Ups and Downs

A rollercoaster ride is an overworked metaphor when it comes to describing a football season, but for once it's justified when reviewing Arsenal's performance over 2020-21. It started with silverware, the victory over Liverpool in the Community Shield, though this came so soon after the delayed FA Cup Final that most people mentally bracketed it with the preceding season. After opening brightly in the league, we were then beaten by Liverpool, Manchester City and Leicester in quick succession, which suggested we were still someway off being realistic challengers for a top position. We perked up with an away win at Old Trafford, and then promptly imploded at home to first Aston Villa and then Wolves. The run-up to Christmas saw us manage only a single point out of a possible 15, the lowlight being a home defeat to Burnley due to an Aubameyang own-goal. This was the only match at which spectators were allowed in before the second lockdown. I was lucky in the ticket ballot, which meant I got drenched in the rain as the club put us all in a section most exposed to the weather, presumably because it was well-ventilated. After such depressing calamity, it was surely inevitable that we would then beat Chelsea 3-1 on Boxing Day. 

January saw a marked improvement in both form and results, marred only by an unfortunate exit in the FA Cup to Southampton (another game lost to an own goal). February saw us revert to incompetence against Wolves (2 red cards after dominating the first half made this a rollercoaster in miniature) and Villa once more, before recovering with a fine away win at Leicester. March saw us stop losing and produced an energising win at home against Spurs that no doubt hammered one of the nails into the coffin of José Mourinho's Tottenham tenure. April saw home defeats against Liverpool and Everton, the latter featuring a Leno own-goal, and points dropped against Fulham. May saw 5 straight wins in the league, including an away win at Chelsea, which proved enough to haul us from 9th position at the beginning of the month to the giddy heights of 8th place at season end. In most years, that run would have seen us leapfrog two or three teams, but the gap to the top six had simply been too big after the disastrous run from early November to the middle of December. The silver-lining to this particular cloud was that we now don't have to worry about Thursday night football, while Spurs have the dubious honour of qualifying for the Europa Conference League.

Broken down into thirds, we secured only 13 points from the first 12 games, easily our worst return in a decade and definitely relegation-flirting. The middle third saw 21 points from 13 and the final third 27 points from the same number of games. 75 points would have been enough to finish in second place, ahead of Manchester United, so it's fair to say our recent form has been of the desired level. But while the overall trajectory was upwards, it's hard to interpret this as steady improvement. The final points tally is only up 5 on the previous season and it remains the second worst over the last 10 years. Had we managed to win the four games we lost home and away to Aston Villa and Wolves (teams that finished 11th and 13th respectively), we would have finished in third place, a point behind Manchester United and now have the Champions League to look forward to. Even if we'd only managed 8 points from that possible 12, we'd have finished ahead of Chelsea in fourth. All teams drop points, but we appear to have lost the knack of playing poorly but still picking them up.

Looking at the glass half-full, the 39 goals conceded was the best performance for 5 years. Arteta's aim to tighten up our leaky defence has borne fruit. Indeed, the chief problem has not been conceding goals but scoring them. 55 is the lowest total product for over a decade and 1 less than last season. The disastrous opening third of the campaign saw us score only 10, which is less than a goal a game. Some of this was down to poor individual form - notably Aubameyang and Willian - but the chief cause was a lack of imagination and enterprise from the midfield until the pivotal home victory against Chelsea. What was encouraging about the final third, and in particular the last 5 games, was that we appeared to have discovered how to play against a low block, at least in the league. We appeared to have temporarily mislaid this ability in the Europa League semi-final against Villareal, though that loss was ultimately down to conceding two poor goals and picking up another unnecessary red card in the first leg. That latter moment pretty much marked the end of Dani Ceballos's stay at the club. Despite some flourishes along the way, he has proved incompatible, unlike his fellow Madrista, Martin Ødegaard.

