Left for Dead?: The Strange Death and Rebirth of the Labour Party

Copyright

William Collins

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Lewis Goodall 2018

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Lewis Goodall author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008226695

Ebook Edition © September 2018 ISBN: 9780008226701

Version: 2018-08-28

Dedication

For Grandad, for teaching me

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Prologue: Longbridge

1 What Went Before: New Labour and the Left

2 The Curious Case of Jeremy Corbyn

3 What is Corbynism?

4 The ‘A-Word’

5 Corbyn the Culture Warrior

6 A Class Apart

7 The Takeover

8 Fear and Loathing in the Labour Party

9 The Night Everything Changed: The 2017 General Election

10 What Comes After: The Next Election and the Future of the Left

Postscript: Grandad

Notes

About the Author

About the Publisher

Acknowledgements

I work in a profession in which my working days are essentially a series of sugar hits. In TV news, our deadlines are short, our working days long but our time horizons truncated. While most people’s jobs and projects can spread out for weeks, if not months at a time, in ours the complications, the highs, the lows, the screw-ups are compressed into a single day. For us, a week is a long-term gig. As a consequence my brain has been rewired by a thousand two-minute lives, three hundred three-minute packages, ten score of online instant analyses.

Writing a book then, all 130,000 words of it, has been a major challenge, the ultimate slow burn. And then, every time I was able to concentrate for long enough, everything would change. In the time I’ve been writing, Jeremy Corbyn has gone from zero to hero (and some would say back again). Every time I thought I understood what was happening, political life would find a way of making me reach for the delete button, once again. In three years, the Labour Party has moved from extinction to the precipice of government, and therefore this book, its premise and its contours have fluctuated almost as much as Corbyn’s reputation. What began as an obituary became a living history of rebirth. At the same time, and to my surprise, it became infused with my own history. For this I am indebted, principally to my family, especially my mum and dad, for giving more political insights and wit and wisdom than I could glean from a lifetime in Westminster. I also have to say an enormous thank you to Tom Killingbeck, my editor, for encouraging me to strike out beyond my working life, beyond Westminster and the corridors of power, and for encouraging me to explore my own story – and how both were mutually reinforcing. I owe him special gratitude for his patience – especially given he inherited the book from his colleague Joe Zigmond, to whom I am very grateful for believing in the idea in the first place. The same is true of my agent Claudia Young – she took half an idea, in the Newsnight green room, and helped develop it into the book you’re holding. Iain Hunt, also of William Collins, handled the final stages of the edit brilliantly. I’d also like to thank the dozens of people, politicians, journalists, aides, activists and the rest, who spared the time to be interviewed. I hope they feel everyone, of every opinion within the Labour Party and without, has had a fair shake.

Special thanks must go to my employers, Sky News, especially the former head of politics Esme Wren, for giving me the space and time to write the book – and so many opportunities more generally, many of which have fed into the contents of these pages. In that vein I’m also grateful to the whole of the senior Sky News management team, especially Esme’s successor Dan Williams, Jonathan Levy, head of newsgathering, and John Ryley, the head of Sky News, for their interest and willingness to throw me new challenges. My colleagues, too, in the Millbank bureau are too many to mention, but are a never-ending source of inspiration, humour and fun. They make me, in so innumerable ways, a better journalist. After eighteen months at Sky News, I can say without hesitation that I am extremely proud to work for an organisation which reports politics without fear or favour and which, in my entirely impartial opinion, has the best political team in Westminster. In particular, my colleague and best friend in TV, Zach Brown, has worked with me since the beginning at Newsnight and now Sky. My best work – especially on matters Labour – has been with him. Long may it continue.

I’m grateful too to my friends, many of whom have contributed ideas to the book – apologies in advance if I’ve stolen them. In particular I’d like to thank Marc Kidson and James Stafford, two brilliant minds, who over the years since our Oxford days have helped shape my thinking on so many things. If you read something here that makes you think, chances are one of them had a hand in it.

As you wade through these pages, there is one man who looms large. My dear grandad, Alan. It is no exaggeration to say that without him there would be no pages. A more thorough tribute is reserved for him at the end – but it would still be remiss not to mention him here. His imprint, his essence, is in every bit of what you’re about to read. I only wish he could read them for himself. With his no longer being here, I will have to leave that to his darling wife, my beloved nan. My dearest, this book is for him.

And to my darling girl – my imp, my Cherie, the cleverest person I’ve met, the one who has had to hear all my stupid thoughts again and again and then read them in print and still be kind about them – I can’t give all those evenings and holidays back but I promise, no matter what happens to the Labour Party, this is my last word on the subject.

