How darkly fitting that a lifelong campaigner for non-sectarian politics should be threatened with expulsion from Labour amid some typically Labour-style sectarian games. I won’t dwell on the procedural particulars of the case of Neal Lawson, co-founder of the “all progressives welcome” organisation Compass: the party’s right state the issue was effectively backing an ultra-local Green—Lib Dem understanding at Labour’s expense in particular parts of Oxford a couple of years ago.
The real point is the context. The mean-spirited policing of Lawson’s isolated old tweets stands in stark contrast to the warm embrace extended to welcome back “The Independent Group” deserters who, not long ago, were campaigning full-time to defeat a Labour frontbench that included Keir Starmer. The big picture, involving heavy-handed manoeuvres in myriad local parliamentary sections, is the purge of the Left documented by Michael Crick—an independent-minded journalist who has previously chronicled the failings of Arthur Scargill and Militant Liverpool.
Back on the day in 2015 when Jeremy Corbyn was elected Labour leader, I wrote a piece making a doomed appeal to all Labour factions to show a little humility. The right, I suggested, would do well to reflect on its hand in the financial crisis and the ruin of the Middle East that had powered the old socialist’s rise. The left, meanwhile, needed to understand that it would soon run into “defenestration or defeat” if it failed to work within the logic of parliamentary politics, or respect the anxieties of Middle Britain.
But neither side was in the mood for self-criticism of any sort. The right immediately mutinied, failed, then (mostly) stuck around brooding, plotting for the glorious day of its revenge. The left slowly grew headstrong, closed its ears to criticism and ultimately went down to a heavy defeat for which it continues to pay the price. But as the pendulum swings back with a force that is knocking out even moderate progressives like Lawson, it seems time to ask whether this countermovement brings its own dangers.
I don’t personally see too many insofar as the looming general election is concerned. Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them. This one is currently losing in spectacular fashion, and rising mortgage rates and squeezed pay are unlikely to sweeten the mood. But I do think the Labour right should pause on what it will be like to govern if the idealists are disenchanted from the very start.
While the left has been particularly prone to veer into a “no compromise with the electorate” dead end, the electoral record is a bit more complex than the conventional wisdom allows for. After all, Corbyn piled on a million more votes in his first near-miss general election than he went on to shed in his second, disastrous re-run. Further back, Labour’s worst-ever defeat, in 1931, was not a result of zealotry but rather the reverse: the party’s second government prioritised respectability over radicalism to such an extent that it had become incapable of correcting a ruinous economic course, leaving its Tory-dominated successor to break with the gold standard.
Oppositions don’t win elections, governments lose them—and this one is losing in spectacular fashion
Nonetheless, for the most part, the right can claim to be more attuned to securing the acceptance of floating voters. Where it has often gone wrong is in mistaking mere acquiescence for a mass enthusiasm for a centrist machine politics that simply doesn’t exist.
Recall its delusion that the reforms to open up the Labour leadership vote to registered supporters would result in ordinary folk flooding in to endorse the “sensibles.” People did flood in. Liz Kendall briefly fancied her chances. But the runaway beneficiary was Corbyn. Recall, too, the mere 13 per cent of the vote achieved by the hapless Frank Dobson in the inaugural race for London mayor, once he became the machine’s unlikely candidate against Ken Livingstone. Remember, more recently, The Independent Group’s talk of turning the page on the whole way politics is done—months before it sunk without trace.
Even the great election winner himself, Tony Blair, presided over a seismic collapse in turnout, from 78 per cent in 1992, the last general election before he was leader, to 59 per cent in 2001. At the time, the more complacent New Labourites mistook the great no-show as a sign of contentment. But in light of his gruelling last couple of years in No 10 it began to look more like dangerous alienation from rootless retail politics, a reading underlined years later by the Brexit vote.
Blair fought the left, but at least started out with the enthusiastic backing of the liberal idealists who would supply the reforms his administration will be best remembered for in decades to come: devolution, civil partnerships, the Human Rights Act and freedom of information. Post-Iraq, I remember digging back into a toe-curling Guardian editorial from the mid-90s which felt it was necessary to register that he was not a “philosopher king.” Compare that to this week’s unsparing leader in the same newspaper at the same stage of the political cycle: “Sir Keir is yet to say he believes in anything much beyond himself. That is a mistake.”
If, like me, you’re paid to follow public policy, you might know that there are still a few progressive ideas bubbling round today’s party: stronger workplace rights, letting councils acquire cut-price land for homes and—hopefully—axing the Tories’ appalling “two-child” benefits policy. If you’ve been around a bit, you’ll also remember how the bitty promises of the 1997 pledge card secured the majority eventually used to deliver a life-saving infusion of funds into the public services, and make great—if reversible—strides against poverty. Having worked in Whitehall and seen splurges being misspent, I’m even prepared to half-buy the party’s latest protestation that its green investment plans could be more effective if ramped up incrementally.
The Attlee government successfully balanced hard-headedness with high-mindedness
Is it, however, reasonable to expect young idealists to cut the Labour Party this much slack? Let’s think about what someone following the news will have picked up about Labour in the last week alone. Rent controls? Actually, no. Reversing Boris Johnson’s assault on the international aid department? Erm, let’s have a chat about that. Opposing the government’s “anti-boycott” bill that Labour’s own lawyer says will undermine the freedom to make a stand against rogue regimes? Feels safer to sit on our hands. Not to mention the unseemly struggle to come up with something other than privatisation itself to blame for the literal and figurative filth of the Thames Water scandal.
All this after the “when they go low, we go lower” slurring of Rishi Sunak as soft on paedophiles a few months ago. And, most consequentially for hopes of social progress at a time of strapped public finances, nods to the wealthy that their riches will remain untaxed.
Even the one fight Labour suddenly seems courageously eager to pick on behalf of the rising generation risks striking a Philistinish note: backing “the builders” over “the blockers,” including on the greenbelt. New homes are urgently needed: Labour is right to be thinking through reform, even though it will be controversial.
But in the lurch from local incentives and permissive reforms to requiring councils to offer up protected land, there is surely a danger of painting yourself into a “concrete before countryside” corner—and, indeed, of forgetting that the greenbelt, like the national parks, was effected under legislation of the Attlee government, which successfully balanced hard-headedness with high-mindedness.
It could do so because it contained not only centrist fixers like Herbert Morrison, for whom socialism was simply “what a Labour government does,” but also visionaries like Aneurin Bevan who pioneered the health service to, as he put it, stand “in place of fear.” A Labour Party that locks out the dreamers may, in the fullness of time, discover that “in place of hope” is a tough sell.
