Can the Left Win Inside the Labour Party?

The academic Mike Wayne has an interesting essay, entitled Roadmaps After Corbyn, in the current New Left Review. It starts with the fantasy of a new socialist party but only in order to highlight what he terms the left's "collective inertia" and its meekness in the face of Starmer's purge: "Post-Corbyn, the left bows its head and hands back the keys, as acquiescent to the status quo as the Labour Party's tradition of Labourism has been vis-à-vis the institutions of the British state. Clinging to Labour or orbiting around it guarantees political paralysis". Wayne sees the Corbyn interlude as the answer to the question: can the left win inside the Labour Party? His conclusion is that it cannot, and not simply because of the power of the political and media establishment but because it will always have one hand tied behind its back by "the right-wing majority in the upper ranks of its own party". I'm not sure this is correct. The very fact of Corbyn's ascension to the leadership, and the inept response of the right that culminated in his re-election, suggest that "the right's commanding position within the party apparatus", as Wayne puts it, isn't quite as secure or decisive as it once was.

It might appear odd to argue that the balance of forces within Labour has shifted in the left's favour at a time when the right is not only in total command but apparently embarked on a campaign that will see the left extirpated once and for all, but that is what I'm going to attempt to do here and in part I'm going to do it by using Wayne's own analysis of the Labour right. The key distinction he makes is between an essentially social democratic membership (with socialism proper a significant but minority interest) and a PLP that marries economic liberalism and social liberalism. The traditional Labourism of the old-school right is a subordinate strand to the dominant neoliberal master discourse (as he puts it, "Deputy Leader Angela Rayner [is] the new John Prescott to Starmer's Blair"). The tension then is between social democracy and liberalism, and arguably has been since the party's inception, with substantive socialism (e.g. workers' control) and traditional Labourism occupying the flanks and exerting an essentially nostalgic pull. 

This tension was reconciled first by Fabianism and later by the postwar consensus centred on the welfare state. It was then undermined by the Thatcher revolution, with its twin focus on dismantling the welfare state and promoting economic liberalism, which in turn gave rise to a new tension between national sovereignty and globalisation with which the Conservative Party is still grappling. New Labour sought to supersede social democracy by embracing that economic liberalism (and explicitly welcoming globalisation as modernisation) while augmenting it with a social liberalism expressed in such shibboleths as openess and diversity, and in the relaxation of public moralising. Of course moralising didn't disappear altogether. By allying itself with economic liberalism social liberalism underwent a change: "No longer is it about the role of the state as a corrective to capitalism's tendency to increase social stratification. Its role is to guarantee a level playing field of competition, not impose social obligations on capital". This change was most evident in New Labour's attitudes towards the "underclass", a disciplinary regime that would be extended from ASBOs to welfare. 

This narrative is particularly useful in highlighting the continuity of New Labour in the Cameron-Clegg coalition government of 2010-15. Austerity was not merely a financial measure but a moral undertaking that valorised meritocracy and charity. Labour's failure to fully push back against austerity reflected not only its continuing adherence to the dominant combination of economic and social liberalism but also its now habitual substitution of moralism for political analysis. The hegemony that existed in this period across all the Westminster parties had an obvious blindspot: that tension between national sovereignty and globalisation which was increasingly articulated at a popular level as a rejection not only of the EU but of the liberal centre generally. While conservatism's inherent contradictions with capitalism allow it to compensate for the latter's disruptions (so xenophobia can co-exist with free enterprise), social liberalism's greater isomorphism with economic liberalism means it is less able to respond to popular disquiet when those contradictions become acute, as they did in 2016. 

As Wayne sees it, Corbyn's success was to shift the party's focus to the contrast between social democracy and economic liberalism, leading to the electoral advance of 2017, but his failure was attributable to the membership's continuing support for key elements of social liberalism, notably the remain cause, which alienated important parts of Labour's working class base and led to the electoral retreat of 2019. In summary, Wayne sees the problem as the membership's divergence from the electoral base. It's a commonplace of contemporary political science that party members are unrepresentative, and that Labour's in particular are much more middle class and educated than its voters, but Wayne is making a subtly different point: that the Labour membership's meekness (see the failure of most deselection attempts, despite the real fears of the right) arises from a political identification with social liberalism as much as a cultural affinity with middle class norms. 

