Read more: Is there still hope for Labour, asks a new play by Jack Thorne
In September 2005, back in the days when parties’ annual gatherings would still occasionally crackle with energy and intrigue, Tony Blair gave his 12th conference speech as leader of the Labour Party. As ever, it was an impassioned and daring address, so full of self-confidence as to seem almost unhinged. Blair had often seemed to lecture his party about the realities of the present and future. But on this occasion, he went much further. He enthused about an “open, liberal” economy that was “unforgiving of frailty,” but full of opportunities that would go to those “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” I can vividly recall watching the speech from the upper balcony of the Brighton centre, and thinking: who exactly were these people? In the most high-flown passages, it sounded as if Blair was not just admonishing Labour for its timidity and conservatism, but despairing of the same instincts among millions of ordinary people.
Towards the end, Blair extended the scope of this sweeping critique to Labour’s past. He recalled a 90th birthday party for the former Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, held at Downing Street in 2002. “Around the room: Denis Healey talking to Roy Jenkins; Tony Benn with Shirley Williams. Michael Foot, Jack Jones,” he recalled. “What brilliance; and what a pity.” He went on: “They were great people. But we were not ready then to see change was coming, accept it and then shape it to progressive ends.” One cannot imagine any leader since Blair having the chutzpah to be so condescending about some of their own party’s most titanic figures. There again, he believed he had the answers that had so eluded them: his three election victories proved it.
Yet there was a problem. Yes, Blair had just won Labour an unprecedented third term, but only thanks to the United Kingdom’s creaking electoral system. Labour had secured just 35.2 per cent of the vote, and the support of a mere 22 per cent of the electorate. In the wake of its victory in 1997, it had somehow mislaid four million votes. Particularly in its working-class heartlands, its core support was increasingly tending to sit on its hands, while middle-class malcontents looked to the Liberal Democrats. All told, the party’s support was unravelling, something which had actually been evident even when New Labour was in its pomp: at the 2001 election, for example, woeful turnout meant that Labour had attracted the support of only 24 per cent of the total electorate, and secured fewer votes than Neil Kinnock had managed in 1992.
In 2007, in an augury of the great political turnabouts to come, Alex Salmond became First Minister of Scotland, and began dismantling Labour’s hegemony north of the border. Soon after, Labour acted on its rising angst about Blair and installed Gordon Brown, who, after making vague promises of some kind of social democratic renaissance, then delivered more of the same, without any of his predecessor’s political wizardry. So it was that at the election of 2010, Labour’s vote-share came down to 29 per cent—its second-lowest showing since 1918.
In the wake of this apparent nadir came Ed Miliband: he pledged, in contrast with his older brother’s sense of continuity with the recent past, to jettison decisively the worst heresies of the New Labour period, and finally allow the party—and trade unions—to feel at ease with what was happening at the top. Though his leadership wobbled from the start, he offered Labour a seductive vision of quick electoral recovery, predicated on the political turbulence let loose by the financial crisis—and the simplest reading of the opinion polls seemed to back him up. Even so soon after such a monumental defeat, it was suggested, Labour might re-discover its conscience, belatedly grapple with its own supporters’ economic woes, and defy the rules of post-Thatcher politics to return to government. Indeed, for around 18 months—starting in the summer of 2011, when Miliband took on Rupert Murdoch and Labour’s subsequent poll rating climbed as high as 45 per cent—it seemed as if the dream might even come true.
But now look. Labour appears to have invested all its energy in a dire electoral strategy, whereby if its core vote can be kept onside and the party retains enough dismayed former Lib Dems, it can be confident of a narrow victory in May. Miliband has since settled into a pattern in which regular crises are followed by supposed comebacks—set-piece speeches, usually, which are briefly pored over, before they quickly fade away—which then give way to more supposed calamities. The press inevitably likes it that way: indeed, thanks to a topsy-turvy version of the formula once beloved of the British music press, many journalists seem to knock him down so they can build him up again, before the cycle begins again.
Meanwhile, much deeper forces do their work. Labour seems incapable of going beyond a poll rating of 35 per cent, and is losing much-needed support to the UK Independence Party (Ukip) and the Greens, while failing to attract disaffected Tories. Thanks to the crooked wonders of first-past-the-post, the party may still win in May—though whether it could claim any meaningful mandate is surely very doubtful. Alternatively, as suggested by the most fear-inducing opinion polls, the party might tumble back to its 2010 share of support, or perhaps go lower still: towards the 27.6 per cent it managed in 1983, when Labour offered the electorate eye-watering socialism to no avail, and political commentators speculated about its imminent demise.
There have been two kinds of response to the latest phase of Labour’s crisis. By far the loudest has focused on Miliband’s apparent inability to eat bacon sandwiches, his poor approval ratings and other signifiers of his alleged uselessness—as if such things entirely explain Labour’s woes. Meanwhile, though the everyday reporting of British politics rarely addresses the deep forces that underlie the fate of the main parties, these big themes are at least starting to intrude into mainstream commentary. Even the kind of columnist who tends to fixate on Westminster intrigue now understands that an occasional piece about the great crisis in political orthodoxies is obligatory, and the idea that 2014 has seen a series of profound watersheds is common currency.