The team changed for the better with the full emergence of Bukayo Saka, Emile Smith-Rowe and Gabriel Martinelli after Christmas. The temporary addition of Ødegaard also suggested an evolution towards a pacier, more incisive style of play, though whether he will return from Real Madrid is moot now that Zidane has left the Bernabeu (let's hope they want Ceballos more). However, too many familiar failings were still evident, from the slow build-ups at the back and self-inflicted wounds in defence and goal. Injuries to key players at inconvenient times also played a part in the season's ups and downs, though this simply highlighted the shallow options for certain positions, notably left back and goalkeeper. Kieran Tierney has emerged as a key player, but one prone to injuries; Thomas Partey has flattered to deceive, but probably should be allowed a season of adjustment; while Nicolas Pepé has managed to be both frustrating and decisive, across the season, within games and even within a single move. It's hard to believe that some of the loanees will ever don the jersey again, notably Torreira, Guendouzi and Kolasinac, but there are promising signs in the development of Joe Willock and Ainsley Maitland-Niles.

Despite his rehabilitation and flexibility, Granit Xhaka's days appear numbered. He isn't going to play any faster so a move to a more sedate league looks likely. One of Aubameyang and Lacazette will probably depart and there are strong rumours about Hector Bellerin and Bernd Leno. With David Luiz already out the door, you'd expect William Saliba to finally be brought "home". He may still be raw in Arteta's eyes, but it's obvious we have to invest now in youth and pace, rather than providing a safe haven for the tired and bewildered (hopefully Willian is on his way too). There's a real sense of a changing of the guard at the moment, though how feasible it will be for the club to enact the sort of squad overhaul Arteta needs is uncertain, given constraints on money, the continuing disruption of the pandemic and the complication of the European Championship. It's clear that Stan Kroenke has no intention of selling the club, but this doesn't mean he plans to invest further. The whole point of the European Super League, at least from the perspective of those not funded by petrodollars, was to guarantee income so the bigger clubs could rein-in their spending and so generate profits. I suspect Edu and Arteta are going to have to be imaginative to get any business done this summer.

A Death Foretold

The death of the Labour Party has been forecast ever since its foundation, and often most enthusiastically by its own elected representatives. It's perhaps difficult to recall after the claim that 2019 was the worst defeat since 1935 that only six years ago Jon Cruddas was describing the 2015 result as an "existential threat". One reason for this occlusion is that Labour actually won a larger share of the vote in 2019 than it did in 2015. The topsy-turvy nature of the discourse around Labour's performance is also evident in the fact that 1935 was a relative triumph, the recovery from the near-death experience of Ramsay MacDonald and the party right's desertion in 1931, in which it increased its representation from 52 to 154 seats and a 38% vote share. This performance legitimised Labour as the opposition and confirmed the decline of the Liberals to marginal status, setting the scene for the two-party politics that would characterise the rest of the century. The short-term result was Labour's vigorous participation in the wartime coalition, which paved the way for its triumph in 1945. If there are lessons to be learnt from the 1930s, it is that Labour is organisationally resilient and that its "heart" lies on the left of the party.

Its subsequent electoral victories in the 1960s and 70s came amidst much angst over its direction and longevity, from the right of the party's revisionism to the concerns of the left over how it could prosper in a consumer society. These debates would mutate during the Thatcher years and eventually produce the synthesis of New Labour, but even then there remained an apocalyptic undertone to the discourse, most famously in Tony Blair's "resistance is useless" analysis of globalisation. Perhaps the most famous example of this pessimism in recent times was the willingness of the PLP to not only talk down the party's chances ahead of the 2017 poll but to exhibit satisfaction with the prospect of defeat. Few in the media considered this behaviour unusual, let alone perverse. In contrast, the Conservative Party has never, outside of fringe academia, faced any questions about its existential viability. This is what hegemony looks like. No matter how many splits it suffers, no matter how violent its purges (note how inconsequential the expulsion of 21 of its MPs in 2019 proved), and no matter how long it spends in the "wilderness", the media's assumption is that the party will endure and be returned to power. This gives it considerable advantages, such as the ability to survive profound divisions - e.g. over Europe - that would destroy any other party.

