Left for Dead?

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.

Yet it’s more than that; I was born into a working-class Labour family but doing the thing that they wanted most of all – getting educated, moving away, going to Oxford, leaving the familiar and making anew. In so doing, in lots of ways, I feel removed from my family and our old way of life, in which I was happy. But on the other, I don’t entirely feel at home with the new world that has taken its stead, nor with the new Labour Party that has been created which looks, feels and sounds so much like the new rarefied world I’ve entered. Perhaps then, as a journalist, I’m in the right place, not as I used to think as a politically obsessed kid as a participant in the arena, but as a passionate observer.

In the interest of full disclosure, I should say at the outset that I joined the Labour Party when I was 15 years old, as soon as I was able. There’s no point in not being up front about that. I was a very political young man – I still am. For me, as a 15-year-old, I felt my sense of class very deeply. Labour was for kids like me and families like mine. I wanted to change my life and that of those around me and joining Labour, my eyes dazzled by the New Labour politics of the age, seemed natural. I sat in dusty leisure centres and school halls on Thursday evenings, debating motions and resolutions, and gave up my teenage Sundays to leaflet in the drizzle. It felt right. Today – with the bonds between Labour and the sort of kid I was frayed – I don’t know whether the 15-year-old me, now, would do the same. This is why I tell you this. Certainly, as a reader you deserve that honesty. You might argue that such history (and such openness) is incompatible with my job as a political correspondent. I would emphatically reject that. I have long left any party affiliation behind me. Every political journalist has a past and often a political one – indeed, given our borderline obsession with all things politics, it would be peculiar if we didn’t. Other journalists’ past (or present) political predilections are well known. But straightforwardness is not the only reason. Most importantly, I talk of my past here because it is directly relevant to the story I propose to tell. I was born into the automatic Labourism of my class and birth. As I have changed, moved on and grown up, so in a peculiar way has Labour. These pages tell the story of the evolution of the party I knew. I hope to tell the story of that evolution as fairly and dispassionately as I can. But it is nonetheless also a personal one.

The only living remains of the Rover factory today is the Austin Social Club, where I spent so many of those childhood Christmas Eves and my dad a fair bit of his wage. It’s a lingering remnant of what was: a workers’ club for a workplace long gone.

Around the new precinct, through the rapidly descending December fog, I noticed what appeared to be two road signs outside the shops. On closer inspection, I could see they weren’t road signs but instead each carried a phrase. They stopped me dead: on the left ‘WE SLEPT TO THE SOUND OF HAMMERS’ and on the right ‘IT WASN’T ABOUT CARS, IT WAS ABOUT PEOPLE’. Many of my friends find the notion of working in industry almost quaint. To us, it wasn’t just a way of life, it was a reason to be. It was under those hammers, and those like them up and down the country, that the Labour movement was forged. And now they’ve ceased to sound, the old movement has withered. But out of its shed skin something else has emerged, something new. It feels, with the 2017 general election result, that the new is half-formed. The old is not quite dead. But its new party is not yet quite born. Perhaps, like me, Labour is betwixt and between two worlds.

* He survived through a combination of Grandad’s munificence and a bit of light form-fiddling.

† I didn’t know it, but looking back, I’d stumbled upon Keynesian economics without realising.

Chapter 1

What Went Before: New Labour and the Left

I assessed that there were three types of Labour: old-fashioned Labour, which could never win; modernised Labour, which could win and keep winning, which was my ambition from the outset; and plain Labour, which could win once, but essentially as a reaction to an unpopular Conservative government.

Tony Blair, A Journey, 2008

If she wants a PR war, then she can have a PR war … I’ll Mandelson her. Nobody wanted New Labour, Jeremy. But we all know how it works.

Mark Corrigan, Peep Show, 2008

What we want to know is what kind of society this government is trying to create.

