade to come. But before considering the implications of this new hegemonic project, it is important to understand the structural and
institutional context that has allowed it to emerge so quickly.
This is the concluding article of a series on Labour’s December 2019 election defeat. In this final contribution, I will consider the strategic implications not
just of Labour’s defeat, but of the Tory victory. I will look at the structural conditions that made that result so likely, and how the left might go forward from
here.
A Pro-Tory System
It is normal for Labour supporters, members and activists to perceive the media as heavily biased against them. If they are sufficiently knowledgeable, then
they will usually understand that the entire electoral system is similar slanted. What’s striking, however, is that they usually seem to imagine that somehow
every part of the country’s political ecology – from Plaid Cymru to the ‘Daily Mail’ – consists of a general conspiracy against Labour. What this perspective
misses is that these systems are not simply anti-Labour. What they are primarily is pro-Tory: and anti-everyone else (including, for example, Plaid).
This situation has been developing since the early 20th century, with the emergence of the modern Conservative party as the unified party of British ruling
class. Since that time, the Tories have functioned as the party of British capital and of those other class fractions whose political orientation was defined by
deference to it. This is of course a simplification, but it is broadly accurate.
The pro-Tory bias of the British media is abundantly and transparently clear. But it is worth reflecting on nonetheless. It’s not as if the Green Party,
nationalists or Liberal Democrats get anything like sympathetic coverage in the UK media, even to the extent that their relatively small levels of electoral
support would seem to warrant. Arguably the extreme nationalist right gets more support from mainstream media than do the Liberal Democrats.
As for the electoral system, this is complicated. Historically it has usually awarded more seats for the same number of votes to the Tories than to any other
party. Occasionally this situation has been reversed in Labour’s favour. But, for example, when the latter situation obtained during the New Labour years, it
was clear that the reason for Labour’s temporary advantage was that it had captured the votes of swing voters in marginal constituencies, the vast majority
of whom were middle-aged, property-owning, conservative and individualistic in outlook.
In the 1990s, New Labour strategists were always very clear about what they had learned from decades of electoral failure for Labour: the First Past the
Post system, as it operates in the UK, effectively hands full control over electoral outcomes to swing voters in ‘Middle England’, who are ideologically
conservative and economically affluent. International comparisons tend to suggest that this is a feature of First Past the Post systems all over the world,
because they punish political parties and movements with geographically concentrated support. Socialism was born in the cities and has always had its
strongholds there, and so tends to suffer considerably at the hands of such a system.
But so do smaller parties with their support more evenly distributed, such as the Greens and Liberal Democrats. Here it is worth reflecting that since the
early twentieth century, the Liberal party and its descendant – the Liberal Democrats – have largely functioned as a party of anti-Tory protest and social
reform in localities where Labour has never had a strong presence. They have also been in coalition with Labour very regularly in the Scottish parliament
(prior to Labour’s Scottish collapse), the Welsh Assembly, and in local authorities up and down the country. It is true that at some junctures they have also
allied opportunistically with the Conservatives against Labour; and in recent years their national leadership has been captured by ideological neoliberals with
their political base amongst the urban upper-middle-class, who tend to view Labour as their main antagonist. But broadly speaking they have suffered as
badly as Labour from a system that is overwhelmingly biased in favour of the Conservative party; or at least in favour of a social constituency that is typically
pro-Tory, only voting Labour when the party embraces an explicitly centre-right perspective.
The reality of this situation was fully manifest in 2017 and 2019. Under any fair voting system, Labour, Plaid, the SNP, the Liberal Democrats and the
Greens would have been in a position to prevent the Tories and DUP from controlling the legislative agenda. If Labour had been willing to do a simple
electoral deal with the other parties, they could have made this happen, at absolutely no cost to themselves. They weren’t, and so the system did its work,
leaving May in control, while allowing her successor eventually to call another election in 2019.
At that election, as explained at the very beginning of this series, ‘Leave’ had a majority in an overwhelming majority of constituencies, bearing almost no
relation at all to its overall support nationally. This was surely the ultimate expression of the fact that, whatever party actually manages to benefit from it, the
UK electoral system overwhelmingly privileges older, white, propertied voters over all others. At the same time, the press has been increasingly oriented
towards an extreme English nationalist position for many years, resulting in almost all of the newspapers coming out for Leave in 2016, despite the wishes
of the then Tory leadership and of the most senior figures in the City of London.
Platform Nationalism
All of these circumstances created the context in which both the Conservative and Labour parties experienced the crisis of centrist neoliberalism. Under
these conditions, the attempt by a right-wing faction to assert control of the political sphere, from within the institutional context of the Conservative Party,
had every advantage.
