At its recent conference in Brighton, Labour narrowly rejected a motion calling for the party to back proportional representation.
The party membership was overwhelming for proportional representation, with 80 per cent of its representatives backing the resolution. But the leadership was staunchly against it, and relied on the unions to see it off. Many union machines are instinctively against; others are indifferent, and so were happy to win some brownie points with Keir Starmer by backing him. Under the intricacies of Labour voting rules, the resulting 95 per cent union vote against was—just—enough to defeat what would have been a huge political and cultural shift by a slim margin.
Most of the country will have hardly noticed. But this decision is extremely revealing about the state of Labour, and the wider prospects for progressive politics in the UK. Labour has a cyclical relationship to electoral reform: support grows when it looks like the party can’t win, and then melts away if it does.
But the party’s relationship to how we vote isn’t just instrumental; it is deeply cultural and emotional, guttural even. Labour’s view on how to count votes is not just important in itself, but inextricably bound up with the way it views relationships with other parties and communities, and its take on how change happens in society.
First-past-the-post (FPTP) allows the two-party system to endlessly reproduce itself. This duopoly (which with the Conservatives 11 points ahead in a fourth term begins to look more like monopoly) survives precisely because it takes 38,000 votes for every Tory MP and 50,000 for each Labour counterpart, as against 250,000 for every Liberal Democrat and 850,000 for the sole Green MP.
It is a barrier that keeps the small parties out and locks the two big parties in, no matter how badly they perform. The stasis is justified in the name of certainty and stability.
My purpose here is not to debate the merits of PR, but to understand why the Labour Machine refuses to adopt a voting system that might well lock the Tories out of power, in the way that FPTP increasingly does to Labour. The Labour Machine—that is, the leadership, officials, unions, most of the MPs and many of the commentators they lunch with—is unmoved, it seems, by the advantage the Tories derive from FPTP.
Of course, the machine insists, Labour could win the next election. It’s what it has to say. It set whirring a background noise in Brighton suggesting that by passing the PR motion, Labour would look like losers. But the party already appears like that: the public don’t think they are ready for government: one YouGov poll in August found only 15 per cent felt it likely Starmer would ever become PM, against 61 per cent who judged it unlikely.
Anything can happen and sometimes does, but the public has a point. The scale of the electoral mountain Labour must climb is eye-watering. It would need the same sort of historic swing that achieved a landslide in 1945 or 1997 simply to eke out a bare majority of one (which would today require a gain of 124 seats). And right now, amid a very messy mid-term for the government, Labour is well behind in the polls, at a point where oppositions on the road to government are usually well ahead.
With no sign of the SNP hold on Scotland weakening and the possibility of punishing boundary changes kicking in, outright victory would surely take an intellectual and organisational effort of a sort of which there is no sign around the Leadership.
A prize passed over
The only realistic route to Prime Minister Starmer is via some kind of cross-party collaboration in which Labour relies on the votes of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and Lib Dem MPs in the Commons, and—at least as important—the support of their activists and voters out in the country, as well as that of the Greens, who now look like they can make or break Labour in around a dozen seats.
The implausible 10.5 percentage point swing required for a Labour majority of one shrinks to a much more routine and realistic 3.5 points where the object is simply to sustain a non-Tory government. Backing PR opens this possibility. It encourages Lib Dems and Greens to back Labour in the seats in which only it can win, safe in the knowledge that voting reform will allow everyone to vote with their hearts in due course.
The quid pro quo is, and has to be, Labour supporters backing Lib Dems where only they can win and finding at least one extra seat which the Greens and their support deserve. Small sacrifices for a much bigger prize—a new government and a new politics.
But instead of grasping it at conference, Starmer made the bald claim that to get a Labour government you need to vote Labour. Even if your goal as a voter is to put him in No 10, this is abjectly untrue in, for starters, the 80 seats where the Lib Dems run the Tories second.