Barbara Castle, 1998

I’m a New Labour kid. That’s not to say anything about my politics especially; rather it’s a matter of my pedigree. The earliest political memory I have is John Major giving way to Tony Blair. I was seven years old, nearly eight, and had some dim conception of this grey man in big glasses being in charge. Mum had previously explained to me that, contrary to my assumptions, the Queen was not in fact the leader of the country. This struck me as being very peculiar: the Queen, after all, had a crown. No, Mum insisted, it wasn’t anything to do with the crown, power was actually exercised by this drab man in a suit rather than the old lady in the jewels. Put right, I forgot about it and focused on something else, like Lego.

But I remember the morning of the 1997 election, watching it on TV. This younger man driving up in front of a black door. Mum explained to me there had been a vote and a change. I was captivated by the idea. That the leader could change just because people willed it.* I asked Mum – worriedly – if she might change if there were a vote and be replaced. No, she laughed, that wouldn’t happen. I was relieved.

But I kept on watching. And watching and watching and watching. I can’t tell you why I’m interested in politics. I just am. In the same way that some people can’t explain why they’re interested in football, or cooking or butterflies, I am just fascinated by politics. I am addicted. There hasn’t been a day since I was about ten or eleven years old when I haven’t thought about it to some degree or other. The drama of it, the importance and scope of it, the power and vitality of it. I can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t be.

My political ‘education’, if you can call it that, started quite early, thanks to one man – my grandad. I used to spend every Easter, summer and half-term with my grandparents on the North Wales coast. Grandad, having been made redundant when the Birmingham mint closed, opened a small souvenir shop in the coastal town of Towyn, near Rhyl. Every day I’d work behind the counter, and there, or in his van, on our way to top up his stock, I would pepper him with questions: ‘What does the prime minister do?’ ‘What were the names of the old prime ministers?’ ‘What were they famous for?’ ‘Do you remember them?’ ‘Which one did you like best?’ ‘Did you like Harold Wilson?’ ‘Why didn’t you like Margaret Thatcher?’ ‘How often is an election?’ ‘Grandad, I’ve read about the miners’ strike – what was that?’ ‘How big is this Chief Whip I’ve read about?’ I must have done his head in but he never once expressed the slightest irritation or impatience, he just chuckled, took another puff on a cigarette and talked to me not like a child but an equal. I gorged on his knowledge and wisdom and words. It was the foundation of everything I was to learn later.

But, in a way, the knowledge he gave me and that I imbibed from book after book was secondary. Because I think that from quite a young age I was aware of how important politics was, not because I read about it in some theoretical or abstract way but because I could see, even as a child, the import and impact of political change around me. Not just with my dad’s work, in Longbridge as I’ve described, but on each and every aspect of my little life.

When I was small we lived in a pretty dilapidated council house. The worst part was that it had no heating upstairs. I remember as a little four- or five-year-old begging Mum to let me sleep with her when my dad was on his night shifts because it was just so cold upstairs. Mum didn’t mind,† but in the end she bought me an electric blanket and we left it on all night. God only knows how we didn’t set the house ablaze. Especially when you consider she occasionally gave me a hot-water bottle to go with it. Even with both, I rarely wanted to get up in the mornings – just now and again, in winter, you could see your breath inside.

I didn’t know any different: it was home, I was happy. I had two kind, loving parents, a mum and dad who although so young did everything they could to give me the best beginning that they could. But, looking back, the fact that a little boy and then a baby sister were allowed to live in a state-owned house without proper heating in the early to mid-1990s was appalling.