Just consider the contrast between the ease with which Johnson expelled a whole bloc of anti-Brexit Tory MPs from the party, compared to the extreme
difficulty that Corbyn had in exercising any discipline at all over the Parliamentary Labour Party. This was not because Johnson was a strong leader while
Corbyn was a weak one. It is because a whole constellation of powerful forces (from the ‘Daily Mail’ to the hedge funds who funded the Leave campaign in
2016) was lined up in place to assist the transformation of the Conservative Party from a party of neoliberal conservatism under Cameron to a party of
nationalist conservatism under Johnson. No such powerful apparatus was in place to assist Corbyn’s attempt to transform Labour from a party of neoliberal
liberalism into a party of internationalist socialism. This is simply because no section of the capitalist class had any interest in assisting that project, while the
class forces that did have such an interest were incredibly weak and disorganised.
Let’s consider some history. The New Labour years had coincided with the absolute peak of global neoliberal hegemony. During that time the historic Tory
attachment to English nationalism had made it very difficult for the Conservative party to act as the agent for this phase of globalising hyper-capitalism. For
a brief period, a pro-capitalist and socially-liberal faction of the Labour party had taken on the role of managing the further neoliberalisation of British
society. But once that era ended, in 2008, the embedded institutional power of Toryism enabled the Conservative party, and its allies in the media, to
reassert their authority over the political scene almost immediately.
Initially, this took the form of the party under Cameron taking on the mantle of New Labour centrist liberalism, while undertaking a direct assault on all of the
social-democratic elements of New Labour’s legacy. But as the authority of neoliberal centrism continued to erode, a right-wing nationalist faction of the
British ruling class – exemplified by Farage and eventually embodied by Johnson – were quite easily able to push and pull the Conservative party into line
with their new project. Their counterparts on the left, by contrast, had an enormous struggle to fight in trying to win over the machinery of the Labour party
and its few media allies (at ‘the Guardian’ and in some sections of broadcast media) from their unwavering commitment to liberal, cosmopolitan
neoliberalism. That fight is still far from over.
Ultimately, the differences here are not difficult to understand. Corbynism was trying to take advantage of the crisis of neoliberal hegemony by transforming
Labour into a vehicle of socialist anti-capitalist politics. Labour has arguably never really been that before, and no powerful section of British society had an
interest in seeing that project succeed.
On the other hand, UKIP, the Brexit Party, the Tory right and the right-wing press were trying to take advantage of the crisis of neoiberal hegemony by
turning the Conservative party back into a vehicle of pro-capitalist English nationalism. The Conservative party certainly has been that before, and clearly
large sections of the capitalist class had a direct interest in seeing that project succeed, especially if the alternative was electoral success for Corbynism.
The deep embeddedness of Toryism within the structures of the British establishment ultimately made Johnson’s task infinitely easier to undertake than
Corbyn’s. It certainly made it easier to win an election as part of the process of undertaking it.
Johnson was able to take full advantage of this situation, while his campaign director, Dominic Cummings, was able to exploit the growing online ecology of
the alt-right, which exists in a clear relationship of mutual reinforcement with ‘the Sun’ and ‘the Daily Mail’ here, as it does with Fox News in the US.
Together, they were able to connect their extreme nativist politics with a general, and entirely justified, sense of disempowerment that many citizens share
today. That sense of disempowerment often takes the form of a mere rejection of the very possibility of democracy and politics as such. Johnson and
Cummings achieved all this by relentlessly circulating social media content that promoted the idea of Jeremy Corbyn as some kind of generic threat to
national security, by insisting that Brexit was a process that could be easily resolved if only parliamentarians got out of the way, and by using social media
and the press continually to stoke hatred, fear and resentment of immigrants. But above all, they operated simply by circulating so much contradictory
information that people felt that there were no information sources they could trust, and no basis for rational deliberation whatsoever.
In 2008, when Johnson first became London mayor (overwhelmingly with the support of suburban voters from London’s Tory fringe), I wrote an article for
openDemocracy arguing that a vote for Johnson was a vote against politics in general, in favour of a diffuse populist sentiment that was cynical of any real
change being derivable from democratic processes; a sentiment that expressed itself as support for Johnson precisely because he believed nothing and
took nothing seriously. In that article and over the next few years, I argued that the only way to challenge this form of anti-politics was for the leadership of
the left to accept that, since the 1970s, we have seen a deepening crisis of our democratic institutions, enabled by and enabling the progress of neoliberal
hegemony. I argued, against the assumptions of most of the mainstream left, that it was no good just to show by example that politics could really ‘work’:
rather, I suggested, the crisis of democracy had to be acknowledged and addressed explicitly. It never was.
