August 2015
By Aidan McGee
When I was ten, at the height of the 1984-5 miners’ strike, I recall a Conservative party political broadcast which made use of really basic (by today’s standards) computer graphics to show a blue hammer hammering a red nail into oblivion. My stepfather, who at that point had been in the Labour party and a member of the Co-op for more than forty years, responded to the repeated ‘BOOF! BOOF! BOOF!’ socialist-smashing noises of the hammer with exaggerated painful winces of ‘OOH! OOH! OOH!’ I guess humour was his way of surviving the eighteen years of electoral oblivion Labour were condemned to: to his credit, it wasn’t exclusively humour of a black kind.
Growing up in a Labour activist household is a seminal and formative experience that doesn’t leave you even after you’ve voted Labour and Conservative and Liberal Democrat and Green at various elections (a confession which either shows me up as a serial inclusivist and slut for total democracy or one which is going to burn my bridges with people reading this blog who expected inveterate loyalty to one particular tribe).
It is a story of interminable political meetings when you’re ten years old and reduced to playing a game of ‘dice football’ whereby you pull out last year’s FA Cup draw and roll dices to determine new scores this time round by way of diversion (not a bad idea to this day on the basis that Rochdale 6 Windsor & Eton 4 probably makes for a far more interesting FA Cup final than the tokenistic top-of-the-top flight endeavours taking place nowadays).
It’s a story of suddenly shrieking out ‘Rochdale have won it!’ and making a future MP (who was tolerant of children) laugh in the process. Well, that’s what my stepdad claims.
Kate Hoey MP: I supposedly made her laugh with Rochdale’s FA Cup Final victory
It is a story of being sick off school one day and being dragged out to collect with striking miners and moved on by the police just at the moment your headmistress is walking by.
It is a story of cups of strong tea and bread pudding during the break from interminable local party motions and Football By Dice, of going on anti-education cuts marches and precociously yelling ‘EDUCATION IN!’ in the hope you’ll get a chant going and then realising you don’t have anything to follow it up with.
It’s a story of ending up down the Labour Social Club on Friday night when you’re a teenager because your hometown is disco-starved and because at least everyone at the club will be kind and companionable and (yes) comradely, and, well, all the rest of it.
So much of my early life was predicated on social events involving left-wing people and let-wing families that, having been largely divorced from it, I don’t know what (if anything) has replaced it. Do constituency parties still have strawberries and cream parties like we did in South-East London in the early to mid-1980s? Or do they not have the funds and morale anymore? Given that polls continually point to support for renationalisation of the railways, it doesn’t remain clear-cut that the strawberries have outlived the socialism.
Strawberries: red like socialism, but haven’t obviously outlived it
Labour is in a big existential crisis. There’s no point in equivocating or euphemising about it because that would be frankly disingenuous. If you wanted some perspective, you could point out that Labour has done existential crises brilliantly well in its 115 years of existing and has still contrived to exist.
It had an existential crisis after its 1929-31 government was forced to resign in the thick of the Great Depression and supposedly outgoing Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald was persuaded by King George V to stay on in a National Government including Conservative and Liberal MPs. The final score of National Government 554, Labour 52 in the ensuing election makes the result of 2015 look like an unalloyed luxury.
It had an existential crisis after going down to a third consecutive election defeat in 1959 at the hands of the brilliantly shrewd Tory Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, at a time of rapidly rising living standards and prevalent new-found consumerism that threatened to consign the red flag pictures to the scrapheap just as the spangly new things called washing machines rolled off the factory line (and, perversely, presented a threat to the communitarian culture of the industrial proletariat in the process).
It had an existential crisis in 1983 when it ended up with barely 200 seats, having seen votes haemorrhage by the million to the newly-created SDP, a response from moderates within the Labour party who felt that they, well, could no longer exist within it. Impressively, the formation of the SDP didn’t represent a complete realignment of politics because the right of Labour who didn’t defect to the SDP carried on arguing with the left (and vice versa) in no uncertain fashion.
Having a full-on altercation over more or less the same thing twice over, once with your former allies, and once with those who are still (somehow) your allies (until they potentially leave for different reasons) might have helped to keep Mrs Thatcher in power for eleven years, yet I have a bizarre sneaking admiration for those who went through it. Arguing about Stuff That Matters is clearly different from arguing about who should win Strictly Come Dancing. The irony is that I imagine veterans from both factions who survive to this day would find a TV programme like Benefits Street dystopian and repellent.