At some point, near the dawn of the new millennium, those houses on Willets Road in Northfield were declared unfit for habitation. They were rightly pulled down and we moved to a better house on a rougher estate but which nonetheless my mum and dad eventually bought under the right to buy scheme. One day, not long after we moved there, on my way home from school, I was beaten up by some older kids. They kept accusing me of ‘cussing’ their mum. I replied meekly, tearily, that I’d never even met their mum. It didn’t stop the next round of punches; I learned then that there’s nothing quite like the sound of the impact of fist on jawbone. Mind you, I was so fat at the time they probably rightly intuited that if they’d gone for anything else their hands might have disappeared under endless rolls of flesh. I was so ashamed that I didn’t admit it for days. When the indigo bruises began to appear, I told Mum I’d walked into a door at school. When she asked why they appeared to be on every side of my face I replied that it was, in fact, a revolving door. Unsurprisingly she wasn’t fooled. For a while I didn’t walk home from school any more. Mum worried we’d moved into the worst neighbourhood in south Birmingham; my dad, by comparison, who had been brought up in proper poverty as the youngest of a big Irish family in Middlesbrough, seemed to think it was, if anything, moderately swish. The trouble peaked one night when the garages around the back of our house were set on fire. I watched it from my bedroom, wondering to myself why anyone would want to do it. The truth is, though they might not have had much more than me materially, they lacked my real blessing: two loving parents, who both wanted me to achieve. In the end, the council put in a new neighbourhood team to sort out the estate. Over time, things got better. After a few years, the problems more or less disappeared.

I attended a lovely school, Turves Green Primary, just down the road. A year or two before I left, me and a few of my friends who were quite bright got an extra teacher, Mrs Clinton, who worked just with us on advanced English and maths lessons. It really helped bring us along and stretched us in ways we might not otherwise have been. Embarrassingly, I remember being thrilled she shared her surname with the then president and asked if there was any chance she might be related and could arrange a tour of the White House. I was more than a bit disappointed by the reply. Around the same time, we started doing something called ‘Literacy and Numeracy hour’. I remember my teacher Mrs Hicking, doubtless aware of this little weird boy already showing an odd, precocious interest in politics, telling me it was a new idea from the new government. I was puzzled but intrigued that teachers, the summit of all power, were being instructed from elsewhere. It was the first of many changes over the next few years.

Then the school was refurbished. I was disappointed to be leaving just as everything was unveiled. I didn’t get into King Edward’s Grammar School a few miles away and so accompanied my (male) friends and travelled a few hundred yards up the road to the local comprehensive, Turves Green Boys’ Technology College. It was a school that had its problems and that did its best with lots of kids who didn’t have that much in life. Many of the boys there didn’t think learning would help them and didn’t see much point in the subjects or knowledge the teachers, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, tried to impart. In my early days, you didn’t get the sense some of the teachers were doing much to help matters. I remember one maths lesson, the teacher, who usually taught PE, gave up trying to keep control of an especially riotous afternoon session. He called for the deputy head, the austere, taciturn Mr Williams. He remonstrated with us: ‘You’re some of our brightest lads, if you actually apply yourselves, you can get Ds and Cs … maybe more, if you’re lucky.’ Educational rallying call, it was not. The lack of ambition, on both sides of the teacher’s desk, was occasionally profound.

Over time, things improved and as they did a fair number of opportunities came my way. A ‘Gifted and Talented’ fund was established and (thanks to some very dedicated teachers) paid for me to learn GCSE Drama and GCSE Spanish after school. It also paid for a hotel in London for me to do a week’s work experience in Parliament, chaperoned by (you guessed it) Grandad. You can imagine my 14-year-old giddiness (‘Was that David Blunkett?! MY GOD, THAT’S DAVID BLUNKETT, GRANDAD!’). It was also the first time I’d properly visited London. I walked poor Grandad’s legs off. He spent the afternoons recovering before we set out on our travels again: Piccadilly Circus, the Embankment, Whitehall, Oxford Street, Leicester Square – places I’d hitherto known only on a Monopoly board. As I walked around Parliament and in London’s bright lights, I swore to myself that one day I’d come back to work in both. Sometimes, as I’m walking past Big Ben on my way to work, or dashing to meet an MP or going to do a live in Downing Street, I think back and can almost see my podgy 14-year-old ghost walking with his grandad, and I pinch myself.