Probably.

Lewis Goodall

London

July 2018

Prologue

Longbridge

Son, where we’re from, you could put a donkey in a Labour rosette and it’d win.

My dad, many, many times

I’m not sure there’s been a time when my family wasn’t involved in making things. Some of my earliest memories involve my grandad coming home and presenting the three- or four-year-old version of me with some samples of buttons, medals or coins that he’d helped make at the Birmingham mint. Grandad, as its works manager, got my dad a job there too. He was a lanky 22-year-old, just moved to Birmingham to be with the 17-year-old mum who had just given birth to me. They’d met at a Scarborough holiday camp a year or so before – my dad’s first ever holiday. He was from Middlesbrough, the son of a dockworker, and before then he’d barely left the town as a kid. He later said it put him off holidays for life. He didn’t have a qualification to his name, except a GCE in needlework. This didn’t help at the mint, where the only job my grandad had available was on a machine that needed a delicate approach and small fingers, which probably explained why all the other workers in the department were women. He didn’t, Grandad told me later, excel himself but he tried his best.* We all lived cheek by jowl in Erdington in north Birmingham: me, my two aunts, Mum and Dad, and my grandparents. I was the apple of my family’s eye; it probably explains why I’m unafraid of the limelight. It was a mindlessly happy existence for a little boy. But after my grandad could fiddle the figures for Dad no more, my nan phoned up the Rover plant, on the other side of the city in Longbridge, where she’d heard they needed some new workers. She asked if they had any openings for her son-in-law (just about – he’d married my mum weeks before; I was page boy at the ripe old age of four). So we left Erdington and crossed the city to the south Birmingham suburb of Northfield, just next to the vast Rover plant. I walked past it to secondary school for five years.

For more than a decade my dad worked there nearly every working day. Each morning I’d leave for school just as he was getting in after a night shift; then, not long after I’d got home at around 4.30 p.m. Mum would instruct me (probably for the third or fourth time) to go and tell him to wake; he had to get up and eat before he started again. We were ships in the night. I didn’t mind. It was a given. Mum and Dad worked, and Dad worked more hours because he had to look after me and my younger sister. He worked incredibly hard (and still does), without complaint. These were the comforting rhythms of my childhood.

These days, I imagine it must be hard for kids in the playground to describe what their fathers and mothers do for a living. How, as a child, do you go about describing what Mummy, the management consultant, does? Or Daddy, who works as a computer software programmer? Or project managers? Or account directors? Or procurement experts?

But for many of us in Turves Green Primary School’s playground, we knew what our dads did. They worked at the Rover. They made cars. And most of them drove in the cars they had made. And I knew which bit my dad worked on: the doors. He was a welder. Today, in the increasingly unlikely event that you see a Rover on the roads, my dad probably welded it on its hinges.

I wasn’t uncommon. When I think back to my friends and classmates, so many of us had fathers and mothers who were employed on the Rover site and even more in the wider supply chain of the plant. Rover was ubiquitous, part of the bloodstream. They even sponsored our school technology labs and our curriculum, their branding and emblem proudly on display on many a classroom wall. Our families were connected through Rover socially via the ‘Austin’ Social Club, just down the road from the main site. I remember every Christmas Eve Dad taking me there for the afternoon, as he enjoyed a well-earned break and pint, played some snooker, or watched a football match. As we got older, some of my friends got their first jobs collecting glasses there a couple of nights a week. The company arranged trips to Weston-super-Mare and other seaside towns. Rover’s presence punctuated almost every aspect of life. It was, on reflection, an impossibly traditional working-class childhood, almost stranded out of its own time.

The plant’s quotidian certainties reassured not only our present but our futures too. I remember very clearly one lunchtime talking to another boy in my class. Like me, his father worked at the Rover. Somehow, as kids do, we started to talk about what we would do when we ‘grew up’. Even today I remember the confidence with which he talked about his own nine-year-old plans. He told me he would work at the Rover and that it would be easy; after all, his dad could easily get him a job. This was more than just the lack of imagination and naivety of a child not yet a decade old. It reflected the esteem a job there enjoyed. Longbridge was the Rover and the Rover was Longbridge.

Some 18 years or so later, I’m not sure what happened to him. I am certain, however, that he had to make a few changes to his career plans. For in the space of our schooldays the deep certainty attached to a life at the Rover gave way to the apprehension and unease of the twenty-first century. Globalisation came to Longbridge and shattered the quiet insularity of our lives. By the 1990s and early 2000s, as me and my friends grew up, changed schools and went into the sixth form, it had become ever clearer that our community was living on borrowed time.