Labour has always been anomalous and pluralistic. It has always been a tenuous coalition of socialists, trade unionists, moderate centrists, Christian socialists, agnostic socialists, atheist socialists, radical liberals who felt they couldn’t be Liberal anymore, right-leaning blue-collar workers, left-leaning white-collar Oxbridge technocrats, prototype social democrats, radicals who wouldn’t have automatically called themselves socialists, and Christians who may not have automatically called themselves socialists either. One wonders how Labour’s first two MPs in 1900, party founder and socialist Keir Hardie, and Richard Bell (a Liberal in all but name), managed to agree on anything in those first few years. A split of a party of two MPs would have at least resulted in an uncontested leadership: which again seems like a luxury light years away from the febrile and fissiparous fulminations within the 2015 battle to lead the party.
The man at the start of it and the heart of it: Keir Hardie
That tension persists to this day: the veteran Labour MP for Birkenhead, Frank Field, is an Anglican who has spent his entire life trying to tackle the issue of poverty and deprivation. The fact he was probably to the right of Tony Blair before and after Tony Blair became Labour’s electoral saviour indicates what a broad church Labour is: a chalk-and-cheese church that defies apocalypse because its congregation feel that however chalky/cheesy they are, a pooling of resources with the cheese/chalk is better than deferring forever to Tory ideology on the economy and social justice.
Proof Labour has always been diverse: Frank Field MP
There are plenty of well-rehearsed arguments as to why Labour is now facing meltdown again and they can be read elsewhere. For me personally, there isn’t too much of a problem in acknowledging that fierce opponents within the party all have valid points to make about one another.
Perhaps it’s easier when you are detached enough to deal with issues that go off the Labour Richter Scale in terms of fraught angst: whether Tony Blair alienated millions of people with the invasion of Iraq (he did), whether he is being way too intransigent in his interjections regarding the contest now (he is) and whether Labour leadership frontrunner Jeremy Corbyn is unelectable as Prime Minister (right now he almost certainly is; I can’t see when or if that will ever change).
Analysing on that scale is relatively easy: but trying to reconcile the various factions of a party bruised by a shocking defeat (and the immediate aftershock of leadership frontrunner Chuka Ummuna withdrawing his candidacy) and working out what Labour does as both a social and political movement and electable force for decades to come is a dilemma that transcends leadership, or short-term electability, or factional principle (which is not something exclusively consigned to the left within the party).
So many things about Labourtrauma TM have struck me, but I will limit myself to articulating a few. In an extraordinary recent podcast interview with The Spectator, former Blair director of political operations John McTernan made the unambiguous utterance with regards to the sentiments of Labour grassroots members: ‘Yeah, but who cares about the grassroots?’ (and then subsequently happily acknowledged that the constituency parties had voted for Tony Blair year after year at conferences).
Forgive me if that sounds just a tad Game Of Thrones meets Malcolm Tucker (“You Know Nothing And You F**king Know Nothing Cubed Squared And Multiplied To The Power Of A F**king Googleplex so F**king Go And Know It On The Muesli-Munching Backbenches where You Belong Jeremy Corbyn?”) It is as if those who define themselves as Blairites have none of the easy charm, discernment, and personable nature that made Tony Blair sellable to both a Labour party traumatised by four election defeats and the wider population from 1994 onwards.
Not one to mince his words: John McTernan
Every intervention like McTernan’s must be stoking the Corbyn tinderbox. Somewhere along the line, voters have become even less likely to vote for Tony Blair than Jeremy Corbyn (although on the evidence of this survey they don’t much like any of the other three leadership candidates either). Perhaps the moment when Tony Blair told Corbyn sympathisers to “get a heart transplant”, and said even if a left-wing Labour party got elected it wouldn’t be something he could countenance on principle, was a defining one. It was the moment Blair, perversely, became like the militant left-wingers he had denounced as overly dogmatic in the past: ironically, for a man talking about transplants, it was the moment Tony Blair decisively stopped being whatever Tony Blair once was. One genuinely wonders if not particularly ideological, non-committal voters might not be tempted to vote Conservative on this showing on the grounds that David Cameron looks far more amenable and far less like a middle-aged King Joffrey (as opposed to any prospective Cameron v Corbyn showdown).
At the same time, the social activism carried out by the likes of comedienne Josie Long is very similar to the social activism carried out by Labour pioneers such as George Lansbury (yes, grandfather of Angela of Murder She Wrote fame), but not done so from a position within a municipal authority or from Westminster.
Following in the footsteps of George Lansbury: Josie Long
This kind of social activism is far more fluid than in the past and far less defined in the 21st century by bloc organisations such as the trade union movement (which, in all fairness, did help in no small measure to make Labour electable in the wilderness years of the 1930s leading up to its euphoric triumph in the 1945 election). Yet in spite of this or because of this Labour has been weirdly slow to embrace such social activism in the 21st century.
