Left for Dead?

SARAH: Extremely effective. By not seeking the approval of all of the people all of the time you’ve put yourself in a very strong position. You’ve got 46 per cent of the people and that means you can afford to ignore all of the rest. And you do. Labour has no chance because it has no power base. Most of the underclass isn’t registered to vote. You’ve virtually destroyed the two-party system.

URQUHART: Good.

The exchange, initially broadcast in 1993, not long after the Conservatives’ fourth victory, is an insight into the now lost mindset of the mid-1990s political observer, especially when you remember that it was written by a Conservative peer. The Conservatives having enough people in the right places could dominate the House of Commons through the ‘first past the post’ system in perpetuity, especially given that Labour’s appeal was so limited. This theory was pre-eminent at the time: that Labour’s social base had proved too narrow and brittle, that as a party born in the fires of the smelter and the soot of the mines, of the manual and unionised working class, in an economy increasingly based on services, it was doomed to failure. The Tories, it was argued, had trapped Labour in a demographic cage. New Labour was an attempt to escape from its confines.

Such an attempt was hardly novel though. Today some talk in a way which seems to suppose that before New Labour came along the Labour Party was one monolithic bloc, ‘Old Labour’, comprised exclusively of miners, flat caps and whippets from the Jarrow marches onwards before the yuppies with the suits and briefcases and flat whites came along and snatched it from those to whom it truly belonged. In other words, that New Labour was unduly obsessed with and beholden to the middle classes. There’s truth to that charge but our problem comes with the assumption that New Labour was somehow unique in its bourgeois courtship; rather the Labour Party had been wrestling with expanding its appeal for a very long time, before Blair and Brown were even born.

As far back as the early 1950s, as the Attlee government slipped from power and an age of rationing and queuing gave way to one of affluence, Labour had been fretting about the salience of its ideological and social appeal. Much to socialists’ horror, many of whom had seen the 1945 government as the beginning of a destined age of socialist government, it was the Conservatives who would govern for the next thirteen years. It began to look as if the Attlee government, for all its achievements, would be socialism’s high-water mark, an apotheosis, an end, rather than a beginning. A new age of individualism and consumerism beckoned for which Labour seemed temperamentally and congenitally ill-suited. As one Conservative journalist observed, the English working class were characterised less by an interest in Marx and Engels, than in Marks and Spencer.

Thus the 1950s were a period of deep soul-searching for the party, and concern abounded that its reach was far too shallow. One study commissioned concluded that ‘Labour is thought of predominantly as a class party and the class that it represents is objectively and subjectively on the wane.’ Moreover, even members of that class were not necessarily friendly to Labour. As Hugh Gaitskell, by then party leader, said to the party’s 1959 conference in Blackpool: ‘We assumed too readily an instinctive loyalty to Labour which was all the time being gradually eroded.’ Harold Wilson’s ‘white heat’ speech, which came a few years after and today is remembered best as a call for state planning and investment in technology and science, was neither nearly so lofty nor futuristic as it appeared. It – and Wilson’s entire electoral strategy at the time – was an attempt to bring in new middle-class and technically educated voters. Wilson ran a campaign arguing that Labour was the classless party, the party of aspiration, for those who aspired to dispose of the primitive and outmoded distinctions of the place and status in which people were born. While the Tories of the grassmoor held back people of talent for reasons of snobbery, so a technocratic Labour government would liberate people of ability irrespective of class, so that socialism was for you if you wore a white coat or a flat cap. This built on Gaitskell’s observation at the party conference in 1959, where he said the worker (and voter) of the future would be ‘a skilled man in a white overall watching dials in a bright new modern factory’. Wilson was, he said privately, ‘making myself acceptable to the suburbs’. The language was different – Gaitskell and Wilson spoke of ‘intermediate voters’ rather than Blair’s ‘Mondeo Man’ or ‘Middle England’ – but the ambition was the same: to expand the Labour Party’s appeal in new quarters.

Wilson’s strategy worked for a while. In 1964 Labour scraped in and won big 18 months later, in 1966. By the 1980s, though, Labour’s white heat had long since cooled and the issue of the party’s social appeal once again seemed profound. MPs and leftists darkly whispered of the party’s ‘London effect’. As the party retreated to its old industrial heartlands of the Scottish central belt, the pit villages of the north-west and east Midlands, and the shipyards of the north-east, Labour struggled most of all in the capital. It seems hard for us to imagine now, but London – deindustrialised, service-dominated, liberal, full of non-unionised younger workers – represented all that Labour Party strategists and thinkers feared most. It was at the centre of the Thatcher revolution and potentially a harbinger of things to come elsewhere. By the late 1980s the party was 17 per cent behind the Tories in London, compared to only 9–10 per cent in the country overall.

Blair, interviewed standing for the 1982 Beaconsfield by-election, was alive to all this early on. He told the BBC’s Newsnight, with Michael Foot at his side:

‘The image of the Labour Party has got to be an image which is more dynamic, more modern, more suited to the 1980s. I don’t think it’s as much about right and left as people make out. We live in a different world now, 50 per cent owner-occupiers, many people working in services. Large numbers of people working in services rather than manufacturing and that means a change in attitudes and a change of attitudes we’ve got to wake up to.’ At its core, Philip Gould, Blair’s close confidant and personal pollster, wrote, would be ‘the new middle class; the aspirational working class in manual occupations and the increasingly insecure white-collar workers with middle-to-low level incomes.’ It would also include the urban poor, the inner cities, the suburbs, as David Marquand observed, every voter from ‘Diane Abbott’s Hackney as well as Gisela Stuart’s Birmingham Edgbaston’. Looked at in this way, New Labour wasn’t just a branding exercise or, ironically enough, that new: rather it was the latest version of a series of iterations of a new type of Labour Party, attempting to attract a new coalition of voters to a party whose electoral performance since the war had been lamentable.