In 2016, Anthony Barnett and Adam Ramsay argued that the Brexit vote, at least for many working class voters, was itself an expression of desperate
frustration with their lack of democratic agency: of the need to reject the authority of that unaccountable political class that had implemented the entire
neoliberal programme since 1975 – whoever happened to have won the most recent election – and who had done nothing to restore the dignity of our postindustrial regions. In his immediate reaction to the election result, Ramsay expressed wholly justified and articulate frustration that this message had never
been heeded by the party. As he explained, “Labour had made a retail offer to the electorate with a selection of attractive policies, but had never offered a
coherent narrative that addressed their sense of collective democratic disempowerment”. The Brexit narrative, by contrast, did exactly that.
In a further brilliant analysis of the 2019 election result, Ramsay shows how Johnson and Cummings have succeeded in carrying the project of Johnsonian
anti-politics to its logical conclusion. As he puts it, both their parliamentary antics and the digital propaganda that they subtly endorsed served to ‘make
politics awful’, as the whole Brexit process came to be experienced by much of the public as a symptom of the dysfunction of British democracy. Then,
having made politics experientially awful: they promised to end it. The promise to 'get Brexit done’ became a pledge not just to give the (neo)liberal elite a
bloody nose, but to finally draw a line under the whole traumatising process of the country trying to make a democratic decision on an issue of momentous
import, in a world in which nobody could be trusted. They created a kind of social machine within which people came to feel increasingly disempowered and
dismayed by the very experience of democracy itself; and then promised to turn that machine off. On some level, of course, this is how reaction always
operates: by making people feel that democracy is impossible. This is why depression, fear and futility are always affects that work for the right.
That is why it was never wrong for Labour to try to bring people a message of hope. But that message should have been the conclusion to a diagnosis of
the problem: and the problem was the breakdown of democracy under neoliberalism. Johnson’s ‘Get Brexit Done’ mantra implicitly acknowledged that
breakdown and its historical frame: promising some kind of resolution to both.
In a sense, there is nothing unique about Johnsonism at all. At least since the first Berlusconi administration, we have seen right-wing governments around
the world combine a discourse and practice of anti-politics – implicitly denigrating the very idea of democracy – with an illiberal extension of corporate media
control and a nativist social authoritarianism. ‘Populism’ is too simplistic a name for this type of politics, which is more distinctive and more technologicallyspecific than that name implies. It currently takes its most terrifying form in the shape of the Bolasnaro regime, and its murderous assault on the Amazon. In
all of its contemporary iterations, the new form of anti-democratic reaction has been vastly enabled by our entry into a world of platform media and shady
Facebook algorithms, delivering right-wing propaganda to nobody-really-knows how many people.
To be sure, the same technological processes have facilitated new forms of democratic and socialist resistance. We will need to make use of all of them if
the planet is to have any hope of survival.
Labour’s Disastrous Electoral History
UK general election 1951 | Wikimedia commons
But we will also need something else: a clear, realistic and intelligent assessment of our current strategic situation, and of the political forces at our disposal.
Let us make this very clear. The Labour party and the British trade-union movement have never, at any point in their history, been powerful enough to
overcome Tory political hegemony on their own, for any sustained period.
In 1906 the Labour Representation Committee had to form a non-aggression pact with the Liberals to make its first serious breakthrough into parliament. In
the 1920s Labour governments were only formed with Liberal support. In 1945 Conservative hegemony had been broken by the onset of war, which left
Churchill needing Labour support to run the country, which gave the party a position within the wartime national government, from which it could commission
the Beveridge report (again with Liberal support). Labour spent three years aggressively publicising Beveridge (literally hundreds of thousands of copies
were published), before fighting an election with a manifesto based on it. No equivalent situation for Labour has ever obtained before or since, nor is it ever
likely to.
In 1951 Labour won the popular vote with the largest majority ever enjoyed by an incumbent government. The most radical government in our history was
the most popular. If the Attlee administration had implemented proportional representation, as the Labour party had planned to do in the early 20th century,
then it would have remained in office into the 1950s. The UK would in all likelihood have become by far the largest and most powerful of a NorthernEuropean social-democratic bloc, along with the Scandinacian countries (in Sweden, for example, it was the parliamentary coalition between the Social
Democratic Party and the centrist liberals during this period that laid the foundations for the long-term success of social democracy there). The future of
Europe and the world would have been quite different. But, thanks to that fatal deference to British institutions that had already come to characterise the
Labour Right, no serious attempts at constitutional reform were made by the Attlee government. Despite that government’s popularity after 6 years in office,
First Past the Post worked to the advantage of the Tories, as it almost always does. They won the most seats. Labour was out of office for another 13 years.