This points to an important change in the sociology of Labour. Before the 1980s, Labour members were mostly socially conservative, in the style now attributed to Red Wall voters, while the cause of social liberalism was driven largely from within the PLP (see Roy Jenkins' reforms as Home Secretary) in tandem with elite-led civil society groups. The shift towards social liberalism among the membership did not occur as an inevitable corollary of the embrace of economic liberalism in the late-80s and early-90s, but was independently driven by extra-parliamentary social movements, notably focused on race, sexuality and womens' rights. More fundamentally, it reflected the delayed advance of the New Left of the 1960s and 70s and the impact that had on local government during the 1980s. While the Labour right was able to corral and neutralise this tendency, isolating the left within the PLP and embracing new public management in local government, it could do little to reverse its impact on the membership. With the revival of social democracy after 2008, this led to a widening gap between members and the PLP that culminated in the shock election of Corbyn as party leader in 2015.

But while that explains the motive force, we also need to understand why there was no effective resistance, and this is where I take encouragement that the left could advance within Labour again. The ability of the trade unions to act as a brake on the left in Labour has declined. This is not just because of the union movement's diminishing influence within the party, following various reforms around conference procedures, the manifesto and leadership elections. It also reflects a shift in union membership to white collar and increasingly public sector roles which has produced a more liberal base with less instinctive hostility towards the left. Though Corbyn's victory in the 2015 and 2016 leadership contests was variously attributed to the intellectual exhaustion of the PLP and the influx of new members, supposedly a mix of old lefties and youngsters radicalised by post-2008 politics, a no less important factor was the realisation that the Islington North MP's mild social democracy and principled internationalism was much more in line with the interests and sympathies of the unions than the reheated neoliberal nostrums of the other leadership candidates.

While the Labour right remain entrenched in the hierarchy of some unions, and while the unions collectively remain prepared to use their votes at conference to block more radical changes (e.g. to campaign for proportional representation), it's probably fair to describe the current situation as one in which the unions are becoming more detached from Labour: the election of Sharon Graham as General Secretary of Unite on a "workplace first" manifesto being obviously emblematic. The increased recourse of the Labour right to procedural mechanisms to expel the left, notably peremptory expulsions for trivial reasons, is in part a recognition that they can no longer rely on the unions to fulfill their traditional disciplinary role either within constituency parties or at conference. Similarly, the influence of councillors has declined within the party since the New Labour years, ironically because the embrace of technocratic managerialism in local government has drained the right of the sort of political enthusiasm that could motivate members. Topics such as anti-antisemitism and patriotism have taken on a greater importance because they provide a way to mobilise a right that is otherwise lacking a politics beyond a conservative defence of the status quo.

The manner in which the Labour right and centre have pushed back against the left also owes a lot to the encouragement of the media and the campaigns against antisemitism and Brexit during the 2017-19 period. The willingness of members of the PLP to countenance a government of national unity, on the proviso that Jeremy Corbyn would stand down as leader, was remarkable for the lack of self-respect it displayed, allowing the Liberal Democrats and various conservative-leaning commentators to set conditions that would be considered intolerable by any other party. The farce of Change UK was almost entirely down to key members of the PLP being seduced into believing that media support could translate into votes. While the formation of the SDP in 1981 was very much predicated on the calibre of the "Gang of Four", Change UK was a startling example of the delusion that media regard was equivalent to public recognition and as such a substitute for talent. The aborted leadership run of Jess Phillips in 2020 also falls into this category. What this outsourcing to the media highlights (again) is the void that exists on the Labour right. 

My conclusion is that the Labour right is terminally weak. Not only does it lack the intellectual coherence of a program comparable to the New Labour project, but it is forced to rely on the wider political and media establishment to prop it up and help prosecute its battles with the left. The recent BBC series - Blair & Brown: The New Labour Revolution - simply accentuated how much the right has decayed over the last twenty years. The ridiculous calls for the return of Blair are indicative not simply of an unhealthy nostalgia but of the failure of the right to overcome the contradictions of economic and social liberalism since 2008. The past cannot be properly buried and zombies roam the land. Corbyn offered a solution to that conundrum by proposing a new synthesis of social democracy and social liberalism. That solution remains viable (whatever its own inherent limitations and contradictions, as highlighted in 2019) and, with no alternative on offer beyond authoritarian centrism, likely to remain dominant among the membership. For all the current pessimism, I suspect the left will revive within Labour and I also suspect that the right will collapse once more, as it did in 2015, but next time it probably won't have the lucky break of a divisive issue as powerful as Brexit to help engineer its revival.