What can we do to change the minds of decision makers and people in general to actually do something about preparing for the forthcoming economic/energy crises (the ones after this one!)?
Is the Labour party dying? It’s a question that commentators have asked since the devastating election defeat last week. But in fact, as a party of working-class self-representation, Labour is already dead.
Throughout much of the 20th century, there were parts of northern England where jobs came with firm expectations about Labour party membership. Labour, the unions and the nonconformist churches were the great social institutions of 20th-century working-class politics. Secularisation in the 1960s saw the decline in the role of the church. Then the unions were dismantled in the 1980s. Now the Labour party, as we once knew it, is gone. Constituencies that had been held by Labour almost since the modern two-party system was born – such as Don Valley and Wakefield – have voted in the Tories.
Change does not happen overnight. The roots of the present defeat take us back several decades. Labour’s dramatic victory of 1997 was built upon a shift in the composition of the Labour vote: more middle class, more concentrated in the home counties. In the 2000s, Ukip’s rise was widely seen as a threat to the Tory vote. But as Robert Ford and Matthew Goodwin documented so well in Revolt on the Right, Ukip was also starting to erode the working-class Labour vote. It shifted from its origins as an anti-EU party, criticising instead the government’s commitment to an open labour market and its embrace of EU free movement rules. Lacking real debate within Labour, the immigration issue became a symbolic one for voters, exemplifying the detachment of the London leadership from grassroot concerns.
Ideologically, Corbynism was a break from New Labour centrism but sociologically, it was more Blairite than Tony Blair. As the Labour MP Jon Cruddas has argued, the Corbyn revolution in the Labour party has narrowed its social base even further, making it the party of young, middle-class southerners, popular in London and some prosperous university towns.
A final nail in Labour’s coffin has been Scotland where, for different but not unrelated reasons, the party has lost almost all its seats. The collapse of the Scottish Labour vote over the past decade is one of the great electoral shifts in recent times, making the geographic retrenchment of the party’s vote in England all the more damaging.
The Labour party grandees currently reflecting on why the 2019 election went so wrong have been quick to blame Brexit. This is too easy. Brexit was both catalyst and cause. The Labour party’s response to the 2016 referendum reflected the sociological changes already under way at the heart of the Labour movement. Labour leave voters were concentrated in those parts of the country that were of little interest to many of the activists driving the party forwards.
Inevitably, this lack of interest was reflected in how the party responded to Brexit. Some – including Jeremy Corbyn himself – were sympathetic to an old-school left Euroscepticism of the kind articulated by Tony Benn. But that tradition has died within the party. Much of the party leadership and its membership believed that Brexit was evidence of working-class xenophobia and a general ignorance of all things EU-related.
There were some MPs, such as Caroline Flint, who warned against this and stood out as Labour defenders of the referendum result. But after a protracted struggle, ardent Labour remainers succeeded in making a second referendum a party promise. After three years of leave supporters being dismissed as racist and stupid, and seeing Labour eventually get off the fence and back the People’s Vote campaign, how on earth did the party expect its leave supporters to react?
Brexit was also a cause in its own right. It pitted a dogged commitment to the politics of democratic consent against an ideologically charged promise of socialism in one country but at the cost of negotiating a softer Brexit and rerunning the EU referendum.
For leavers, Brexit has always been about more than just policies. Membership of the EU denoted a fundamental change in society – a movement from being a nation state to being a member state. Governments increasingly seemed to be getting their legitimacy and sense of purpose not from their voters but from their association with other governments across Europe. Over time, a gap opened up between politicians and voters. Many people felt as if it didn’t matter who they put in Downing Street – they still had little say over the country’s governing structures or the most important decisions that shape society.
The current Labour leadership was often portrayed as dogmatic Marxists but on Brexit they demonstrated an incredible willingness to compromise on the question of rule by democratic consent. Because of what Brexit meant to them, voters were far less willing to compromise. When Theresa May first brought her withdrawal agreement to the House of Commons, the near-unanimous response by the British left was to reject her deal. Labour’s fate would have been very different had the policy instead been to accept the result of the 2016 vote, support her deal and then push for a post-Brexit election.