In 1964 after an endemic Tory crisis, Wilson managed to scrape a tiny, ineffectual parliamentary majority. In 1966, at the very high water-mark of post-war
social-democracy and trade-union power, he was able to call an opportunist election at a favourable point in the economic cycle, winning an impressive
majority on 48% of the national vote. If any period stands as evidence against the theory that Labour can’t win elections on a progressive platform under
First Past the Post, then it’s the 1960s. But even then, Wilson’s only convincing majority was won when he had the advantage of being in government and
choosing the time of the election. And that was at the absolute historic high-point of social-democratic consensus, cultural radicalisation, working-class selfconfidence and youthful baby-boomer optimism. The Labour-supporting Daily Mirror was the best-selling newspaper on the planet. Even a significant
section of the ruling elite – at institutions like Oxbridge and the BBC – was sympathetic to socialism and Marxim because of their wartime experiences of the
struggle against fascism. Anyone who thinks that we are now living through a remotely comparable moment is more optimistic than me.
Wilson lost the next election in 1970. He won in 1974, but only with a tiny majority, and having actually lost the popular vote. First Past the Post favoured
Labour that year, but in doing so, it damned the party to 18 years in opposition, once it left office five years later. The party was only able to govern with the
support of the Liberals after 1977, and found itself in charge of a socio-economic crisis that the most intelligent Tories all knew they had been lucky to
escape having to manage. Labour’s reputation for economic competence took two decades to recover, and I would suggest that the collective political
unconscious of the British working class has never really forgiven the party for agreeing to the 1975 IMF demand to start rolling back the post-war
settlement, in return for a financial bail-out.
At the same time, changes to the nature and organisation of industry were undermining the traditional strongholds of Labourism already. Stuart Hall, Eric
Hobsmawm and others tried to warn the left that the nature of the crisis and its outcomes would have serious repercussions for the viability of their
traditional strategies. Some listened: but most called them traitors and sell-outs, only canonising figures like Hall in retrospect, many years later.
The trauma of the 1980s, including the 1981 formation of the ‘Social Democratic Party’ as a direct and damaging split from Labour, did not leave the party or
the non-Tory left in any stronger position. Neither, of course, did the catastrophic defeats suffered by the workers’ movement on global and local scales
during that decade. A completely failed project – a disaster for everyone who didn’t want to see the Tories in power for another 15 years – the creation of
the SDP at least made it very clear that the British party system never was going to resolve itself into the simple two-party duopoly that Labour members
always preferred to think of it as. This left Labour even more clearly unable to win parliamentary majorities without cooperation with other parties, and yet
more unwilling than ever to pursue such cooperation, because doing so would mean making some kind of rapprochement with the traitors of the SDP (or at
least with the party formed by their merger with the Liberals: the Liberal Democrats).
By the beginning of the 1990s, as a young Labour activist, I was convinced that Labour had only two strategic options open to it. It could preserve its identity
as a radical socialist party of the organised working class and the public sector, probably thereby consolidating around 32% of the national vote, while
conceding the ‘centre ground’ to the Lib Dems, allowing them to consolidate around 20%, while forming an alliance with them to produce a genuine antiTory majority (keep in mind that even in 1983, and certainly at all subsequent elections, the Liberal manifesto was far closer to Labour’s than to the Tories’).
Or it could accept that the only way to win a majority under First Past the Post was to transform itself beyond all recognition, moving way further to the right
that at any point in its history, so as to be able actually to take a significant share of votes directly from the Conservatives in Southern, middle-class
constituencies.
At that time most of my fellow student activists, even on the far left, shared my enthusiasm for electoral reform. But they dismissed the rest of this analysis
as far too pessimistic. They were certain that Labour could never move so far to the right as I was suggesting it might, and were sure that we would never
have to work with the Lib Dems. They confidently looked forward to a future in which Labour governments, committed to radical democratic socialist
programmes, would be elected under PR with over 50% of the popular vote. I often pointed out that this had never happened anywhere: even at the high
point of Swedish social democratic hegemony. But for this, I was generally accused of defeatism.
Labour didn’t win again until 1997. The party won office as ‘New Labour’, effectively having conceded all real political power to its traditional enemies:
outflanking the Liberal Democrats to the right, courting the votes of the aspirational middle classes at the expense of almost everyone else, openly
conceding a veto over its programme to Murdoch and the City of London.