Both main parties are the victims of the same forces, and are in comparable states of disarray. The key factor is a long process of dealignment—based on what some social theorists call “disorganised” capitalism and, in Labour’s case, strongly tied to deindustrialisation—which goes back at least four decades and is now being played out all over Europe. Compounding these changes, the unequal, cash-strapped economy with which Britain ended up after the boom years has shredded both parties’ time-honoured pitches to the electorate: with Labour, the idea that public spending is a panacea for most problems; and on the Tory side, the belief that an individualism manifested in hard work and property ownership will always see people right.
Clearly, the demise of these old certainties is bad news for both parties, but it represents huge problems for Labour. Centre-right politics, after all, tends to have a supportive coalition of forces ready made: if your mission is to maintain free-market capitalism while liberalising the economy still further, most of the mainstream press, along with the forces of corporate power, will gladly help. Blair and Brown’s project partly amounted to the repositioning of their party so as to take advantage of this fact—but when New Labour ran out of road, and Miliband began re-emphasising themes of insecurity and inequality, the challenges faced by 21st-century social democracy presented themselves anew.
Across the country, Labour’s problems are clear. In whole swathes of the English south, it is no longer part of the political conversation. In Scotland, to use a term coined by the academic and writer Gerry Hassan, it finds itself in the unenviable position of being “undead”: still nominally in the game, but now dwarfed by the Scottish National Party (SNP) and a range of left-of-centre groups who see it as a conservative relic of a failed past. Meanwhile, in the party’s remaining heartlands, from the south Wales valleys to the post-industrial expanse of south Yorkshire, Labour’s decline is something you can almost feel.
Choose your town, and the requisite parts of the story will usually be there. A Labour Club in need of a lick of paint will stand as a monument to an era when the party was tightly woven into local life. The MP or prospective candidate may have arrived from elsewhere, as a highly-rated political hotshot—one thinks here of Miliband himself, representing Doncaster North; or Stephen Kinnock, the son of a former Labour leader recently chosen to be the dead-cert MP for the faded Welsh steel-town of Aberavon. Their seat will still be nominally safe, but between 1997 and now, Labour’s share of the vote will have tumbled, usually from somewhere around 70 per cent to the mid-50s.
Those who still vote Labour might talk about doing so as a matter of ancestor-worship: “My grandad always voted Labour, so that’s what I do.” People who feel more sceptical about the party will often accuse it of taking them for granted—witness the curt verdict I heard this summer in one of Labour’s most treasured redoubts: “What’s Labour done for the Rhondda Valley? Not a lot. Nothing.” There will be frequent mention of a point during the 1990s when the party ceased to know what it stood for, and harsh words about Blair: “More Tory than the Tories,” or something similar. And everywhere, the traditional foundations of Labour hegemony have crumbled. In 10 years of chasing Labour’s ghosts as a journalist, I have had countless conversations that highlighted all this, but the best happened in Merthyr Tydfil in the week of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. In the town centre, I spoke to an 18 year old who was finding it impossible to get a job. I wondered, did she know what a trade union was? “No,” she said. “I don’t. What’s that?”
These changes are glaringly evident in Labour’s core areas and regions, but they ripple out into the country at large. And when the party’s bond with even its most loyal voters is as weak as all this suggests, it may only take the appearance of a strong political rival to shake Labour to its foundations. This is the essence of what has happened in Scotland; it also accounts for Ukip’s increasingly impressive showing in the north of England, traditionally Labour-voting pockets of the English east and, if opinion polls are to be believed, Wales. Ukip leader Nigel Farage well knows this, and is revelling in it. “Everybody thought that people’s tribal allegiance to Labour was as strong, if not stronger, than the tribal allegiance to the Conservative Party,” he said recently. “What we’re actually finding is they [Labour voters] don’t recognise the tribe… People that come from the Labour side of the equation don’t think anyone’s on their side.”
On the face of it, they might have a point. Politics, after all, is about much more than dry matters of policy: it comes down to essentially emotional affinities, and impressionistic readings of whether or not a party can make any convincing claim to understanding people’s lives. Here, Labour has long been found wanting. As the party has shrunk as a presence in society and the trade unions have been pushed out of the economy, the parliamentary party’s narrowing range of backgrounds has only increased its disconnection—not just from its core supporters, but whole swathes of the entire electorate—and accelerated its decline.
Nearly all the senior members of the Shadow Cabinet began their careers as 20-something political researchers and advisors. Earlier this year, the Guardian discovered that around half of Labour’s candidates in marginal seats had similarly been “special advisors, party workers, researchers, lobbyists or MPs.” You know these people when you see them: they tend to speak in a Blair-ish idiom which extends even to their hand gestures; they give off the sense that Westminster politics defines the entirety of their interests and they are often rather accident-prone.