Hard on the heels of the "betrayal" of the UK fishing industry, the news that the government is considering removing tariffs on beef and lamb imports as part of a free trade agreement with Australia has dismayed the National Farmers Union, not least because this points to the potential direction of travel with regard to a possible US trade deal. That the Conservatives are divided on the merits of this won't come as a surprise. They remain a coalition of liberal and protectionist interests, beholden to supermarkets as much as landowners. What is politically interesting about this tussle is that the Tories are prepared to make their division over free trade public, with cabinet ministers happy to brief the media on their opposing views rather than keep the dispute in private. While this reflects the limited electoral importance of farmers as a group, it also suggests the government doesn't fear the opposition using the issue to drive a wedge into the Tory backbenches. This is partly down to Labour being similarly conflicted between free trade and protectionism, but it also reflects the party's current intellectual timidity and its lack of operational adroitness.

This has become pathological for Labour. We see it most clearly in the failure to land an effective blow on the government in respect of its management of the pandemic, which is the inevitable result of a commitment to constructive criticism and a belief that a forensic approach would cause the Tories' narrative to collapse under the weight of its own contradictions. Both beliefs are naive and appear to reveal an unfamiliarity with the history of the Conservatives, a party that in 2015 absorbed much of the electoral base of the critically-supportive Liberal Democrats and which was shameless long before Boris Johnson was born. But Labour's intellectual timidity is also visible in the determination to expunge Corbynism not by arguing against its premises and outlining an alternative vision but by anathematising the man. This has ironically proved a point of friction with the Blairites, not because they have any sympathy for the MP for Islington North, but because they believe Labour must pursue the former course to be credible. The flaw in their thinking is that their own arguments are merely a rehash of those of the 1990s, with technology now playing the deus ex machina role previously taken by globalisation.

The reversion to Keynesian intervention in 2009 should have triggered a major intellectual ferment within Labour, but it was soon clear that curiosity and novelty would be limited almost entirely to the left while the centre of politics lapsed into a funk that has now lasted for over a decade. The reason Jeremy Corbyn won the leadership in 2015 was not simply that he was arguing for a leftwards shift in the party's programme, but that he was offering real ideas, albeit relatively moderate ones in the context of Labour's history and initially often more gestural than substantive. His opponents could offer only tired and uninspiring New Labour continuity (Liz Kendall) or a vacuum in which personality was expected to do the heavy lifting (Andy Burnham). The same vapidity characterised Owen Smith's 2016 leadership challenge, while the only real difference in the 2020 contest was Keir Starmer's willingness to adopt the Corbyn programme to get over the line before almost immediately dumping it. The attempts to fill the resulting policy void have so far been underwhelming when not simply comical, from recovery bonds to a surfeit of flags.

Given that the Starmer manoeuvre cannot be pulled off a second time, it means that the party's right and centre must between them evolve not only a new programme but a fresh intellectual underpinning, and do so in double-quick time if the next general election isn't to be written-off. Casting an eye over the centrist landscape, we see nothing but barren scrub and tumbleweed at present. There is no Anthony Giddens selling snakeoil, let alone a John Rawls preaching justice. Blue Labour was a nostalgic impulse when formed in 2009 - wishing away the complexity of the financialised world order in favour of localism and mutuality - and it has become ever more reactionary since, drifting away from the question of how society should be ordered to an increasingly bitter denunciation of how certain people choose to live their lives. Despite the relevance of some of its initial insights in the wake of the financial crash, such as the importance of sociability and the role of virtue ethics, it hasn't developed over the years and now looks like a political dead-end. Even the "Red Wall" hasn't been enough to return it to centre stage. So are there glimmers of hope anywhere else in the political centre?