This sounds like a condemnation, and it partly is. But it is crucial to be realistic and objective about the conditions under which Blair and his colleagues
operated. They were fully aware of the history that I have laid out here, and its implications. They were working under conditions of peak neoliberal
hegemony. There had been no major crisis for neoliberalism, no upsurge of countervailing forces, no significant generational swing to the left (although
since 1990, the Tories’ traditional poll lead among women had collapsed among younger voters, and that tendency would continue to this day). Most of the
residual Bennite wing of the party continued to behave as if global neoliberal hegemony were the fault of the perfidy and cowardice Neil Kinnock (who had
led the party from the left to the right between 1983 and 1992), and that it could somehow have been magically reversed if only he had stood firmer on
socialist principles. They offered no realistic strategic solutions to the worldwide crisis of the left. It is true that, for example, if John Smith (Labour leader
1992-4) had lived then he probably would have won the 1997 election (by a much smaller margin than Blair did) and enacted a somewhat more radical
programme than Blair: but he would have been destroyed by the press for doing so, and pushed out of office after one term.
Under these conditions, the only logical thing for Labour to do was to pursue a policy regime that explored what redistributive, democratic and socially-liberal
policy options might be open to it, while accepting that the power of Murdoch and the City could never be challenged. Of course I condemned them at the
time, as did my intellectual hero Stuart Hall. But in retrospect it was never clear what assemblage of social forces we expected them to mobilise in the fight
against the triumphant capitalist class: just 7 years after the collapse of the USSR.
Blair, like the British electorate (I think), showed an intuitive genius for registering the real balance of forces in a given social formation. He (like they) knew
that there was no point in a political party or movement making promises that its current level of strength left it in no position to keep. Where he stands
condemned, by my analysis, is in the complete lack of interest he showed throughout his time in office in doing anything at all to change that balance of
forces. I honestly think that any Labour government elected in 1997 – that wasn’t planning a one-term kamikaze mission against the legacy of Thatcher –
would have had to implement pretty much the same programme that Blair did initially, to avoid finance capital and its political agents simply annihilating
them. The alternative would have been to introduce PR and form an alliance with the Liberal Democrats: but die-hard Labourists like John Prescott
threatened to resign from cabinet if any such course were pursued.
Nonetheless, over the next two parliamentary terms all kinds of things could have been done to change the situation. An aggressive programme to raise
union density, a serious plan to restore the power and dignity of local government, and a genuine effort to improve and strengthen our independent media
sector: all of that could have been done and should have been. And if it had, then Labour in office might have been able to do the thing that it was not strong
enough to do in 1997, but should have been strong enough to do by the early 2000s: to initiate some plan of industrial reconstruction in the North.
But in those days, the Tories were nowhere in the North and most of the Midlands. The swing voters that New Labour depended on were all aspirational
middle-class citizens in the South. Labour lost literally millions of votes in the ‘heartlands’ between 1997 and 2010: by far the greatest proportion of those
that have been lost since that time. The road to 2019 was built by New Labour during this time.
Of course this was, fundamentally, because Blair and his colleagues had made an alliance with sections of the capitalist class – the City, the media owners
– who had no interest in seeing British national manufacturing recover. But it was also because they were under no electoral pressure to change course,
because the votes of former miners counted for nothing under First Past the Post. In fact Blair himself, cognisant of all this history, had wanted to implement
PR as recommended by the commission he set up, headed by Roy Jenkins, in 1998. But he was blocked by figures in his own cabinet such as Prescott and
Jack Straw, allied to the most reactionary sections of the traditional Labour Right. Without any obvious political motive to do so, faced with internal
opposition and challenging external circumstances, Blair neither pushed forward with democratic reform, nor pursued any political course that would have
prevented the alienation of its ‘traditional working class voters’ from the Labour party.
Of course, Blair’s failure to pursue a policy programme that would actually have reversed the rise of inequality in the UK (rather than just slowing it down),
would have actually begun to restore the power of organised labour (rather than just offering workers some minimal, if significant legal protections), would
have broken the stranglehold of Murdoch and his kind over our culture: none of this was primarily down to issues of electoral politics or system. Under the
historic conditions that they were working under, the New Labour government achieved a great deal: restoring funding to core services and effecting
impressive levels of regeneration in many poor urban areas. Their limits were the limits of the coalition of social forces that they had built: the Labour party
and its institutions, a largely passive membership and electorate, sections of the ruling class committed to a project of social liberalism and cultural
modernisation. If anyone else had been able to build a better one, then they could have had a go: but they (we) didn’t.
Once Labour finally hit a real economic crisis, under Gordon Brown, 2008-10, there was no assemblage of social forces with which to resist the Tory
resurgence. After the 2010 election, the Liberal Democrats – having been denied the electoral reform that Blair had promised them for over a decade –
threw in their lot with Cameron, who had won more votes and seats in parliament than Brown. Of course, Cameron had come nowhere close to winning a
majority of actual votes in the country, and the 2010 Labour and Lib Dem manifestos were (as always) much closer to each other than to the Conservatives’.