By the time of my childhood, Rover had been manufacturing cars on the site for a hundred years. Ever since a young industrialist, Herbert Austin, discovered a disused printing works there in 1905, it had been a hive of industry. A century later, in 2005 it had largely closed. At its peak, 100,000 people were employed on that site alone; even by the dawn of the millennium, five years before closure, my father was one of 25,000, with an estimated 100,000 in the wider supply chain.

So, as its troubles mounted in the late 1990s and early 2000s, we all of us were aware of just how potentially devastating the factory’s closure would be. As the national media poured in to witness the slow decay of this last British brand of motor car, we kids went to school every day in something akin to grief. I remember seeing the worry in my mum’s eyes, I remember her asking my dad, every night before he’d even had chance to take off his coat, what news there was from the union, from management – something, anything that might give us some hope and if not hope then at least some certainty. This was reflected and amplified for me in the playground, all of us exchanging fragments of half-truths that had been ricocheting around our fevered imaginations. The plant’s travails, every twist and turn of the story, gripped us and the wider community like an all-too-real soap opera. I can recall, as an eleven-year-old, praying, on more than one occasion, that the factory would be saved and Dad would keep his job.

It wasn’t and he didn’t. As BMW pulled out in 2000 and the factory was ‘rescued’ by a consortium of local businessmen, Dad decided to take redundancy. By his own reckoning, it was ‘one of the only good decisions I’ve ever made’. Although not exactly flattering for my mother and for me, it had the benefit of being true. By leaving when he did, he received a full redundancy package to reflect his decade-long service. Those 6,500 who chose to stick with the plant until 2005, when it finally closed its doors, received no more than half a month’s pay packet. At the same time, the plant’s newish and final owners made a pretty penny. While profits plunged and the news became grimmer, it transpired that the British Towers group, which in 2000 had bought the plant from BMW for £10, had been siphoning considerably more than a tenner of investment into their own pockets. In 2002, they pumped £12.95m into a trust fund for their retirement. At the end of its five-year tenure the Phoenix consortium had been remunerated with £42m while the company went into administration with debts worth over £1.4bn. The day after closure, while being interviewed by the BBC, John Towers announced the set-up of the Longbridge Trust Fund for ex-workers – where he pledged the assets of the company, which he hoped would raise up to £50m for the workers’ severely damaged pensions. As of 2018, those workers were yet to see a penny. Later, it became clear that 6,000 workers would receive next to nothing from the pensions they had paid into for years. The money had vanished. The news broke that Nanjing, a Chinese consortium about which nothing was known in Birmingham, was buying the intellectual property, branding and remaining assets of what was the Rover MG Group. A tiny handful of workers remained in Longbridge, with the rest of production moving to China.

At the same time, BMW had taken the only assets that made the brand profitable, including the iconic Mini that had been produced on the site for decades. When I look back, I can see it as a textbook indictment of the worst elements of globalisation and corporate greed, and it left our community bewildered and bereaved.

This canvas is the one on which my childhood and early life were painted, in colours that millions of others would recognise too, in Britain and across the West. Those same forces, and the anger and resentment left in their wake, also form the base coat for the politics of our own age.

My family were not especially political. Both my parents’ families were quintessential congenital Labour types, the sort of people whose politics is motivated by an atavistic but powerful instinct: ‘We vote Labour because they are for us and the other lot are for them.’ One of my earliest political memories, perhaps my earliest political imprint, was my grandad telling me that Margaret Thatcher ‘made the rich richer and the poor poorer’ and Mum nodding sagely as he did so. As simplistic as it may sound, these are the fundamental political reflexes on which most people rely, the lenses through which they view and make sense of the world around them. Grandad read the papers and watched the news but they largely reaffirmed his own views; the rest of my family didn’t do much of that but they knew how they felt. None of them were much troubled by party politics; if they remembered to vote, they would vote Labour – and that was that.

And that’s why, at the time of Rover’s travails, I simply couldn’t understand why the then Labour government wasn’t helping my dad. My eleven-year-old brain, small but curious, was flummoxed by the events leading to the factory’s closure. I knew that the Tories were for them and Labour was for us. Yet Labour didn’t seem terribly interested in helping us, any more than the loathsome Tories were.