The merging of the Blairite lobby group Progress and the think-tank Policy Network as Progressive Britain doesn't suggest an intellectual revival so much as a lack of funds and interest. It's early days, but all the new organisation has produced so far are platitudes and homilies. A particularly comical example from its online launch conference was Stella Creasey "raising the idea of UBI in areas that need income the most". A means-tested or targeted UBI suggests not simply an inability to break free of New Labour's mangerialist mindset, it also highlights an ignorance of the increasing acceptance of universalism by neoliberal thinkers in the face of intractable inequality and bureaucratic failure. But perhaps more interestingly it shows how the PLP's self-appointed thought leaders are trying to keep their options open. It would be wrong to dismiss the likes of Creasey, Cruddas and Kyle as empty suits with no fixed beliefs or policy preferences. Their problem is that they don't know what Starmer stands for and cannot therefore adjust their beliefs to fit: they cannot "work towards the leader". That the Orwell fan club of the centre-left finds itself faced with an opaque, authoritarian and at times capricious inner party is not the least of the present ironies.

Another is that the party has spent a year focused on the expressive rather than the instrumental, echoing the pre-2017 criticism of Corbyn's tenure as an indulgence by party members and a retreat from the discipline of electability. Ahead of the Hartlepool by-election, there was much flag-waving but also the Community Organising Unit was disbanded and an unpopular candidate parachuted in. The disappointing result has led to urgent demands for greater change, but without any clear explanation of what that change might be other than a further shift away from anything remotely leftwing. There is zero prospect that Labour will get its act together in time for the Batley and Spen by-election, and real doubts it will be ready in time for a general election in 2023. In lieu of any compelling vision or eye-catching policies from the leadership, what we'll probably see is a further ramping-up of the PLP's hysterical anti-leftism, a compensatory belligerence over emblematic issues such as Israel/Palestine and various culture war fluff, and a further (pointless) attempt to shame Boris Johnson. 

Much of this is attributable to Starmer's shortcomings as a leader, but the fundamental problem Labour faces is one common to the political centre across the world: neoliberalism will not reduce inequality or arrest the climate crisis. The Biden administration has garnered admiring gazes, but it has done so by adopting much of the party left's programme of structural change. However, this is probably its highwatermark, as we see the first signs of watering down in the name of bipartisanship and "realism", and a clear reaffirmation of orthodoxy in foreign affairs. In the UK, Labour doesn't face an opponent who is as obligingly regressive as the Republican Party. Instead, the Tories have occupied the nominal centre-ground, at least rhetorically, even if this is as much the result of the pandemic's contingencies as design. Labour must either move further left, which would mean rehabilitating Corbynism if not Corbyn, or convince the electorate that the Tories are insincere. Its recent focus on patriotism and virtue, together with its growing desire to be seen as woke-sceptical, suggests its has made its decision. The intellectual vacuum of the centre is producing a drift of politics to the right. That's the other lesson of the 1930s that Labour MPs seem reluctant to acknowledge.

Levelling Up

While there are plenty of competing explanations for Labour's loss of Hartlepool, one that nearly everyone agrees on is that the constituents were in favour of "levelling up". I'm not so sure. Were a UK government to undertake a massive programme of industrial investment and urban regeneration for the North and Midlands it would predominantly (and assuming it acts rationally) be putting money into the large cities, as that is where most of the industrial capacity already is, where the skilled labour is to be found, and where the multiplier effects would be greatest. Newcastle and Manchester would benefit far more than Hartlepool or Wigan, not just in absolute terms but in relative terms too. What it's not going to do is bias investment towards small towns that were once mono-industrial (reliant on shipbuilding, mining or steel production, or on a single large manufacturer) but which now lack much potential outside of local provisioning (warehouses, logistics etc). At best, these will be dormitory towns for the conurbations (so what investment they'll get may be focused on transport links and possibly schools). 