Under PR, a Labour-Lib Dem coalition would have been the probable outcome, and university tuition fees would never have been raised to £9k. Despite the
fact that they were, we haven’t seen a Labour victory since.
Hard-Wired Tory Hegemony
Surely by now the lessons of all this history are plain. The failure to adopt a system of proportional representation – as used by almost every other
parliamentary democracy in the world – has proven a consistent disaster for Labour and the people it represents. This is not because PR is some ‘magic
bullet’ for promoting social democracy, but because it at least represents a significant democratic advance on First Past the Post: a system which used to be
more common, a long time ago, but remains in operation now in Australia and Canada and almost nowhere else.
From a materialist perspective, this is not an insignificant issue. Social power relations, class relations, and inherent political biases can become crystallised
into institutions and technologies in ways that make future outcomes and uses of them more or less likely. For example: there is nothing inherent in the core
technologies powering smart phones that make it probable that they will be used to cultivate attention-deficit and neurotic, compulsive behaviours in entire
populations. But our phones have been designed by institutions (giant capitalist corporations) that have every interest in them having that effect, and so
certain tendencies for them to do so are built into the designs of interfaces, apps and platforms. In much the same way, First-Past-the-Post in Britain
entrenches and helps to reproduce a set of power relations and political procedures which have always, only ever, benefitted the forces of reaction. That is
one specific lesson of this story.
Of course it is also true that if we had had proportional representation for any significant portion of the past century, then neither the Labour party nor the
Conservative party would still exist in anything like their present forms. Both would have fragmented into a number of smaller, more ideologically coherent
units. I would submit that, given the history I have just outlined, whatever such outcomes may have ensued, they could hardly have been worse than the
ones that we’ve endured.
But the more fundamental lesson is this. The forces of Tory hegemony are simply too powerful for Labour and its movement to overcome, without forming
alliances with others, except at periods of unparallelled strength (or temporary crisis for the Conservative party). I’m afraid I do not believe that we are on the
verge of such a period; nor is there is any chance of achieving one without a sustained period of reforming government laying the ground for it first. Of
course such a recovery of strength would also require labour organisation, community mobilisation, and a general rebuilding of socialist culture. But it would
also need at least some years of sympathetic government to gather momentum.
What would it take to fight back?
Let me be absolutely clear here. I am not about to suggest for a moment that simply reforming the UK electoral system, or collaborating with other political
parties, would in any way be sufficient to the realisation of our political hopes. But I am going to insist that electoral reform is a necessary condition for
achieving those objectives; and that it would be illogical to have accepted that the First Past the Post system is broken, and yet to insist on trying to win
under that system while competing with other parties who also oppose it.
But first, if I am not suggesting that proportional representation – and electoral pacts to achieve it – constitute a sufficient means of defeating Tory
hegemony, then what would?
On the basis of my analysis earlier in this series and here, I’d suggest that there are three principal domains in which working-class power and democratic
efficacy have been deliberately and systematically undermined by 40 years of neoliberal hegemony. These are: labour organisation, local democracy and
the media. In each of these fields, institutions that were sympathetic or conducive to the democratic, self-organised power of working people have been
suppressed, diminished and defeated during the whole period since the 1960s. As I remarked already, I believe that it is the failure to intervene in these
domains for which the New Labour administration will eventually be remembered most critically. Had they done more to regulate the press and support
independent media, to actively encourage trade-union membership, and to restore power and autonomy to local government, then the Tory austerity assault
could never have been as successful as it was.
Each of these is a front on which we must now fight: organising communities and demanding local reforms, while building a local sense of solidarity and
possibility; supporting our own left media while openly attacking the right-wing bias of the existing outlets; above all, working to rebuild our unions by any
means necessary must be seen as an urgent task for all of us. Each of these is also a major area of reform to which any future Labour or Labour-led
government must commit.
And yet we will not achieve such a government without taking the weakness of our electoral position seriously. The 2019 election made one thing very clear.
Half a million new members, a new culture of technologically-enabled mobilisation, and a commitment to radical socialism, were able to save Labour in
England and Wales from the kind of collapse that it suffered in 1983 and that so many of its counterparts have already suffered elsewhere (including, lets
not forget, in Scotland). But it was not, and was never going to be enough to overcome a political system that overwhelmingly advantages the
Conservatives, once the Tories had lined up behind a coherent new hegemonic strategy.
Labour cannot overcome these forces alone, short of a miraculous and literally unprecedented recovery of its historic strength, past anything that it has
known before. It will only overcome them if it can lead a bloc of democratic forces that will include activists, community groups, unions, and other
organisations all round the country. There is no getting away from the fact that it will have to include other parties: all of those parties, including the Liberal
Democrats, who do not benefit from the right-wing bias of the British press and the British state. This anti-Tory coalition will have to be understood, at a
certain level, as an alliance of different social groups and different class fractions all of whom share a common interest in preventing the destruction of life
on Earth. But yes, it will also have to take the form of political co-operation between groups and parties that are used to competing with each other.