British politics post-Brexit will not be any kinder to Labour. With the social structures of Labourism in the north of England and in Scotland now in terminal decline, there is every possibility that the Tories will hold on to the new seats they won last week.
Labour isn't already dead, although it might be if it elects the wrong leader now. It actually has a golden opportunity to sort itself out, especially since Johnson is heading for some very choppy unknown territory.
From what I am reading in various places, a lot of the deeper thinkers in momentum know that Labour needs a big rethink, and they are opening up to the possibility of a leader not like Corbyn. Which means not RLB. Which means Starmer or Nandy.
The people in red wall seats are likely to vote for somebody, even if they have to choose between a bunch of people they hate. Most of us have to vote for the candidate we dislike the least, or against the one we like the least.
I believe Labour could indeed win those voters back, although it requires policy shifts that would send some of the Identity Politics Posse running away to the Liberal Democrats.
By a process of elimination. Leader of the Labour Party cannot just remain a permanent vacancy. Labour has a choice. Momentum-navel-gazing Long-Bailey, drift back towards the centre with Sir Kier, or choose the one who might actually turn things around. My choice is Nandy, but Starmer would do better than RLB.
You seem to think Labour are just going to wither and die, but the tories can't just exist unopposed and the libdems aren't going to stage a massive comeback any time soon because FPTP works hard against them.
Modern Britain has been shaped by two events: the banking crisis of 2008 and the Brexit vote eight years later. The reason Boris Johnson is sitting in No 10 is that the Conservatives have learned the right lessons from these episodes and Labour has not.
The Tories have understood that their response to the financial meltdown – a prolonged period of austerity that squeezed living standards – was unpopular and wrong. They also twigged that Brexit was a revolt against austerity and free-market economics more generally – so they have embraced the decision to leave the European Union and positioned themselves as the party of intervention and the working classes.
Labour got the first part of this narrative but not the second. In this general election it sought to divorce austerity from Brexit – with disastrous results. Labour won seats in 2017 when it said it would respect the referendum result, but saw its “red wall� breached when it moved steadily closer to remain. Having chosen not to listen to what voters in its former heartlands were saying, Labour now seems bemused to find that they have migrated to a party that did.
Labour’s Brexit stance was not the only reason it lost the election. The number of seats won by the party has fallen, with one exception, at every election since 1997. Corbyn bucked the trend in 2017 and although he only managed to emulate Gordon Brown’s performance in the defeat of 2010, there was hope that Labour could avoid becoming as politically irrelevant as the social democratic parties in Germany and France. But to do so Labour had to keep its broad electoral coalition together.
The problem in doing so became evident as the campaign wore on. Voters in the former industrial parts of the country are not mugs. They could see that Labour’s stance on Brexit had moved from respecting the referendum result in 2016, to telling the public to have another think (and to come up with a different result) in 2019.
And when canvassing returns showed the likely loss of seats in the red wall, Labour made matters worse by coming up with a string of panicky, and expensive, electoral bribes. To many voters, these seemed an insult to their intelligence, which indeed they were.
All of which leaves Labour in a terrible place. It is not just that the Conservatives are in power for at least the next five years. It is not even that seats once thought impregnable have been lost. It is the failure – for a second time in a decade – to be able to exploit conditions that looked tailor-made for a party of the left.
The financial crisis marked a watershed for global economic liberalism, because its fundamental tenet – that markets worked best when governments took a back seat – came under scrutiny. Brexit was one of the ways in which the pushback against the orthodoxy manifested itself, but much of the remainer left in the UK has been unable to grasp this. Instead of seeing Brexit as a vote for a different sort of economy, it has demonised leave voters as nativists and racists. It decided early on that no matter what form Brexit took, it would be worse than the status quo.
This was a curious argument, because it presupposed that nothing ever changes: that there would be no new policies, no attempts to improve on what currently exists, no attempts to respond to any short-term problems that Brexit might cause. By this token, Labour’s national investment bank and its Keynesian infrastructure programme would have made no difference either.
Brexit has already been a catalyst for change. It has forced the government to spend rather than cut. The Conservatives are committed to increase both the minimum wage and have pledged to use the money saved by scrapping a planned reduction in corporation tax to spending on the NHS. The need for state intervention in the economy is now accepted: regional policy is back in vogue.