I remember walking around the by then rather tumbledown Grosvenor Shopping Precinct up the road from our house, looking at my mum as she nipped around the shops and thinking, Why doesn’t the government just buy the factory, employ the workers, they’ll pay tax and there won’t be a problem?† But there would be no question of much assistance. There was endless talk, and a lot of hype – one Labour cabinet minister after another (from the very top down) traipsed to our little corner of Brum – but there was certainly no question of nationalisation or a rescue package. In fairness, the government did offer a £100m bridging loan to lure a separate Chinese company to invest in the business, but when they got cold feet, there was nowhere else to go. I remember my dad, late one night, over a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale in our kitchen, musing, almost to himself, how funny it was that the fate of all his old mates was being decided in a boardroom somewhere, in another language, by people we’d never met, by a company we’d never heard of, in a country none of us were ever likely to visit. After a moment’s contemplation, he took another swig, shrugged his shoulders and said, ruefully: ‘That’s the modern world, I suppose.’

What my young brain also found difficult to understand was that our government, the body in which so much awesome power was said to reside, appeared so impotent. How pathetic, it seemed, to have British ministers, the chancellor of the exchequer himself, shuttling back and forth to China, begging a company that was itself owned by the Chinese state, to reconsider. Worse, even those efforts were for naught.

But my dad and his mates got on with it, and this fortitude wasn’t uncommon. Rover’s death had been a slow one; most had been braced for it. There was never any serious expectation that the government would step in directly. Ever since the 1980s, plenty of working people had seen their employers bite the dust and been told, rightly or wrongly, that the government ought not and could not step in, that it would distort the market, that the world had globalised, that the buck no longer stopped with the government. There was, then, no real backlash. The hard-working local Labour MP was re-elected in the subsequent general election, despite the factory’s closure. The BNP, and later UKIP, gained in strength but never seriously threatened. Most voters carried on voting Labour, in the knowledge, perhaps, that though Labour would do little, they would at least try and do a little more than the obvious alternative.

But eleven years later, in 2016, Longbridge, like hundreds of other places that had been forgotten, that seemed so powerless, discovered a political vent, discovered that alternative in its rejection of the European Union. Longbridge, and all of the other Longbridges, had had enough, they fought back.

And little wonder. Many promises were made in Rover’s wake. On the eve of its demise, Tony Murphy, then of the Amicus union, said: ‘Yet again I’m having to write an obituary for another stalwart of the British engineering and manufacturing industry. Longbridge and the whole of the West Midlands are becoming ghost towns. We are going to fight for every job possible at Longbridge … We don’t want to see another supermarket built.’

On a grey, December afternoon, the sort of midwinter day sunlight barely troubles, I returned to Longbridge and met up with my oldest friend, Liam. We’d met at our local primary school some twenty-three years earlier. My dad had worked at Rover, so had his neighbours. The place had changed much in twelve years, and yet not enough. Half of the old site had been transformed. At its centre was the biggest Sainsbury’s I’d ever seen. Later that afternoon, I found out Liam’s neighbour now worked there.

The Sainsbury’s wasn’t alone. It had been joined by a Hungry Horse pub, a Boots, a small shopping precinct, a Poundland, a large youth centre called (in what I can only assume to be the product of a town planner’s dark humour) ‘The Factory’ and a small business technology park. The promised industrial jobs never came. In truth, I doubt anyone expected them to. And the site of the main factory, the one I walked past every day on my way to school? Well, that had been replaced only by detritus, mainly plastic bags and rubbish, willowing in the wind. There was nothing there. Twelve years on, no one could think of anything to do with it.

This is not a book about Rover, nor is it one solely about my own experiences. This is a book about the decline, near-death and potential rebirth of social democracy and the left in Britain. It’s a story of how the left lost touch with the economic and cultural lives of its voters. How those voters became disillusioned with a party that seemed unable to imagine how to improve its own voters’ lives or tell a convincing story about their so doing. How, as a result, the centre left has withered but how also, a new Labour Party, a new left has emerged to take its place; but which, ironically, is no closer to the voters who became alienated in the first place. It’s a story of transformation, of Labour leaving its historic working-class moorings behind and sailing into a new world, depending on new people, new classes and new places. It’s a story that begins with Labour, centred in Britain, but which holds lessons for its left-wing sister parties and students of politics around the wider world. It’s a story that asks how Labour came so close to death only to be rescued, in the end, by forces not of its own making.

I feel I’m in a decent place to evaluate all this: I’ve been following what has happened ever since the 2015 general election. I’ve interviewed Jeremy Corbyn and nearly every single senior Labour figure. I’ve spent more hours than I care to remember travelling the length and breadth of the country speaking to Labour clubs, voters and members in all four corners of the kingdom.