In July this year, Chuka Umunna—who, to be fair, saw out his pre-parliamentary career as a lawyer, before he became the MP for Streatham and the Shadow Business Secretary—was mid-way through an interview with the BBC when he betrayed the fact that he did not know how to pronounce “Worcester” (it came out sounding like “Wichita,” the city in Kansas immortalised in Glen Campbell’s 1968 hit “Wichita Lineman”). More recently, there was the episode in which the then-Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry took to the campaign trail in Rochester, and tweeted a picture of a house—complete with a white van—decked out with three St George’s flags. Her tweet merely said “Image from #Rochester,” but accusations of snobbery were hardly quietened by her subsequent explanation: she thought the image was “remarkable” and said she had never seen a house “completely covered in flags before” (as luck would have it, she is also the MP for Islington). Miliband’s aides somewhat speciously claimed that they had never seen him so angry, and she was effectively sacked. Whether she deserved the punishment was open to question. What was most interesting was the Labour leadership’s obvious twitchiness about the white working class who once formed its core vote.
These stories would look like examples of simple ineptitude, if they did not speak a profound truth: that, to quote from Peter Oborne’s prescient book The Triumph Of The Political Class (2007), the modern Westminster elite “is distinguished from earlier governing elites by a lack of experience and connection with other ways of life”—even, it seems, in its own political backyard.
In an age like ours, this kind of detachment might yet prove politically fatal. The reasons are bound up with millions of Britons’ collective response to globalisation, and the hardship and disorientation let loose by the crash. Contrary to Blair’s exhortations in 2005, most people have failed to be “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” Equally, leftist fantasies of some mass post-2008 yearning for traditional Labour values have hardly materialised. To a limited extent, and to Miliband’s credit, questions of privilege and disadvantage and the predicament of the so-called “squeezed middle” have intruded on mainstream politics in a way that they did not during the New Labour period. But as evidenced by the arrival of Ukip and much of the momentum behind the SNP, they are increasingly drowned out by a cacophony of noise about identity, belonging and, with particularly serious implications for Labour, what it is to be politically authentic.
Labour’s reliance on a caste of essentially cultureless metropolitan politicians means that it tends to leave this terrain open to other parties. Nowhere is this more evident than in its unbelievably clunky manoeuvrings on immigration. Lacking any real emotional connection with the places where population change is a huge issue, it can neither stick to its liberal guns and speak a meaningful language of reassurance—nor, if it really wants to chase after Ukip and the Conservatives, give out “tough” messages with any credibility. Instead, Labour’s panicked response is to affect hardline rhetoric that nobody believes, while also insisting that immigration has been to Britain’s great benefit. To quote the Scottish writer Alex Massie, the message seems to be: “Ukip are right. Please don’t vote for them.” Such confusion is what happens when you throw rather inexperienced people into the midst of a debate that is not just visceral, but politically dangerous. Put bluntly, they cannot cope.
Strangely, a penetrating analysis of Labour’s current impasse has emerged from the very heart of the party itself. Since 2012, the Labour free-thinker Jon Cruddas—himself a former advisor to Tony Blair, though he has always been at pains to avoid the habits and mindset of the political class—and the academic Jonathan Rutherford have been working on the party’s policy review. This has produced a mountain of material, split between specific recommendations and a broader examination of Labour’s possible future. The most eloquent example of the latter is a jointly-authored, 50-page text entitled “One Nation: Labour’s political renewal,” which quietly emerged under the nose of the leadership in early September.
Some of the policy review’s proposals will make it into the 2015 manifesto—but the surrounding framework assembled by Cruddas and Rutherford looks like being far too iconoclastic for the leadership to endorse. “Labour has lost its social anchorage in the coalitions built up around the old industrial working class,” they write. “Across Europe, social democracy faces a similar predicament. Once great ruling parties have become hollowed out and are in danger of shrinking into professionalised political elites. In government, these parties were often neither very social, nor very democratic. They tended to be top down and state driven, compensating for the system, but not reforming it. It was politics that did things to and for people rather than with them. The old model of social democracy built in the industrial era has now come to the end of its useful life.”
As they appear to see it, Labour’s increasing disconnection from its own supporters and its reliance on a dwindling clique of Westminster insiders are symptomatic of an even deeper predicament—the extent to which the party’s basic mission is being left behind by modernity. In the midst of the nostalgic stink kicked up by Ukip, that may sound strange, but it actually represents the beginnings of a far-sighted answer to Britain’s current political tumult. “People say, ‘We want our country back,’” Cruddas recently told me. “They say, ‘The system isn’t working.’ This is a politics of recognition. It’s about how people’s lives are. And the question of their powerlessness can only be answered by giving them more power.”
At the core of this, in keeping with the cold fiscal climate, is a rejection of Labour’s essentially Fabian notion of benevolent big government, and an alternative vision of a devolved, participatory future: the reinvention of Labour as a more open party, the empowerment of cities, some first steps towards workplace democracy, even the abolition of Whitehall behemoths such as the Departments of Work and Pensions, and Communities and Local Government. Running alongside it is an idea of contribution that runs well beyond the leadership’s talk about a “something for something” benefits system. As Cruddas puts it, his vision is of “contributing—looking out for your neighbour, voting… not hoovering up Special Brew at half 10 in the morning, and running around with your weapon-dog.”