So Labour’s remainers face a choice. Option one is to move straight from supporting a second referendum to arguing for rejoining the EU. This is an entirely negative strategy and relies on UK voters looking at the dismal growth across the Channel and saying: “We want what they are having.� It seems a tad unlikely.
Option two involves grudgingly accepting that Brexit is a reality and that Labour’s approach should be to make the best of a bad job. This would be a continuation of Corbyn’s triangulation strategy and have the same baleful result. The message sent to leave voters would be the same as it has been consistently from remainers since 2016: you got it wrong, you idiots. This doesn’t seem to be a particularly good way of rebuilding the red wall either.
Strategy three is the hardest for remainers to swallow but it is the only option that offers a way back for Labour: embrace Brexit and argue for a left version of Britain outside the EU. This could take many forms: a devolution of power to local mayors; a new deal for the north; state support for green industry that would provide well-paid jobs in every constituency. It means exuding optimism that things can get better rather than telling people who are struggling, but not destitute, that only state handouts can alleviate their misery.
The choice is simple: start putting together a post-Brexit progressive project or have a monster sulk and watch the Tories make the political weather.
From my rudimentary grasp of UK Parliamentary rules it looks like the Liberals are now powerless to block any bill or insert any provision that is to their liking. There only option is to wait for the Tories to put forward something controversial and champion the other side to move public opinion in there favor.
There fondest dream must be to have Boris screw up in some way that ticks off the majority of voters and have argued for a better way that becomes popular.
You're going to have an interesting five years.
The only thing that the LibDems have going for them is their strong showing in Local Government. If they didn't run so many local councils and be the opposition in many others the party might just as well give up and disband. As it is they toil on nationally in hope that one day they might pull off a comeback.
kenneal - lagger wrote:The only thing that the LibDems have going for them is their strong showing in Local Government. If they didn't run so many local councils and be the opposition in many others the party might just as well give up and disband. As it is they toil on nationally in hope that one day they might pull off a comeback.
What I can't understand is why they are finding it so difficult to figure out how to do this. The reason they did so well under pre-Clegg leaders was they were on the centre-left economically and offered a home for Labour supporters in seats Labour couldn't win. They built up a huge pool of these, who reliably tactically voted for them. Clegg broke that electoral system, and since then the libdems have responded by drifting ever further to the economic right. Jo Swinson is economically more right wing than Boris Johnson.
Their basic problem is that they are trying to steal tory votes, but not that many people on the left of the tory party are inclined to vote for the libdems. If they weren't willing to vote libdem last week, they probably won't ever be.
UndercoverElephant wrote:a lot of the deeper thinkers in momentum
That was funny
Cheered me up no end!
Stop being (daft). You aren't Albert Einstein, and you don't know who I am referring to, what they have achieved in their lives, or what they were saying.
UndercoverElephant wrote:a lot of the deeper thinkers in momentum
That was funny
Cheered me up no end!
Stop being (daft). You aren't Albert Einstein, and you don't know who I am referring to, what they have achieved in their lives, or what they were saying.
I do know who you are referring to. Momentum. You said some of their ranks were 'deep thinkers'.
They are not deep thinkers, otherwise the labour party would not be the vanquished, totally useless opposition they are now.
Momentum are three quid marxists. Hugely popular amongst the under thirty, useless degree, everyones equal, why can't I have more toys, life is not fair, metropolitan moaners.
Some of them might think deeply, Stu, but the quality of the thinking can't be guaranteed.
By the way, I have edited a couple of posts for language. There are ways of being derogatory without using bad language. I will have to remember this myself as well.
Stop being (daft). You aren't Albert Einstein, and you don't know who I am referring to, what they have achieved in their lives, or what they were saying.
I do know who you are referring to. Momentum. You said some of their ranks were 'deep thinkers'.
They are not deep thinkers
Know them personally, do you? Have you spent long evenings with them, discussing politics and philosophy? Because I have.
What you are doing is dismissing something you have no knowledge of. That isn't wise or clever. It's childish and arrogant.
