How the Left Might Win Inside the Labour Party

This is a follow-up to last week's post, Can the Left Win Inside the Labour Party? That was an essentially negative analysis, focused on the structural weaknesses of the party right in the context of historical decline. That decline encompassed both the wider Labour movement, seen in dwindling trade union numbers and a weakening of union authority within the party (the 2010 leadership election notwithstanding), and the decline in the establishment utility of the both the old Labour right after 1989 and the neoliberals after 2008. Though the 2016 EU referendum and its aftermath provided a springboard for the latter's bid for renewed relevance and ultimately helped secure the election of Keir Starmer as party leader, this came at the cost of highlighting the right's intellectual bankruptcy and manoeuvred them into a corner where 1990s nostalgia had to fill the void. This post is by way of a more positive analysis of the left's strengths and opportunities. But before I move on to that, it's worth recapping two of the key weaknesses of the right as these point to possibilities for the left. 

The most important is the fundamental distance between the mass of the membership and the Parliamentary Labour Party. In terms of political ideology, the contrast is between social democracy and economic liberalism, with social liberalism being the common ground, albeit offset by authoritarian instincts on the right. The PLP's marriage of social liberalism and economic liberalism has proved problematic. Not only has its disciplinary bent alienated many on the left, particularly among the young, but the contradictions between national sovereignty and globalisation have given rise to both an opportunistic and electorally-succesful Toryism and a popular disdain for social liberalism more generally (the so-called culture wars). The party right's attempt to reconcile this, through the emotionalism of Blue Labour or a doubling-down on economic liberalism (e.g. Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves's current courting of business), have so far failed to capture the popular imagination. Ultimately the combination is unstable and there are grounds to believe that some on the Labour right intend to resolve this by marginalising the social liberalism, which means antagonising the party membership.

The second major weakness of the right is that the changes in the social composition of the Labour Party, both among the membership and the apparat, have made this ideological distance more difficult to bridge. This is not simply rephrasing the first point but highlights two sociological developments. The party membership has shifted towards greater social liberalism since the 1980s, in combination with a rejuvenated social democracy after 2008. In contrast, since the 1990s the PLP has increasingly drawn its members from a professional political class, nurtured in the upper echelons of the more conservative trade unions and "sensible" local government fiefdoms, that has strong personal relationships with the predominantly rightwing media. This twin movement has fuelled an atmosphere of mistrust and barely-concealed disdain in both directions between the membership and the PLP that clearly goes beyond the forever war against "Trots" or old Labour "behemoths". 

The most obvious evidence of this localised culture war is the current leadership's purge of the left, which has used the proxy of antisemitism, or proximity to those accused of antisemitism, to isolate and expel leftwing members. The point is not simply that the charge of antisemitism is usually false, but that the right feels the need to employ it at all. This is because an ideological attack on the left, in the manner of the struggle against Militant in the 1980s, would fail because the contemporary left are democratic socialists at worse, not Trotskyite entryists committed to the supersession of Labour as a bourgeois party by a genuine working class vanguard. While some of the expelled members are socialists, many are vanilla social democrats or even liberals with anti-imperialist sympathies. Objectively, the people currently being thrown out are well within the bounds of Labour's supposed broad church, including in their support for Palestinian rights.

To give him his due, Tony Blair does recognise that the underlying tension is ideological and is prepared to urge that Starmer expunges socialism from the Labour party altogether. But it is notable that this has led him to insist that Labour should reject "the wokeism of a small though vocal minority", which reflects both his starting position within an establishment still someway further to the right of Labour and even Starmer himself. The justification for this is another motivated polling report by Peter Kellner, for which Blair wrote a typically intemperate and self-regarding foreword. Kellner has followed the conventional wisdom of British political science in assuming a "decline in class-based voting" and its replacement by a politics centred on "the new divisions of age, education and culture". For all the insistence on clarity of purpose and direction, the analysis is incoherent and contradictory. Within four paragraphs of the executive summary Kellner assures us that both that "economics no longer trumps culture" and that "the people’s agenda today is primarily economic and social, not cultural". The Labour right remains in a transitional phase; not yet ready to claim it is the true conservative party: patriotic, trustworthy with the public finances and intolerant of progressive nonsense.