I say it will ‘have to’ because I simply do not think that Labour alone is institutionally capable of mobilising the levels of support that would be required to
overcome the obstacles that we face. Does anyone really believe it is? What would it even look like if it were? Perhaps if Labour party membership could
actually pass the 1 million mark, then it may become plausible to suggest that the Labour party alone can contain and cohere the entirety of the movement
that we need. Until that happens, we must try to begin to take seriously the reality of our strategic situation.
We will lead, or we will die
Early in 2017, I argued strongly for a strategy of cooperation with other parties. I suggested that we should pursue deals with other non-Tory parties
according to which we would stand down for each other in specific seats that each party respectively could not win, on a quid-pro-quo basis, and only in
seats in which local parties were happy with the arrangement. The aim would be to win a non-Tory majority, which would then introduce PR immediately
(presumably what would be introduced would be the system recommended by Jenkins in 1998). Another election could then be held under PR, or seats
could be allocated under the new system according to the vote at that election.
The proposal was not necessarily for any formal alliance with other parties beyond that. It must be stressed that this was never a proposal for Labour to
‘stand aside’ for other parties except in cases where a) the local party had deemed the seat unwinnable by Labour and b) the other party in question had
agreed to stand aside for us in at least one other comparable constituency, allowing us to win it. The result of any such arrangement would only ever be a
significant net gain of seats for Labour and a greater net loss for the Conservatives. It must also be stressed that neither I, nor any advocate of such a
scheme, has ever suggested that Labour or its supporters would stop engaging in movement-building and socialist proselytising in constituencies where
Labour did not happen to be fighting specific elections. And of course, the proposal was never for Labour to offer significant concessions to other parties on
matters of core concern to our base in return for such cooperation. My assumption – and I think it is well founded – is that most small parties (including the
Libeal Democrats) would make very few demands on a senior coalition partner who was offering them, finally, proportional representation.
Beyond this, I do, in fact, think that we could propose an alliance with other parties – even Liberal Democrats – that went further than mere electoralreformist expediency, on the grounds that the current climate crisis and the long-term crisis of British democracy and society are demonstrable and urgent
realities, that would obviously require a great collaborative effort by different social groups to address. We could invite all parties, and members of none, to
join us in the task of forging a Green New Deal.
What the effect of making such a public invitation would be, I don’t know. Some parties might accept it, some might reject it, some might split over it. I do
know that we would have nothing to lose by trying, and there would be nothing forcing us to continue with any such arrangement were the outcomes not
ones that we were happy with.
What is deeply disturbing is the frequent insistence of so many leftists that even trying to initiate such a process would constitute some kind of betrayal (of
what – socialism? the working class? – is never clear). This is not a rational response to a political and ecological crisis. It is a symptom of psychic
investment in a dogmatic and dangerous fantasy: the fantasy of one People, one Party, one Leader expressing all the truth and virtue in the world. And to
make the Labour party – of all things – with its compromised and complex history, the object of such as fantasy: it’s frankly incredible.
My report was published a few months before the 2017 general election. Our electoral result in June of that year was much better than I had dared to hope
for when I wrote it. But we didn’t win. If my suggestions had been followed (and I know that they were discussed by some close to the party leadership), with
electoral deals being done over merely a handful of seats across England, then we would have ended up with a Corbyn-led government. As it was, the firstpast-the-post system allowed Theresa May to stay in office that year, despite Labour’s achievements and her evident unpopularity. As for 2019: I’ve made
very clear in this series why I think that that election confirms even more strongly the argument that I made in the January 2017 report: that Labour can’t win
on a radical platform on its own, under First Past the Post. At least, not short of a miracle.
But We Came So Close in 2017 – Didn’t We?
Of course, critics of this perspective might look back to the near-win of 2017 and suggest that we might be able to reach that point again, and even cross the
line this time, if we’re not hampered by the Brexit conundrum, and if we have slightly more effective leadership and narrative. Well it’s true, we might. But I
have several responses to make to this.
One is to refer to my analysis in part four of this series, on Brexit. I would suggest, on the basis of the evidence there, that Labour simply will not be able to
put together that full electoral coalition again without adopting a reactionary position on immigration, or without having finally won a decisive ideological
victory against right-wing nationalism. I know how hard this is for many of us to take. But the clear fact is that one of the conditions for the 2017 result was
our manifesto commitment that free movement would end with Brexit; and the membership will, rightly, never allow us to take that position again.