In contrast to all this, Labour politics, and the culture of the British left more generally, is still wedded to a dreamy yearning for some crude replay of Clement Attlee’s reforming Labour government of 1945-51, and an enduring belief in the capture of the centralised state—and on these fundamentals, Labour’s instincts have barely moved. In mid-November, for example, the party sent out an email detailing the policies that Miliband now thinks define his leadership. Note the verbs: he will apparently “scrap” the bedroom tax and the Health and Social Care Act, “force” energy companies to cut their bills and “ban” exploitative zero-hours contracts. As further signposts to the good society, there will be a new 10p rate of tax, a mansion tax, and the restoration of the 50p rate of tax. To anyone with left-ish politics, all this will be fine as far as it goes, but it sounds like unreconstructed lever-pulling, and takes no account of the decline of trust and the disappearance of a world in which voters happily left the job of bringing about social change to politicians. What, one wonders, does Labour have to say about participation, meaningful empowerment or pushing public services towards the kind of horizontal engagement that now defines millions of lives, thanks to everything from Facebook to Mumsnet? In February this year, Miliband gave a one-off speech extolling the wonders of “people-powered public services.” It offered a few tantalising examples of what this might mean—open access to personal data, the creation of networks of people who use the same public service, so as to hold its providers to account—but was then left completely undeveloped. The tenor of Labour’s plan for government is still coldly mechanistic. To use Cruddas and Rutherford’s phrase, it’s a matter of doing things to and for people, rather than with them.
By way of underlining that a fast-changing world threatens even the ideas that underlie the party’s name, there is also the question of work. In June last year, another Miliband speech—as if to confirm Labour’s often antediluvian idea of politics, speeches are still the main way he communicates—focused on the benefits system, extolling the wonders of “jobs for everyone who can work” and “good employment.” Labour is committed to a so-called “compulsory jobs guarantee” which will oblige young people to take “a job” after a year or lose their benefits (on Twitter, it was hyped using the cloying hashtag “#partyofwork”). There seems to be an unchanged idea here of paid employment as the cure for most ills, and an almost sentimental belief that dependable jobs, somehow underwritten by government, can still exist in abundance. The problem is that the public well knows that reality is speeding off somewhere else. If 15 per cent of British workers—and rising—are now self-employed, temporary contracts are becoming omnipresent, and people increasingly bounce from job to job, the party of labour once again runs the risk of looking as if it knows far too little of life as it is actually lived.
In fairness, Miliband’s promises to move against zero-hours contracts suggest that the leadership knows it has to have some better answers. But the bigger picture is surely of profound changes—more serious, even, than the decline of manual labour that triggered Labour’s long retreat—which require a political paradigm shift. What if, for technological reasons rather than thanks to the awfulness of neoliberal capitalism, we are in an accelerated phase of the long passage away from jobs-for-life? In that scenario, if the centre-left wants to give people greater security, it will have to do so in advance of their entry to the workplace, rather than thinking that once they have been shoved into the call centre, or fast-food restaurant, all will be well. At the cutting-edge of left politics, one big idea is aimed at achieving exactly this: a guaranteed citizens’ income—a policy, tellingly, at the centre of the platform of Podemos, the nascent party of the left now topping the polls in Spain. In Britain, the only political forces which are attempting to advance the same idea are the Greens and Compass, the left pressure group that has provided Cruddas with a lot of his inspiration. Not that one should expect Labour’s senior figures to embrace such policy exotica just yet, but the absence of any real interest in the idea—even among the trade unions—speaks volumes about a party that is in danger of falling asleep.
Self-evidently, these are strange, profoundly volatile times. The old dualistic politics is over. Only the electoral system, which may yet break under the strain, keeps the show going. As far as Labour is concerned, Blair may yet prove to have been the last of his kind, triumphantly claiming to have grasped the key to history, and winning supposedly thumping election victories, just before his party’s decline rendered such grandstanding impossible.
Certainly, the great industry of commentary claiming that if only Labour did this or that it would be restored to its old glories increasingly sounds flatly silly. Like most members of the Labour tribe, I have my own notion of what an ideal party of the centre-left might look like, but I do not think for a moment that it would restore the party’s old majoritarian dream. The politics of the future, on left and right, will be pluralistic and often chaotic; at this rate, it may eventually not involve Labour at all. I do not say that with any great relish, but if era-defining political shifts are afoot, you can hardly pretend that your own side will somehow be immune.
Back in 2005, with his characteristically odd grammar and almost biblical sense of destiny, Blair dispensed his own take on the arrival of bracingly new times. “A baby is born,” he said. “The father takes a photo on his mobile. In seconds relatives around the world can see, and celebrate. A different world to the one we were born into. Faster, more exciting, yet with that come threats, too.” The rest of what he said now looks dated beyond words: the expression of a pompous kind of politics that Labour was right to leave behind. But on that simple point, how right he was. And how grave those threats look for the party he once led.