Towards the end of my time at school, a senior teacher handed me a brochure with the words ‘Aim Higher’ emblazoned across its front. Inside, its pages outlined a new programme, a series of summer schools that had just been established across British universities to encourage kids from state schools without much history of sending students to Russell Group universities to apply. Everything was paid for, accommodation, train fare, food – the works. ‘You should think about the one at Oxford,’ he told me. I acted on his advice, applied to the programme and was accepted. I had the time of my life. Up to then I used to dream of what it would be like to escape my happy but small world and in that week, surrounded by the books and the buildings and the spires, I began, for the first time, to see the shape of a new, bigger existence that might take its place. From then on all I wanted to do was go and I was determined to do everything I could to make it happen. I spent weekends scouring the internet (dial-up, when not interrupted by calls from Nan, aunts and Mum’s friends) for every scrap of information I could to help me get there, be it about interviews, extracurricular activities, practice entrance examination techniques and the rest. I worked like a dog for my GCSEs, now knowing how important they were to the application process. Two years later, in what was then the proudest moment of my life, I was able to tell my crying, jubilant mum that I’d won a place at St John’s College, Oxford, to read History and Politics. I will never forget opening that letter, in full Charlie Bucket mode, reading the words aloud again and again lest they vanish from the page. Mum literally jumped for joy; once she came back down to earth, I noticed she had a look in her eyes. At the time I thought it was pride. But looking back I think it was more: it was vindication. Vindication in the face of all the people who had written her off as a hopeless teenage mum all those years before. I think much of the rest of my life has flowed from the contents of that letter, opened on that December afternoon. And yet I’m quite confident that the words inside would neither have been read nor written had it not been for that precious week in midsummer, two years before.

Just as I was packing my bags for Oxford, work was about to start on a new £3m sports hall at Turves Green Boys. Birmingham was changing around me too. Slowly but surely, with the new Bull Ring and revamped city centre, Brum had a spring in its step. The city was shining with fresh glass and things felt hopeful. My mum’s sisters, who had lived with us all together in Erdington, were by then starting to have kids of their own (waiting to the grand old age of their early and mid-twenties, which is pretty late in my family‡). They seemed better off than we had been. Not so much because their income was greater – if anything it was probably a touch less – but it was topped up by the new sprawling system of tax credits created by Gordon Brown. I couldn’t help but be aware of this because occasionally, in the car on the way home after we had been visiting, Mum’s eyes would flash and invariably she’d spit out something like: ‘They don’t know they’re born, we didn’t get tax credits or anything like that with you.’ Nothing quite like sisterly love, sometimes.

Much if not all of what I’ve just relayed followed inexorably from my watching the New Labour government to office, on that 1997 day. They put the money in to refit old dilapidated council housing on its last legs. They established the Gifted and Talented fund. They invested in regional cities. They refurbished schools. They established the Aim Higher Summer School Programme.§ In short, I have no doubt that I wouldn’t be where I am today were it not for the New Labour government. They say the personal is political. It doesn’t get more personal than that. You can say it was all on tick, all on borrowed time. You can say that Blair didn’t achieve enough, that he was a neoliberal, a Tory, a Thatcherite wolf in Labour clothing. You’re perfectly entitled to think this and you’re perfectly entitled to make the accusation that I am a Blairite (I’m sure some of you will). That isn’t true. I’m a journalist and like all journalists I can only relay to you lived experience as I see it. I can only tell you that those things were transformative to me and to those around me. I think it’s also the reason why – you wouldn’t know it from reading the editorials in the Guardian or listening to many of the bien pensant voices in London – in many working-class communities there are plenty of people (my parents and their friends included) who don’t have a bad word to say about Tony Blair. They remember their lives before his time in office and they felt their material lives tangibly improve. My own life is among that number. Many people I know want someone to arrest Tony Blair. I confess to you that when I met him for the first time as a journalist, part of me – a not insignificant part – wanted to thank him for what his government had done.