It's also worth noting that "green jobs" will not generally mean former shipbuilders making windmills or ex-miners installing geothermal heat pumps. There will a bit of that, but the bulk of the work will be in loft insulation and other forms of energy efficiency, so they will be distributed where the current population is. It's also the case that the loose definition of a green job (a net benefit to the environment versus assumed alternatives) means that it will encompass rail transport, electrification for cars and other activities that are most intense within large cities. Green manufacturing (of solar panels, for example) will mainly happen where manufacturing already happens and where there are established distribution networks, which means a lot of it will be offshored to the Far East (China already accounts for two-thirds of the global production of photovoltaic technology). Green jobs will not provide the direct and indirect employment opportunities that a shipyard or a colliery once did.

Retired homeowners in places like Hartlepool see "levelling-up" in terms of public spending rather than industrial investment. The now infamous vox-pop on BBC Breakfast, in which an older resident blamed Labour for the loss of the local hospital A&E department and the magistrates' court, despite these closures having nothing to do with the council, was interpreted by many as either stupidity or bias (i.e. the failure of the interviewer to challenge the misunderstanding), but it also suggests that Labour's historic identification with quality public services is weakening. This isn't because Labour has failed to deliver - there were real gains under Blair and Brown - and certainly not that the Tories are seen as more credible after a decade of austerity. Rather it's because voters in these areas still seek to articulate their interests in the language of the collective rather than the personal. But while they want a healthy economy and improvements to local services (bread and roses), I suspect what they want above all is a guarantee that property values will be maintained and social care will be better funded, which is highly personal. 

If the Tories only manage to do the former, and there is plenty of reason to believe that this will be the limit of their ambition, hence the absence of social care from the Queen's Speech this week, then it will probably be enough to retain the support of this electoral bloc. Failing to "level up" will not prove as damaging as some fear. It is clear from a revealing Conservative Home post by Rachel Wolf, who co-authored the Tories' 2019 manifesto, that the party recognises that what this demographic chiefly wants is a sense of value and security, hence reviving the high street and addressing crime are prioritised over employment and apprenticeships. This view receives support from a number of unlikely quarters, such as Peter Mandelson commenting on the "smartness and tidiness" of privately-owned homes in his former constituency (without perhaps appreciating that this is orthogonal to civic pride), and George Monbiot noting how the erosion of the state's capability to enforce the law has left the old feeling vulnerable and anxious (without perhaps appreciating how press reports on "online scams" are no less a moral panic than tales of rampant knife crime).

The Tories know that retired homeowners, who spend a disproportionate amount of their time lamenting the disappearance of familiar shops and fretting about burglary, are a pivotal vote in so-called "Red Wall" constituencies. And because these deindustrialised towns aren't going to be reindustrialised, an ageing population and high rates of home ownership are likely to be persistent features. One of the reasons why retired homeowners religiously visit the high steet is to view the windows of estate agents. Many interpret the relative affluence of the high street itself as a window onto the town's intrinsic value and therefore a reflection of their own asset's potential. In contrast, Labour has (yet again) vowed to focus relentlessly on "work and jobs". This is fine, but it fails to acknowledge that the levelling-up issue for its potential voters (i.e. the actual working population rather than nostalgic retirees) is more about wages than unemployment. To be fair, some get this and it's likely that pay will become another area of friction with a leadership whose instincts are to revive the business-friendly mantras around skills and education that distinguished New Labour. 

The claim that Labour "cannot win the votes of left social conservatives because their social values are more important to them than their economic interests" mistakes the situation. Social conservatism isn't a novelty, and it didn't dissuade "traditional voters" supporting Labour administrations in the past. Had it really been so much more important, Harold Wilson wouldn't have risked supporting the abolition of the death penalty nor Tony Blair repealing Section 28. What is new is the now former working class fraction of retired homeowners anxious about inheritance and care costs. This is a demographic that has grown to significance since the 1980s and whose class consciousness has been shaped by the media's focus on property and financial risk. If anything, their economic interests are even more salient because of the potential uncertainty of property values subject to both the vagaries of the wider economy and a more localised erosion due to crime (real and imagined) and declining amenities. They may express their concerns through a variety of media-friendly social and cultural tropes, from immigration and statues to travellers and trans rights, but these are clearly symbolic of more personal concerns over control and stability.

Though a significant element of the population, it's important to recognise that this is a pivotal electoral bloc only in certain constituencies, specifically those where retirees and homeownership are high and many of the young have left town. James Kanagasooriam's original coinage of the "red wall" recognised that these demographics meant certain seats should probably already have drifted to the Tories before 2019 (Hartlepool was trending that way), but later media usage has reduced the label to little more than "In the North, previously staunch Labour, collapsed overnight" (this narrow focus ignores the seats in the West of England where a similar dynamic helped the Conservatives supplant the Liberal Democrats in 2015). The framing has led Keir Starmer to think that these seats can be flipped back to Labour by adopting socially conservative policies in conjunction with a (slightly) more interventionist economic programme. But this ignores the underlying trend and that such a strategy dissuades potential voters as much as it persuades. Is there a different approach Labour could adopt that might reverse the trend? If there is, it will depend on enthusing the actual working class in seats like Hartlepool, as happened as recently as 2017.

What might this alternative approach look like? Rationally, Labour should be appealing to working people on pay and job quality. Over and above promises on green jobs and apprenticeships that will benefit only a minority, one policy that has the potential to improve wages and encourage more secure work for many more people is UBI. Evolving the furlough scheme and pre-existing tax credits into a basic income has the transformative potential that Right to Buy had in the 1980s, both in the sense of dramatically altering the circumstances of substantial numbers of people and in providing a profitable electoral dividing line between the Conservatives and Labour. Just as it was the latter who made tentative steps towards the allowing council house sales in the 1970s, only to be gazumped by the Tories, so there is a risk now that if Labour doesn't champion a more systematic and less punitive approach to income support, the field will once more be left to an opportunistic Conservative Party that could introduce a more discriminatory scheme that rewards their own electoral coalition, much as they did with the pensions triple-lock. 

Appointing Rachel Reeves as Shadow Chancellor doesn't augur well. Not only has she built her political career on a punitive approach to welfare, but she's a former Bank of England economist who is most comfortable with fiscal orthodoxy. The report that Keir Starmer intends to spend his summer talking to people who don't vote Labour (i.e. those retired homeowners again), rather than rallying the party's supporters, is also dispiriting. The problem in 2019 may have been ex-Labour voters attracted by the Tories promise to "get Brexit done", but the problem in Hartlepool last week was more about Labour supporters staying home in the face of a party with no plan or enthusiasm to get anything much done. Levelling up the country will probably turn out to be no more than rhetoric, but the term might have more significance for the Labour Party if it can be persuaded to build its policy offer outwards, rather than focusing on the Red Wall (which now plays a similar "moderating" role to the swing voter of old) or by retreating to the Blairite learned helplessness of exogenous change (globalisation then, technology now).

Listening

According to Julian Coman, writing in the Guardian ahead of this week's trip to the polling station, "In the wake of Labour’s terrible, soul-destroying election defeat in 2019, the need to 'listen' to the red wall constituency voters who had deserted the party became an instant truism". There are a number of things that are objectionable in this sentence: the hyperbole, the notion of a "red wall" speaking with a single voice, and the implication that Labour had stopped listening to voters before the general election. But what's really notable is the suggestion that the result was not a sufficiently clear message: that more listening was necessary. This is actually a refusal to acknowledge voters' displeasure at the party's stance on a second referendum. The claims that Corbyn was toxic "on the doorstep" can't be wholly dismissed as make-believe, unless you think that the media has absolutely no impact on public opinion, but this oft-repeated point is clearly intended to distract from the other message. It's also the case that prioritising the 2019 result for interpretation allows a lot of people to forgo having to think too hard about why Labour increased its vote in 2017. The problem now is that the Hartlepool by-election defeat and poor local government results in England have elbowed themselves to the front of the queue for "listening".

Predictably, there are many who still want to talk about 2019, not least Keir Starmer with his new mantra that Labour has "a mountain to climb". But we're long past the point where the party's stumbling incompetence can be blamed on its former leader. Even the Blairites are now turning their focus on the current one, with the reliably tactless Andrew Adonis referring in The Times to Starmer as "a transitional figure - a nice man... without political skills or antennae at the highest level". The results certainly don't flatter the current leadership, but it's obviously a stretch to view them as a judgement on Starmer's "antennae", just as you cannot simply interpret the message delivered by the people of Hartlepool as "Please replace Annelise Dodds with Rachel Reeves or Yvette Cooper". The analysis of Adonis is a perfect example of elite concerns "at the highest level". It appears that he still hasn't fully processed the anti-elite message of 2016. To prove the point, he patronises the electorate: "It is a common fallacy that people at large believe in ideas and policies. In real life, beyond a small number of philosophers, they believe in people who believe in ideas and policies. It all comes back to the leader". Plato couldn't have put it better.

If Adonis is simply living in his own fantasy world, in which he and Tony Blair are philosopher kings, Coman is at least engaged in a more outward-looking exercise, but it remains one of ventriloquism rather than listening. He has long sympathised with Blue Labour and other varieties of class nostalgia, and even indulged the sotto voce disdain for multiculturalism of those who have moved even further to the right. Central to his interpretation is a dichotomy between liberal individualism and communitarianism: "From Victorian New Liberals such as TH Green to the great Marxist historian of the English working class, EP Thompson, British progressive thought has a venerable tradition of defending the rights of community against capitalism, the market and individualism. ... As the totemic Brexit debate over freedom of movement illustrated, [Labour's] deepest moral concern is to promote the rights and freedoms of the individual. The tension between liberalism and communitarianism could be creative, if both sides of the debate were given a fair hearing. But across too much of the left, for too much of the time, the longings of Labour’s lost voters are still not being listened to". 

The idea that Labour is driven by the promotion of individual rights and freedoms, and presumably more so than the Conservatives or Liberal Democrats, is demonstrably untrue. It is a party founded to pursue the collective rights of organised labour. While it has absorbed much of the liberal tradition of individual human rights, its periods in office have been marked by authoritarianism as much as libertarianism. What has distinguished it from the other parties is its commitment to minority rights, which in many cases have grown out of its protection of collective labour rights (e.g. in respect of racial discrimination), and it's in that context that its ambivalence over freedom of movement should be seen - i.e. as a concern with the rights of EU migrant labour rather than the interests of business or the selfish convenience of the #FBPE crowd. What Coman is really hinting at is that Labour doesn't prioritise the volk, which in the Blue Labour reading (and implicitly in the superficial sociology of many British political scientists) has come to be identified with a narrow and geographically-specific demography: the socially-conservative, petty property owners of Northern and Midlands towns.

EP Thompson's famous work, The Making of the English Working Class, is about the radical tradition and its organisational and ideological evolution between Jacobinism and Chartism, not the preservation of antique liberties and the commitment to parliamentarianism of the progressives of the day, such as William Cobbett and Henry Hunt. The "condescension of history" that he memorably spoke of was not a failure to listen to the voices of English radicals but a determination to misrepresent them as either fools or knaves, and that tradition was to be found as much among soi-disant progressive historians as reactionary ones. The common theme was the denial of agency. In that regard, it is telling that Coman imagines the defence of community as being carried out by progressive thinkers, rather than the communities themselves (even Thomas Green was more generous in his support for democratic localism). Again, there is an unwillingness to actually listen as opposed to project prejudices. Thompson gave the humble stockinger a voice, not by ventriloquising his "concerns" but by directly quoting his words in a relevant context.