Read more: Is there still hope for Labour, asks a new play by Jack Thorne
In September 2005, back in the days when parties’ annual gatherings would still occasionally crackle with energy and intrigue, Tony Blair gave his 12th conference speech as leader of the Labour Party. As ever, it was an impassioned and daring address, so full of self-confidence as to seem almost unhinged. Blair had often seemed to lecture his party about the realities of the present and future. But on this occasion, he went much further. He enthused about an “open, liberal” economy that was “unforgiving of frailty,” but full of opportunities that would go to those “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” I can vividly recall watching the speech from the upper balcony of the Brighton centre, and thinking: who exactly were these people? In the most high-flown passages, it sounded as if Blair was not just admonishing Labour for its timidity and conservatism, but despairing of the same instincts among millions of ordinary people.
Towards the end, Blair extended the scope of this sweeping critique to Labour’s past. He recalled a 90th birthday party for the former Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan, held at Downing Street in 2002. “Around the room: Denis Healey talking to Roy Jenkins; Tony Benn with Shirley Williams. Michael Foot, Jack Jones,” he recalled. “What brilliance; and what a pity.” He went on: “They were great people. But we were not ready then to see change was coming, accept it and then shape it to progressive ends.” One cannot imagine any leader since Blair having the chutzpah to be so condescending about some of their own party’s most titanic figures. There again, he believed he had the answers that had so eluded them: his three election victories proved it.
Yet there was a problem. Yes, Blair had just won Labour an unprecedented third term, but only thanks to the United Kingdom’s creaking electoral system. Labour had secured just 35.2 per cent of the vote, and the support of a mere 22 per cent of the electorate. In the wake of its victory in 1997, it had somehow mislaid four million votes. Particularly in its working-class heartlands, its core support was increasingly tending to sit on its hands, while middle-class malcontents looked to the Liberal Democrats. All told, the party’s support was unravelling, something which had actually been evident even when New Labour was in its pomp: at the 2001 election, for example, woeful turnout meant that Labour had attracted the support of only 24 per cent of the total electorate, and secured fewer votes than Neil Kinnock had managed in 1992.
In 2007, in an augury of the great political turnabouts to come, Alex Salmond became First Minister of Scotland, and began dismantling Labour’s hegemony north of the border. Soon after, Labour acted on its rising angst about Blair and installed Gordon Brown, who, after making vague promises of some kind of social democratic renaissance, then delivered more of the same, without any of his predecessor’s political wizardry. So it was that at the election of 2010, Labour’s vote-share came down to 29 per cent—its second-lowest showing since 1918.
In the wake of this apparent nadir came Ed Miliband: he pledged, in contrast with his older brother’s sense of continuity with the recent past, to jettison decisively the worst heresies of the New Labour period, and finally allow the party—and trade unions—to feel at ease with what was happening at the top. Though his leadership wobbled from the start, he offered Labour a seductive vision of quick electoral recovery, predicated on the political turbulence let loose by the financial crisis—and the simplest reading of the opinion polls seemed to back him up. Even so soon after such a monumental defeat, it was suggested, Labour might re-discover its conscience, belatedly grapple with its own supporters’ economic woes, and defy the rules of post-Thatcher politics to return to government. Indeed, for around 18 months—starting in the summer of 2011, when Miliband took on Rupert Murdoch and Labour’s subsequent poll rating climbed as high as 45 per cent—it seemed as if the dream might even come true.
But now look. Labour appears to have invested all its energy in a dire electoral strategy, whereby if its core vote can be kept onside and the party retains enough dismayed former Lib Dems, it can be confident of a narrow victory in May. Miliband has since settled into a pattern in which regular crises are followed by supposed comebacks—set-piece speeches, usually, which are briefly pored over, before they quickly fade away—which then give way to more supposed calamities. The press inevitably likes it that way: indeed, thanks to a topsy-turvy version of the formula once beloved of the British music press, many journalists seem to knock him down so they can build him up again, before the cycle begins again.
Meanwhile, much deeper forces do their work. Labour seems incapable of going beyond a poll rating of 35 per cent, and is losing much-needed support to the UK Independence Party (Ukip) and the Greens, while failing to attract disaffected Tories. Thanks to the crooked wonders of first-past-the-post, the party may still win in May—though whether it could claim any meaningful mandate is surely very doubtful. Alternatively, as suggested by the most fear-inducing opinion polls, the party might tumble back to its 2010 share of support, or perhaps go lower still: towards the 27.6 per cent it managed in 1983, when Labour offered the electorate eye-watering socialism to no avail, and political commentators speculated about its imminent demise.
There have been two kinds of response to the latest phase of Labour’s crisis. By far the loudest has focused on Miliband’s apparent inability to eat bacon sandwiches, his poor approval ratings and other signifiers of his alleged uselessness—as if such things entirely explain Labour’s woes. Meanwhile, though the everyday reporting of British politics rarely addresses the deep forces that underlie the fate of the main parties, these big themes are at least starting to intrude into mainstream commentary. Even the kind of columnist who tends to fixate on Westminster intrigue now understands that an occasional piece about the great crisis in political orthodoxies is obligatory, and the idea that 2014 has seen a series of profound watersheds is common currency.