I got older, I saw many of the government’s imperfections, began to appreciate Blair’s and Brown’s personality defects, the endless tedium of their interminable psychodrama. I, like many others, felt disillusioned by the horrors of Iraq. By the end of my period at university, watching the results programme on my iMac with friends, drinking cheap Malbec in plastic cups right in the middle of my finals week, it felt like New Labour’s time was exhausted, tarnished in a thousand ways, in the sands of the Middle East, in the expenses office of the House of Commons, in the pages of the Hutton Report, in the meeting rooms of Downing Street where the Election That Never Was was called off. But it’s clear, now we can look at the period with a more neutral, dispassionate lens, that in most ways Britain got better in those years, especially for the people Labour was established to defend and promote, the working classes.

It is then a matter of some curiousness that Blair’s name is mud and that period of Labour government, the longest in the party’s history, is considered an embarrassing aberration by so many within and without the Labour Party. The fate of its reputation tells us much, not only about the inadequacies of both New Labour and its replacement but of the entire breed of ‘moderate’ centre-leftism that has all but disappeared around the world.

I don’t propose to give a blow-by-blow account of the New Labour years. It’s already been done. Instead, we need a different approach in our attempts to understand that era. The most common accusation against New Labour is that it had become a pale imitation of the Tory Party, that it had mutated into a form of Thatcherism with, at best, a human edge. This accusation was made in its earliest days. Even by 1996, before Blair became prime minister, the mid-1990s seminal state of the nation TV drama Our Friends in the North lambasted the project as a sell-out. The son of one of the main characters, Mary (who had started out on the left of the party as a local councillor only to become leader of Newcastle City Council in the 1980s and a Blairite MP), accosts his mother at a political meeting: ‘Mother, man, if you and your New Labour party sound any more like the Tories they’ll sue you for plagiarism.’ This belief was to embed itself, then multiply, before it finally became received wisdom in the party, and is the main reason, alongside his foreign policy decisions, why Blair has been disowned as a pariah.

There are many legitimate criticisms to be made of Blair. His decisions in the wake of 9/11, to religiously stick with a neoconservative American administration in particular, deserve much of the ire for which they are now known. Blair’s development into a political masochist, irritating his base, attacking students, the public sector, led to a drift from his social democratic beginnings. However, it is a gross, ahistorical and absurd contention that the New Labour years were ‘Tory-lite’. For all of its faults, the Labour government was not a Conservative (or conservative) one and did things that a Tory administration would never have countenanced. It fails to understand either what New Labour was or the historical and political moment in which the Labour Party found itself in the early to mid-1990s. Nonetheless, even though it was in fact a recognisably Labour government, it did, in its rhetoric, if not in its actions, sow the seeds of the leftist Corbynist revival that it was its raison d’être to banish and destroy. This is my attempt, 25 years on, to offer a rounded perspective on New Labour and its place in history.

NEW, NEWER AND NEWEST LABOUR

New Labour was an election-winning machine: it presided over by far and away the most successful electoral period in the party’s century-long history, achieving 13 years in office and three terms in government. It is nearly always forgotten now that before the 1997–2010 ministries the longest period the party had been continuously in office was five and a half years. Prior to 1997, the last time the party had won a decent majority was in 1966, under Harold Wilson. Yes, 1966. In other words, by the late 1990s it wasn’t just England fans enduring thirty years of hurt; decent Labour majorities felt nearly as rare as England winning the World Cup. The Conservatives were in office for sixty-six out of one hundred years of the twentieth century, about the same length of time as the Communists in the Soviet Union – and the Soviets hadn’t had the minor inconvenience of periodically having to secure the population’s consent. The Tories were election-winning dynamos and had moulded a nation in their own image. Labour’s performance, by contrast, had been anaemic.

New Labour, then, was a movement born out of desperation. The party, especially after the shock defeat of 1992, was questioning its very survival as a credible governing force. The original British (and better!) television series of House of Cards summed up well the mood of the early 1990s. The Machiavellian protagonist, Francis Urquhart, succeeds Thatcher as prime minister and goes on to win three more general election victories, each victory being narrow but absolute. At one point, Urquhart, seeking a new political adviser, asks a candidate to assess his government’s performance: