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?