Both main parties are the victims of the same forces, and are in comparable states of disarray. The key factor is a long process of dealignment—based on what some social theorists call “disorganised” capitalism and, in Labour’s case, strongly tied to deindustrialisation—which goes back at least four decades and is now being played out all over Europe. Compounding these changes, the unequal, cash-strapped economy with which Britain ended up after the boom years has shredded both parties’ time-honoured pitches to the electorate: with Labour, the idea that public spending is a panacea for most problems; and on the Tory side, the belief that an individualism manifested in hard work and property ownership will always see people right.
Clearly, the demise of these old certainties is bad news for both parties, but it represents huge problems for Labour. Centre-right politics, after all, tends to have a supportive coalition of forces ready made: if your mission is to maintain free-market capitalism while liberalising the economy still further, most of the mainstream press, along with the forces of corporate power, will gladly help. Blair and Brown’s project partly amounted to the repositioning of their party so as to take advantage of this fact—but when New Labour ran out of road, and Miliband began re-emphasising themes of insecurity and inequality, the challenges faced by 21st-century social democracy presented themselves anew.
Across the country, Labour’s problems are clear. In whole swathes of the English south, it is no longer part of the political conversation. In Scotland, to use a term coined by the academic and writer Gerry Hassan, it finds itself in the unenviable position of being “undead”: still nominally in the game, but now dwarfed by the Scottish National Party (SNP) and a range of left-of-centre groups who see it as a conservative relic of a failed past. Meanwhile, in the party’s remaining heartlands, from the south Wales valleys to the post-industrial expanse of south Yorkshire, Labour’s decline is something you can almost feel.
Choose your town, and the requisite parts of the story will usually be there. A Labour Club in need of a lick of paint will stand as a monument to an era when the party was tightly woven into local life. The MP or prospective candidate may have arrived from elsewhere, as a highly-rated political hotshot—one thinks here of Miliband himself, representing Doncaster North; or Stephen Kinnock, the son of a former Labour leader recently chosen to be the dead-cert MP for the faded Welsh steel-town of Aberavon. Their seat will still be nominally safe, but between 1997 and now, Labour’s share of the vote will have tumbled, usually from somewhere around 70 per cent to the mid-50s.
Those who still vote Labour might talk about doing so as a matter of ancestor-worship: “My grandad always voted Labour, so that’s what I do.” People who feel more sceptical about the party will often accuse it of taking them for granted—witness the curt verdict I heard this summer in one of Labour’s most treasured redoubts: “What’s Labour done for the Rhondda Valley? Not a lot. Nothing.” There will be frequent mention of a point during the 1990s when the party ceased to know what it stood for, and harsh words about Blair: “More Tory than the Tories,” or something similar. And everywhere, the traditional foundations of Labour hegemony have crumbled. In 10 years of chasing Labour’s ghosts as a journalist, I have had countless conversations that highlighted all this, but the best happened in Merthyr Tydfil in the week of Margaret Thatcher’s funeral. In the town centre, I spoke to an 18 year old who was finding it impossible to get a job. I wondered, did she know what a trade union was? “No,” she said. “I don’t. What’s that?”
These changes are glaringly evident in Labour’s core areas and regions, but they ripple out into the country at large. And when the party’s bond with even its most loyal voters is as weak as all this suggests, it may only take the appearance of a strong political rival to shake Labour to its foundations. This is the essence of what has happened in Scotland; it also accounts for Ukip’s increasingly impressive showing in the north of England, traditionally Labour-voting pockets of the English east and, if opinion polls are to be believed, Wales. Ukip leader Nigel Farage well knows this, and is revelling in it. “Everybody thought that people’s tribal allegiance to Labour was as strong, if not stronger, than the tribal allegiance to the Conservative Party,” he said recently. “What we’re actually finding is they [Labour voters] don’t recognise the tribe… People that come from the Labour side of the equation don’t think anyone’s on their side.”
On the face of it, they might have a point. Politics, after all, is about much more than dry matters of policy: it comes down to essentially emotional affinities, and impressionistic readings of whether or not a party can make any convincing claim to understanding people’s lives. Here, Labour has long been found wanting. As the party has shrunk as a presence in society and the trade unions have been pushed out of the economy, the parliamentary party’s narrowing range of backgrounds has only increased its disconnection—not just from its core supporters, but whole swathes of the entire electorate—and accelerated its decline.
Nearly all the senior members of the Shadow Cabinet began their careers as 20-something political researchers and advisors. Earlier this year, the Guardian discovered that around half of Labour’s candidates in marginal seats had similarly been “special advisors, party workers, researchers, lobbyists or MPs.” You know these people when you see them: they tend to speak in a Blair-ish idiom which extends even to their hand gestures; they give off the sense that Westminster politics defines the entirety of their interests and they are often rather accident-prone.