Faced with a choice between a real hope of a share—the dominant share—in an anti-Conservative alliance, and in all likelihood no power at all, the Labour machine plumped for impotence by doubling down on FPTP. Seasoned conference observers and campaigners all agree that if the Leader’s Office had wanted to shift one or two of the unions, such as USDAW, from being anti-PR to neutral or nudged Unison from being neutral to being pro-reform, they could have done it. But they didn’t. They wanted FPTP. The question is why?
Of course, cross-party collaboration is always fraught, but if the alternative is an unprecedented fifth consecutive loss for Labour, that is existential—both for the party and for the country, seeing as Scottish independence would be turbo-charged by the sense that the Union means perpetual overlordship by Westminster Tories.
Hegemony of opposition
The only rational basis for choosing no power over a shot at shared power is that the advantages the Labour machine derives over the third and fourth parties by its guaranteed second place is too great a gift to give up. The status of being Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition would seem to be reward enough for Labour not to budge. As one tweeter put it after the conference, for the party machine “hegemony of opposition is more important than power.”
In understanding Labour’s increasingly strange psyche we are aided by Roberto Unger, the Brazilian left theorist, who describes political institutions as fossilised version of old struggles. Labour is, and maybe can only be, the creation of the institutions and struggles of the late Victorian era. Its abiding sentiment is rooted in a mix of Leninism and Fabianism, which shared a managerial centralism. Profoundly mechanical, fixated on hierarchy and control, the party’s whole ethos is about getting to the top and commanding those below. Which, of course, is always purportedly for their own good.
At its worst the Labour machine practices a politics of abuse, almost taunting its own electorate and membership for having “nowhere else to go.” FPTP is the means to enforce this “them or us” binary choice. “Vanguardist” machine operatives are found on both the party’s left and right: Corbyn did no more and no less to advance the cause of PR pluralism than Starmer has done. They are both machine politicians. The right look to endlessly repeat 1997, the left 1945. Meanwhile the world moves on and leaves both somewhere deep in the rear-view mirror.
Given the premium on controlling the machine, there is no room for compromise or negotiation with other factions any more than there is with other parties. It is always all or nothing. Us or them. Anyone that isn’t behind you is, by definition, against you. Indeed, those who claim to be fellow progressives without toeing the line are the worst culprits of all: the cowards who flinch and traitors who sneer. That way, at least failure can always be someone else’s fault.
And then in every election, FPTP pumps up the tyres of the machine, guaranteeing a solid second place and keeping alive the dream of “our turn” in which the right leaders will finally enact, according to factional taste, social democracy or full-blooded socialism.
Out there is the real world, things are changing fast. The deferential, machine-like class and administration system that created the Labour Party is gone. A digital, inter-connected and flatter world is making new institutions and reshaping the electoral terrain. For decades, the working-class vote has been slipping through Labour’s fingers. Scotland went slowly and then dramatically, followed by the red wall. Now it’s the Asian vote that is being lost. In each case, people recoil from being cogs in Labour’s grand machine plans.
The electorate is more volatile than ever, which—surely—calls for a looser and more agile politics. Instead, even as it weakens, the party seeks to compensate through ever tighter control. Even as space opens up for the Greens in the cities, and the Lib Dems in the blue wall, and as Boris Johnson makes daring raids into Labour’s core turf by raising taxes to boost public spending, the machine only becomes more sclerotic.
Can Labour stop being Labour? It is doubtful. Neither of the twin revolutions of Blairism and Corbynism did anything to shift the party off its axis of control. The gap between the machine and the members is, as the PR vote showed, now gaping. FPTP keeps papering over the cracks. But only just. Something will have to give—eventually. The great danger, though, is that this won’t be the culture of a rusting but dogged machine, but all hopes for progressive change in Britain.
Salvation for progressive hopes lies in coming to understand that pluralism is not a sign of weakness, but a profound modern reality—and therefore a strength. It must be embraced not just instrumentally, for the purpose of winning, but as an intrinsic good in itself.
Labour’s “big tent” has rarely been a happy place, and it has now finally had its day. The party must its pitch its canvass upon a camp site that other progressives can also make their home. Either that, or we will all be fated to live in Tory Town for good.