Indeed, Labour appears to be sclerotically stuck in the mode of ‘do things from Westminster or get the funds from Len McCluskey’ instead of waking up to the fact that society in the 21st century is far more transient, is far more peripatetic, far more rootless, and is far more defined by individual acts of kindness (perhaps something which makes the Conservatives more electorally palpable as they better represent the idea of individual identity, liberty and initiative).
It is possible to incorporate the basic decency and generosity of British people into some new vision for Labour, but for now, in terms of hands-on social justice, Labour is missing the boat where food banks such as The Trussell Trust aren’t. Giving to my local food bank two years ago and wondering why there was no such thing as a socialist (or even social democratic) foodbank wasn’t a bad insight (at the time) into why Labour might be going into the 2015 election in big trouble. If, as this article suggests, young people in traditional Labour heartlands have no idea what a trade union is, it might be time to take inspiration from Josie Long and start having a rethink about what exactly Labour is (which isn’t the same as letting unions wither on the vine per se).
With that in mind, the best tweet I read this summer was a bloke who said: ‘Labour at the moment is like a weird sci-fi movie about one body with two minds.’ I expanded upon this theory to the editor of this blog, to the effect that Labour in 2015 is like some hideous Frankensteinian conception with feet where the arms should be and vice versa, with all parts moving in completely distended and unorganic fashion (maybe with speaking limbs shouting out ‘unelectable Trot’, ‘Brownite’, ‘Blairite’, ‘Tory lite’ and ‘Jeremy Corbyn isn’t left-wing enough’ – I’m not ruling the last one out). Apologies that, as a result, between us we felt the need to put in a suitable picture from the Internet at this point (for some comic relief, black humour, catharsis etc. for anyone who requires it).
Confounded and contorted: too many limbs or factions?
The obvious converse point leading from this is that the Conservative Party, with a minimal majority, looks in rude health and far more obviously of a single body and mind. Hence this postscript: it’s only fair to talk in some small detail about the party currently in government. The same old Conservative strengths that have made them just about the most successful political party anywhere since the 1700s are once again in evidence: pragmatism, adaptability, bridging differences more discreetly and easily than their opponents, a simple belief that capitalism works best (even if there are different kinds of capitalism), and the innate ability to appeal to the conservative instincts of people from Belgravia to Berwick-upon-Tweed to Battersea to Brighton Kemptown to Burton-upon-Trent.
Add to that PM-in-the-making George Osborne, a man with energy, ruthlessness, vision and a desire to swallow up the centre ground seen in no Tory politician since Michael Heseltine (if not Margaret Thatcher), and the shell-shocked skeletal parliamentary rump that is the Liberal Democrats, and the Conservatives appear to have a future indefinitely mapped out by the demands of government, not survival.
Currently at the apotheosis: George Osborne
By nature politics is cyclical: prior to Labour’s thirteen years in power between 1997 and 2010, the Tories ruled for eighteen (although Labour in a sense had nearly five of those years in the cultural ascendancy given that the Tories looked like a busted flush from Black Wednesday in September 1992 through to their defeat in May 1997). Prior to that, Labour won four elections out of five between 1964 and 1979, and the 1970-74 Edward Heath Tory government that broke this run spent much of its time doing socialist impressions, or offering socialism via Tory government.
Prior to all of that the Tories ruled for 13 years between 1951 and 1964; prior to that Labour had an eleven-year stint on the Government benches after serving in Churchill’s wartime administration and then going it alone from 1945. Overlapping this was the Tories being in power from the Great Depression to the last days of World War Two. We don’t really change our mind that often about which government we want: Heath is the unenviable example since 1931 of a party only winning one election in a row.
That, however, might just give Labour cause for hope in the long-term, based on the fact that this still doesn’t yet signify a one-party state and that the electorate is historically ready to give the other lot a turn: that and the fact the Tory share of 36.9% of the vote this year is nothing like the 49% they got when winning in 1955 and 1959. Clearly the Tories are nowhere near as popular as they used to be, and many would identify a link between the social divisions from the 1980s and a general disillusionment with (and disaffiliation from) politics.
But until Labour actually pool their resources and reconcile their differences, and try to avoid splitting into three parties next time round (Labour, New New Labour and Purged Labour), they might be indefinitely relying on going ‘Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!’ every time the badly-drawn Microsoft Paint blue hammer goes down on the red nail for comic relief amid the serious business of recalibrating their very identity. It stands to my stepfather’s credit at the age of 90 that he’s seen all the false-alarm Labour meltdowns in the past and that he’s already finding similar coping mechanisms
The Insightful People 