In July this year, Chuka Umunna—who, to be fair, saw out his pre-parliamentary career as a lawyer, before he became the MP for Streatham and the Shadow Business Secretary—was mid-way through an interview with the BBC when he betrayed the fact that he did not know how to pronounce “Worcester” (it came out sounding like “Wichita,” the city in Kansas immortalised in Glen Campbell’s 1968 hit “Wichita Lineman”). More recently, there was the episode in which the then-Shadow Attorney General Emily Thornberry took to the campaign trail in Rochester, and tweeted a picture of a house—complete with a white van—decked out with three St George’s flags. Her tweet merely said “Image from #Rochester,” but accusations of snobbery were hardly quietened by her subsequent explanation: she thought the image was “remarkable” and said she had never seen a house “completely covered in flags before” (as luck would have it, she is also the MP for Islington). Miliband’s aides somewhat speciously claimed that they had never seen him so angry, and she was effectively sacked. Whether she deserved the punishment was open to question. What was most interesting was the Labour leadership’s obvious twitchiness about the white working class who once formed its core vote.
These stories would look like examples of simple ineptitude, if they did not speak a profound truth: that, to quote from Peter Oborne’s prescient book The Triumph Of The Political Class (2007), the modern Westminster elite “is distinguished from earlier governing elites by a lack of experience and connection with other ways of life”—even, it seems, in its own political backyard.
In an age like ours, this kind of detachment might yet prove politically fatal. The reasons are bound up with millions of Britons’ collective response to globalisation, and the hardship and disorientation let loose by the crash. Contrary to Blair’s exhortations in 2005, most people have failed to be “swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.” Equally, leftist fantasies of some mass post-2008 yearning for traditional Labour values have hardly materialised. To a limited extent, and to Miliband’s credit, questions of privilege and disadvantage and the predicament of the so-called “squeezed middle” have intruded on mainstream politics in a way that they did not during the New Labour period. But as evidenced by the arrival of Ukip and much of the momentum behind the SNP, they are increasingly drowned out by a cacophony of noise about identity, belonging and, with particularly serious implications for Labour, what it is to be politically authentic.
Labour’s reliance on a caste of essentially cultureless metropolitan politicians means that it tends to leave this terrain open to other parties. Nowhere is this more evident than in its unbelievably clunky manoeuvrings on immigration. Lacking any real emotional connection with the places where population change is a huge issue, it can neither stick to its liberal guns and speak a meaningful language of reassurance—nor, if it really wants to chase after Ukip and the Conservatives, give out “tough” messages with any credibility. Instead, Labour’s panicked response is to affect hardline rhetoric that nobody believes, while also insisting that immigration has been to Britain’s great benefit. To quote the Scottish writer Alex Massie, the message seems to be: “Ukip are right. Please don’t vote for them.” Such confusion is what happens when you throw rather inexperienced people into the midst of a debate that is not just visceral, but politically dangerous. Put bluntly, they cannot cope.
Strangely, a penetrating analysis of Labour’s current impasse has emerged from the very heart of the party itself. Since 2012, the Labour free-thinker Jon Cruddas—himself a former advisor to Tony Blair, though he has always been at pains to avoid the habits and mindset of the political class—and the academic Jonathan Rutherford have been working on the party’s policy review. This has produced a mountain of material, split between specific recommendations and a broader examination of Labour’s possible future. The most eloquent example of the latter is a jointly-authored, 50-page text entitled “One Nation: Labour’s political renewal,” which quietly emerged under the nose of the leadership in early September.
Some of the policy review’s proposals will make it into the 2015 manifesto—but the surrounding framework assembled by Cruddas and Rutherford looks like being far too iconoclastic for the leadership to endorse. “Labour has lost its social anchorage in the coalitions built up around the old industrial working class,” they write. “Across Europe, social democracy faces a similar predicament. Once great ruling parties have become hollowed out and are in danger of shrinking into professionalised political elites. In government, these parties were often neither very social, nor very democratic. They tended to be top down and state driven, compensating for the system, but not reforming it. It was politics that did things to and for people rather than with them. The old model of social democracy built in the industrial era has now come to the end of its useful life.”
As they appear to see it, Labour’s increasing disconnection from its own supporters and its reliance on a dwindling clique of Westminster insiders are symptomatic of an even deeper predicament—the extent to which the party’s basic mission is being left behind by modernity. In the midst of the nostalgic stink kicked up by Ukip, that may sound strange, but it actually represents the beginnings of a far-sighted answer to Britain’s current political tumult. “People say, ‘We want our country back,’” Cruddas recently told me. “They say, ‘The system isn’t working.’ This is a politics of recognition. It’s about how people’s lives are. And the question of their powerlessness can only be answered by giving them more power.”
At the core of this, in keeping with the cold fiscal climate, is a rejection of Labour’s essentially Fabian notion of benevolent big government, and an alternative vision of a devolved, participatory future: the reinvention of Labour as a more open party, the empowerment of cities, some first steps towards workplace democracy, even the abolition of Whitehall behemoths such as the Departments of Work and Pensions, and Communities and Local Government. Running alongside it is an idea of contribution that runs well beyond the leadership’s talk about a “something for something” benefits system. As Cruddas puts it, his vision is of “contributing—looking out for your neighbour, voting… not hoovering up Special Brew at half 10 in the morning, and running around with your weapon-dog.”