There has been much talk today of existential crisis, but a lot of this is simply an excuse to give hobbyhorses another turn around the room, such as the need for a "progressive alliance" or electoral reform. As ever, the results can be interpreted to fit multiple, contradictory narratives, and no doubt pollsters and focus groupies will make money over the coming months providing the veneer of empirical research to substantiate them. But that said, there are some reasonable conclusions that we can draw. While the press has a tendency to interpret local election results as a judgement on national politics, the reality is that people do take an interest in their local authorities, and one thing that has become apparent over the last year is that the Conservative government will do more financially for Conservative-controlled councils. You don't have to believe in "levelling-up" to recognise which side your bread is buttered on. At this stage in the electoral cycle, it makes sense to vote Tory if you want more public spending locally. The government has even tried to make this point explicit by fiscally strangling Transport for London, though I doubt this will be enough to sway the GLA and Mayoral elections. The lesson for Labour is that regional mayors and local authorities can either take on the government (as Andy Burnham briefly did) or act as its agent, and the Tories can do a better job of the latter. 

Another conclusion is that patriotism is not a vote-winner, even if the charge of a lack of patriotism can be a vote-loser. It proved an effective wedge deployed by the Conservatives against Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, but this was because he could be presented, however inaccurately, as outside the political nation, which depended in the first instance on his delegitimisation by the PLP (the media's persistent association of international solidarity and foreign aid with weakness and self-hatred obviously helped too). This was quite different to Brexit, where people on both sides of the divide, who each considered themselves the backbone of the political nation, set up competing patriotisms. That both absurdly claimed the Queen's favour indicated that this was a competition within the bounds of the national community (something not dissimilar informs the competing patriotisms in Scotland, where the SNP has been reluctant to commit to republicanism). Performative patriotism for Labour is clearly a rejection of the left, but because its goal is simply readmission to the political nation, it fails to distinguish the party in any meaningful way from its electoral opponents. Keir Starmer gains no kudos for appearing in front of a Union Jack at every opportunity.

Likewise, the Labour leadership's war on the left will earn it little praise among the general public. Apart from alienating leftwing voters, it simply reinforces the view that the party is "riven" and factional. It also leads to the not unreasonable suspicion that seizing control of the apparatus and candidate selection are simply ends in themselves, which hardly helps when you're trying to charge the government with corruption and nepotism. Parachuting Paul Williams into Hartlepool appears to have been as significant a strategic error as having no memorable policies. As regards the latter, "We are good at purging dissidents" is not a compelling electoral offer. Starmer's mistake was not to conduct a thorough purge within his first few months. Had he done so, the ground would have been clear to articulate substantive policies that could have formed the basis of the election campaign. The irony is that he was constrained by the results of the EHRC investigation and in particular the need for an independent disciplinary process (something that Peter Mandelson realised was going to be a problem). One worrying thought is that Starmer is happy for the purging of the left to continue ad infinitum precisely because it puts off the need to address policy substance.

There are a lot more results to come in over the next few days but the pattern looks pretty clear already. Labour is going backwards in England (some cities excepted), holding its own in Wales (perhaps reflecting a mild "vaccine bounce", but also its distance from party HQ), and making no headway in Scotland (where it remains marginal to political debate). Some of its voters have peeled off to other parties (the Greens look like they are benefiting as much if not more than the Liberal Democrats), but the biggest reason for its declining vote share is simply people staying home. That's actually relatively good news for Labour, as those voters could be enthused again, but it does increase the pressure on Keir Starmer to start producing some meaningful policies now. If there is one lesson from 2019 that is still applicable, it is the need to prepare the ground well in advance (the counter-argument made by Stephen Bush and others, that the party should be sparing with policy initiatives, was always about normalising moderation and emphasising image, which looks pretty silly now). The problem is that Starmer has damaged his credibility during his short tenure as leader, both by reneging on the 10 pledges made to Labour members and by "moving on" over Brexit, which has irritated many remainers without convincing leavers that he is a true convert. The message isn't that voters don't trust the Labour party but that they don't trust the leadership. But who wants to hear that?