Our People

The Labour Party's history is one of a dialogue between rights and entitlements: what everyone should expect versus what organised labour should be entitled to. This reflects the party's origins both in the radical wing of the Liberal Party, with its desire to universalise liberties, and in the particularist approach of the trade union movement, which sought to further the interests of its members. Though the unions grudgingly adopted some of the universalist tactics and language of syndicalism, notably the general strike, its focus remained limited to the bread-and-butter of self-interest rather than social transformation. Thus the aim in 1926 was to restore miners' pay and hours, not to seize the means of production. As the labour movement was absorbed into capitalist society through parliamentarianism and what became known as "industrial relations" (i.e. collective bargaining), the two traditions were initially complementary, achieving a secular apotheosis in the institutions of the welfare state, notably the NHS. This was the synthesis of universalism and particularism captured in the resonant phrase "national insurance": available to all as a right but subject to conditionality and the contributory principle. 

Over the course of the second half of the twentieth century these two traditions increasingly came to be seen as being in conflict in the popular discourse. The rights of the individual were arrayed against the privileges of trade unions in the form of the closed shop and the inconvenience of strikes. The language of the original liberal revolution was revived as union leaders were cast as "barons" and the destruction of established norms was cast as "modernisation". This was all part of the neoliberal revolution, but it also reflected the growing tensions within the labour movement itself between younger workers demanding that the movement take industrial democracy seriously and a bureaucratic apparatus that increasingly accepted the hegemonic idea that British industry needed reform to free itself of "sclerosis". The triumph of Thatcherism settled this argument decisively in favour of the apparatus even as it undermined the labour movement through recession, repression and punitive legislation.

With questions of industrial policy and property rights sidelined, the consequence was the Labour Party's greater emphasis on that liberal tradition of universalism. This translated not only into the extension of rights to previously disadvantaged communities - what would come to be known as "diversity" - but into full-throated support for European integration and a more robust promotion of human rights globally. But the particularist tradition was still part of Labour's DNA, only now reframed as the just desserts of the neoliberal monad: Worcester woman enjoying her ability to shop at Marks & Spencer's on a Sunday. The result, when Labour finally returned to government in 1997, was the peculiar mish-mash of "rights and responsibilities" that marked the party's rhetoric, together with the blithe trust in market forces and messianic approach to foreign relations embodied by Tony Blair. I don't need to enumerate the many disasters this gave rise to. The key point is that the once fruitful dialogue between rights and entitlements had by now curdled into a fractious contention between established rights and fluid responsibilities, often at the whim of the media.

The current Labour government lacks a theory of the economy, by which I mean it doesn't really know what or who the economy is for, beyond the unthinking credo of growth and its presumed material benefits for voters in the form of a profusion of goods. Consequently it has no idea how to stimulate or restrain economic activity, hence the uncertainty over green investment and missteps like the employer NIC hike, while its fiscal planning seems reactive only to market sentiment ("in office but not in power" pretty much sums up Rachel Reeves as Chancellor). Likewise, it has no theory of culture, hence its absurd attempts to monopolise patriotism, its MOR tastes in the arts, and its fogeyish attitude towards the young. But what it does have is a theory of governance and central to that is the belief that rights are conditional on right behaviour. Historically, even during the New Labour years, this was largely just rhetorical scolding, but it has started to take on a concrete form now. This is evident not only in the administration's preservation of the benefit sanctions regime introduced by the Conservative-Liberal coalition, and in its echoing of the press in treating asylum as a "golden ticket", but in its appetite for extending the state's coercive powers over protest.

The liberal tradition holds as a self-evident truth that only conservatives and reactionaries impede progress. The implication is that anything slightly to the left of them will help the arc of history bend towards justice. This is obviously not true, but it means that liberals can easily delude themselves into thinking that they are the defenders of rights even as they undermine them. The tradition emanating from the labour movement holds as a self-evident truth that the Labour Party exists to further the interests of "our people". The implication is that it is always worth voting for Labour, no matter how disappointing they may prove in office. This, rather than Peter Mandelson's claim that Labour supporters "have nowhere else to go", is the guiding light of the party's electoral strategists: get Labour into power and hope for the best. In combination, these two beliefs allow Labour politicians to convince themselves that, to coin a phrase, all voters are equal but some are more equal than others. But because of the party's factionalism, "our people" often means a very narrow segment of the population, which is how fictions like the "hero voters" of Morgan McSweeney's imagination can come to dominate political analysis. 

This also explains why Labour always appears happy to alienate its actual core vote, which it has been doing at a spectacular rate over the past year. There can be little doubt that the majority of people protesting over Gaza and the subsequent proscription of Palestine Action will have voted Labour in 2024, and also little doubt that the party's poor showing at less than 34% was not the product of "efficiency" as claimed but the result of disillusion since the purge of the left after 2019 and the steady jettisoning of Keir Starmer's pledges made during the leadership election. When you add in the reluctance to lift the two child benefit cap or introduce any sort of wealth tax since taking office, it almost seems like we're witnessing a perverse experiment in finding out how easily a political party's base can be discouraged from voting. In this light, the mood music about "reforming" the European Convention on Human Rights sounds like another attempt to woo a reactionary who isn't going to vote for the party anyway, but it also points to something fundamental in this government's worldview: that all rights are contingent because they are conditional to the needs of the moment, from avoiding inconvenient court challenges to reassuring the Board of Deputies of British Jews.

The contrast with the Labour Party's embrace of universalism in the 1990s is stark, and only made more ironic by this turn occuring under the leadership of a "human rights lawyer". Despite his many flaws, Blair never doubted that Labour had to apperal to the mass of voters rather than just "our people". And while he was guilty of ventriloquising their preferences over issues such as the Iraq War, he didn't present the British people in narrow and exclusionary terms but as part of a more dynamic global population seizing the neoliberal moment at "the end of history". But it's important to emphasise that the particularist turn does not mark the revived influence of organised labour in the party, or even a commitment to the bread-and-butter concerns of the already forgotten "everyday economy" or "securonomics" that Rachel Reeves once eulogised. Rather it reflects the steady absorption of the Labour Party by the security state and the adoption of its instinctive authoritarianism. "Our people" has come to mean the apparatus itself, not the rank and file.