So to achieve a result like that, we would have to have made significant gains in an ideological war against Murdoch and his ilk. And granted, the latter
objective is hypothetically plausible. I’ve said we should strive for it, and we should. But if we’re going to launch an ideological campaign against right-wing
nationalism, why on Earth wouldn’t we try to enlist the liberals into it, given that favouring a liberal immigration policy would be one of the few positions that
almost all Labour radicals would share with almost all Liberal Democrats? Just because we hate them forever? Is that really grown-up politics?
Another argument is simply this: why not? Even if we were in a position of unusual strength, making it possible to win an election alone, wouldn’t any
principled democrat among us want to see proportional representation introduced anyway, purely for democratic reasons, and given all the evident harm
that First Past the Post has done us? And in that case, why not at least do a one-off electoral deal just to ensure that it would happen, and insure against
any unforeseen disasters? What exactly would we lose by it? Even if we had managed to squeeze the Lib Dem vote even more than in 2017: the very fact
that we had done so would surely demonstrate that we had nothing to fear from allowing them the representation in parliament that democratic justice
demands.
But finally, the most powerful argument in favour of such a strategy is simply this. Like any historical moment, ours is constituted by complex and
contradictory tendencies. On the one hand, as I have explained, it is shaped by the long-term effects of noliberal hegemony and by the shorter-term effects
of its recent crisis. It is newly dominated by the resurgence of reactionary nationalism, adapted to the era of platform media culture. But is is also shaped by
the very tendencies of which Corbynism was just one, early and (hopefully) immature expression.
Those tendencies are manifest in the recent re-emergence of many of the political demands that neoliberalism was brought into existence to contain:
demands for forms of equality that could not be delivered by post-war social democracy (predicated as it was on patriarchy and white supremacy); demands
for democracy in the home, the workplace, the community and the school. They were already present in the short-term eruptions of radical democratic
utopianism that characterised the anticapitalist movement of the early 2000s, and Occupy a few years later. They are present in the half-formed, confused
but authentic critique of representative democracy that informs Extinction Rebellion.
These are the forces that can animate a 21st-century socialism, appropriate to the age of networked communications and complex social identities. But
nobody can seriously argue that such a politics can be contained and owned by one dogmatic party, committed to a mid-20th century model of social
change. Labour must let go of the ideology of ‘Labourism’ because it is wholly inimical to the complex culture that a contemporary socialism must embrace.
This is true at the most general level. But it is also clearly true at the specific level of British electoral politics.
We inhabit a political system that is not only designed to prevent the socialist left of the Labour party from taking power. It is now clearly biased against
every force other than nativist ‘platform nationalism’: ‘disaster nationalism’ in the age of ‘platform politics’. Under such circumstances, it makes no sense not
to try to build as broad a coalition of anti-Tory forces as possible – from anarcho-communists to liberals – to try to challenge its and change it.
Would this be easy? Of course not. But life is hard. It is likely that the displaced political class, and their liberal supporters in the wider managerial class, will
make at least one more attempt to regroup and take back the control of anti-Tory forces that they enjoyed throughout the New Labour period. The Labour
leadership election is the most obvious opportunity for them to do so. If the winner is a soft-left figure like Starmer, then they will exert immense pressure on
him to capitulate to their authority and their agenda. If it is someone from the left: well, we already know what they will do. Either way, such pressure must
be resisted at every turn.
But it must not be resisted merely with a view to isolating and separating Labour’s existing coalition from the middle-class liberals. As our psephological
analysis has made clear: it was losing their support that cost Labour perhaps more dearly between 2017 and 2019 than anything else. We may have to
show them once again that the long 1990s is over, and that the coalition to defeat the right can now only be led from the left. But we must bring them into
that coalition, whether that means bringing them into our voting bloc or not: if we can’t, then we are done for.
This is a proposition that meets with endless resistance from the romantic and dogmatic left, who see any talk of cooperation with liberals and centrists as
necessarily some form of betrayal, and who recognise no greater virtue than that of inflexibility.
Well, we have been here before. In the 1930s and 1940s, faced with the emergency of fascism, the communist and socialist lefts had to overcome similar
qualms and dogmatism in order to fulfil their historic duty. From the New Deal administration to the post-war Labour government; in Spain, in France, and on
a continental scale, when the Red Army became the only obstacle to the military triumph of Nazism: some were defeated, others were victorious, but no
other strategy could have worked. The forces of the left led the coalitions that the liberals were obliged to join. That is how fascism was beaten, and how the
gains of the post-war settlement were made possible. In the new form of reactionary, anti-democratic politics that Johnson represents, and in the climate
crisis that threatens the viability of life on Earth, we face no less of an emergency now. We will lead, or we will die.