In straightforward electoral terms, the claim is that Labour can only win office by retaking the so-called Red Wall seats, specifically by winning back older, non-graduate voters, who hold socially conservative views. And the corollary to that is that Labour cannot do this if it too loudly proclaims the interests of its actual voting base: the socially liberal, the young and graduates, and of course the urban working class. But this is not simply a counsel of despair - assuming that older conservatives are the only decisive factor in Northern and Midlands seats outside the big cities - it is also perverse in its overt disdain for its most loyal supporters. It is this that provides the left within Labour with its most obvious route back to influence or even outright control: namely becoming the champion of the social progressivism that chimes with the membership. For all Starmer's efforts to simultaneously shrink the party and attract the likeminded, CLPs are not about to be taken over by an influx of Daily Express-reading pensioners, and many CLPs are clearly dismayed by the leadership's alacrity in adopting positions to the right of the Conservatives on topical subjects such as asylum and business-friendliness.

The second opportunity available to the left is the promotion of explicitly social democratic policies. In fetishising the socially conservative voter in Mansfield, the Labour right are careful to downplay that everyman's support for social democratic policies in the economic sphere, such as the nationalisation of utilities, higher taxes on the wealthy and a reversal of the marketisation and stealth privatisation of the NHS. The word "nationalisation" appears only once in the Kellner report, and that in a wholly negative vox pop ("So, I voted Conservative for the first time"). To put this in context, Blair's foreword mentions the "far left" four times. The fundamental problem for the Labour right remains its reluctance to embrace social democracy, old Labour nostalgia notwithstanding. This isn't because the Johnson government has occupied that particular space. None but a fool would imagine the Conservatives have become the party of the welfare state, or even of the developmental state committed to modernisation and public investment. The Labour right remains tied to the mast of neoliberalism (now reframed by Blair as riding the tiger of "the technology revolution"), and no one on the right appears to have a better alternative. 

Kellner, and presumably Blair, isn't  in denial about the public's appetite for social democracy, or even socialism, but he is determined to reinterpret it as anything but support for a left agenda. In a sentence that should go down in history, he claims "To make sense of this issue, we need to relate the widespread pro-socialist inclination among voters to the clear preference for staying close to the political centre". In a section that comes close to parody, he insists that "“Social” is a useful word for Labour to own: there is clearly a public appetite for the ethic of coming together for the common good. Adding “ism” on the end, however, is risky unless socialism can be stripped of its doctrinal associations". This is a logical progression from Blair's own Third Way reframing of what he referred to as "social-ism" in 1994, showing that the project continues in the minds of its leading lights. I doubt they'll take the next logical step and add "National" to the mix in order to appeal to the Red Wall, but it's pretty obvious that the intention is to not only bury "socialism" but to redefine "social" to mean little more than the disciplinary state.

I'm conscious that in outlining what I think are the positive reasons for the left to see hope in the Labour Party I've ended up focusing on Tony Blair. This isn't simply down to the coincidence of his latest intervention. For all his rebarbative qualities and the incoherence and sheer outdatedness of his prognoses, Blair remains an intellectual colussus on the Labour right. In other words, his prominence is entirely due to the lack of novel thinking. The vagueness of Starmerism, beyond status quo conservatism and an anti-leftism that is closer in style to the 1950s than the oft-cited 1980s, reveals the shallowness both of the man - an establishment hack whose managerial talents cannot hide a lack of curiosity and empathy - and the party right more broadly. Blair's haunting of Labour is not simply down to the media's indulgence of him or even genuine affection within the PLP (outside his longstanding coterie there are few who can tolerate his conceit and bitterness). It simply reflects that the party right is populated by intellectual pygmies at present. This is ultimately the left's real opportunity.