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.