In contrast to all this, Labour politics, and the culture of the British left more generally, is still wedded to a dreamy yearning for some crude replay of Clement Attlee’s reforming Labour government of 1945-51, and an enduring belief in the capture of the centralised state—and on these fundamentals, Labour’s instincts have barely moved. In mid-November, for example, the party sent out an email detailing the policies that Miliband now thinks define his leadership. Note the verbs: he will apparently “scrap” the bedroom tax and the Health and Social Care Act, “force” energy companies to cut their bills and “ban” exploitative zero-hours contracts. As further signposts to the good society, there will be a new 10p rate of tax, a mansion tax, and the restoration of the 50p rate of tax. To anyone with left-ish politics, all this will be fine as far as it goes, but it sounds like unreconstructed lever-pulling, and takes no account of the decline of trust and the disappearance of a world in which voters happily left the job of bringing about social change to politicians. What, one wonders, does Labour have to say about participation, meaningful empowerment or pushing public services towards the kind of horizontal engagement that now defines millions of lives, thanks to everything from Facebook to Mumsnet? In February this year, Miliband gave a one-off speech extolling the wonders of “people-powered public services.” It offered a few tantalising examples of what this might mean—open access to personal data, the creation of networks of people who use the same public service, so as to hold its providers to account—but was then left completely undeveloped. The tenor of Labour’s plan for government is still coldly mechanistic. To use Cruddas and Rutherford’s phrase, it’s a matter of doing things to and for people, rather than with them.
By way of underlining that a fast-changing world threatens even the ideas that underlie the party’s name, there is also the question of work. In June last year, another Miliband speech—as if to confirm Labour’s often antediluvian idea of politics, speeches are still the main way he communicates—focused on the benefits system, extolling the wonders of “jobs for everyone who can work” and “good employment.” Labour is committed to a so-called “compulsory jobs guarantee” which will oblige young people to take “a job” after a year or lose their benefits (on Twitter, it was hyped using the cloying hashtag “#partyofwork”). There seems to be an unchanged idea here of paid employment as the cure for most ills, and an almost sentimental belief that dependable jobs, somehow underwritten by government, can still exist in abundance. The problem is that the public well knows that reality is speeding off somewhere else. If 15 per cent of British workers—and rising—are now self-employed, temporary contracts are becoming omnipresent, and people increasingly bounce from job to job, the party of labour once again runs the risk of looking as if it knows far too little of life as it is actually lived.
In fairness, Miliband’s promises to move against zero-hours contracts suggest that the leadership knows it has to have some better answers. But the bigger picture is surely of profound changes—more serious, even, than the decline of manual labour that triggered Labour’s long retreat—which require a political paradigm shift. What if, for technological reasons rather than thanks to the awfulness of neoliberal capitalism, we are in an accelerated phase of the long passage away from jobs-for-life? In that scenario, if the centre-left wants to give people greater security, it will have to do so in advance of their entry to the workplace, rather than thinking that once they have been shoved into the call centre, or fast-food restaurant, all will be well. At the cutting-edge of left politics, one big idea is aimed at achieving exactly this: a guaranteed citizens’ income—a policy, tellingly, at the centre of the platform of Podemos, the nascent party of the left now topping the polls in Spain. In Britain, the only political forces which are attempting to advance the same idea are the Greens and Compass, the left pressure group that has provided Cruddas with a lot of his inspiration. Not that one should expect Labour’s senior figures to embrace such policy exotica just yet, but the absence of any real interest in the idea—even among the trade unions—speaks volumes about a party that is in danger of falling asleep.
Self-evidently, these are strange, profoundly volatile times. The old dualistic politics is over. Only the electoral system, which may yet break under the strain, keeps the show going. As far as Labour is concerned, Blair may yet prove to have been the last of his kind, triumphantly claiming to have grasped the key to history, and winning supposedly thumping election victories, just before his party’s decline rendered such grandstanding impossible.
Certainly, the great industry of commentary claiming that if only Labour did this or that it would be restored to its old glories increasingly sounds flatly silly. Like most members of the Labour tribe, I have my own notion of what an ideal party of the centre-left might look like, but I do not think for a moment that it would restore the party’s old majoritarian dream. The politics of the future, on left and right, will be pluralistic and often chaotic; at this rate, it may eventually not involve Labour at all. I do not say that with any great relish, but if era-defining political shifts are afoot, you can hardly pretend that your own side will somehow be immune.
Back in 2005, with his characteristically odd grammar and almost biblical sense of destiny, Blair dispensed his own take on the arrival of bracingly new times. “A baby is born,” he said. “The father takes a photo on his mobile. In seconds relatives around the world can see, and celebrate. A different world to the one we were born into. Faster, more exciting, yet with that come threats, too.” The rest of what he said now looks dated beyond words: the expression of a pompous kind of politics that Labour was right to leave behind. But on that simple point, how right he was. And how grave those threats look for the party he once led.
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