OUR SURVEY SAYS …

Today there are some who argue that the New Labour victories came at too great a cost; that effectively Blair, in his courting of ‘Middle England’ and so-called ‘Mondeo Man’ and ‘Worcester Woman’, hemmed himself in, reduced Labour’s room for manoeuvre, and reined in radicalism all in the name of respectability, and that this was unnecessary. The academic Neal Lawson, for example, has argued that Blair’s 1997 majority was too large: ‘The tent was too big and you spent the next ten years trying to keep the wrong people in it: the very rich, for example.’1

That a political party is electorally successful but then spends the years afterwards self-flagellating because it had the wrong sort of votes cast by the wrong voters seems to me an argument that only the Labour Party could have. But even taken on its own terms, there are two key reasons why it is a wretched analysis. For a start it’s ahistorical. It looks that way now because Blair did achieve what he did. It seems the party was destined to win and win big. That is not how it seemed at the time: Labour politicians did not have the reassuring benefit of hindsight that we possess. Read any diary entry, any memoir or account of that period, and the scars of four successive defeats run deep in the psyches of the Labour politicians of the age. Even though the party had been ahead in the polls for years, even though the country was thoroughly sick of the Tory government, it didn’t seem a certainty that Labour would finally get over the line. Chris Mullin, in his safe Labour seat of Sunderland Central, still didn’t think it was going to happen until the last moments, as his diary entry from 24 April 1997 (exactly a week before polling day) records:

We’re going to lose. Blair knows it, too. I can see it in his eyes every time he appears on the TV news. The magic is fading. He looks exhausted. Major, by contrast, is as fresh as a daisy. The massive rubbishing to which our man has been subjected is paying off. The Tories have succeeded in turning him from an asset to a liability.2

Moreover (ironically given the accusation that all Blair wanted to do was achieve office at any cost), getting into government was not New Labour’s only aim. Blair’s objective was not to secure power once. Lawson is probably right that most (though by no means all) mainstream Labour leaders in 1997 would have won – the country was sick of the Tories after 18 years and the democratic elastic had been stretched to its maximum. But that was not the sum of Blair’s or Brown’s ambition. They wanted to govern for a sustained period in office. At the time that was mistaken for pragmatism over principle, but up to then one of the key critiques of the Labour Party was that it had never been able to enact a truly transformative programme because it had never governed for long enough – that too is forgotten now. Rather it had had periods of minority government followed by the stop-start governments of the 1940s and 1950s and especially the 1960s and 1970s. Blair didn’t believe that simply expelling the Tories from office every now and again was enough: he wanted to, in effect, displace them as the natural party of government. Listen to any speech, read any pamphlet written by Blair or Brown at the time, and the idea of securing that objective drips off the page; that, in their view, required fundamental political accommodations. In the 1940s, after the Labour government enacted some truly socialist policies, socialists were dismayed not just at losing office in the 1950s but because the scales fell from their eyes. Part of the ideological makeup of prewar socialism was that once the working class had had a taste of the truly transformative powers of the ideology, it would usher in a golden age in which Labour would rarely be dislodged. History had not turned out that way and Blair’s generation held no such illusions; they assumed they must act accordingly.

But there’s another reason why it’s easy to ridicule the Blair big tent, why it seems almost quaint as a political notion: because, for good or ill, it was precisely that – a big tent. Blair genuinely believed his was a new approach, a new conception of politics, and that much of the population could be brought into the tent’s shelter. His politics was not one based on antagonism but on unity. The contrast with what came before him, of Margaret Thatcher’s constant quest for enemies to slay, of her rhetoric of ‘our people’ and ‘one of us’, was a million miles away from Blair’s soft and conciliatory tones, of ‘one people’, transcending left, right and all the old dogmas. Francis Urquhart would not have approved. In as much as anything, this was rooted in Blair’s personality, in a tremendous self-belief in his own persuasive abilities and capacity to bring people together. As Professor David Marquand argued years later: ‘the central premise of his statecraft was that society was naturally harmonious: that apparent differences of interest or belief could always be compromised or transcended’.3

That contrast is not only striking for what came before Blair but for what has come since. New Labour’s big tent partly seems so kitsch because its open and pluralist approach seems so foreign to the politics of our own age. Today’s politics, of remain and leave, of heroes and villains, of identity politics, of authenticity and virtue and vice, is a politics that fundamentally rests on enmity just as much as did that which characterised the 1980s. It relies on showing who you are for and who you are against and in so doing revealing your truly authentic self. In this regard, the bonhomie of the settled politics of Blair’s 1990s seems as distant as Baldwin’s 1930s or Macmillan’s 1950s – indeed our own politics has manifested itself to some extent as a counter-reaction to it. Consequently, Blairism can appear unprincipled or rootless. The ‘authenticity’ of big characters like Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Jeremy Corbyn and the rest must surely arise as a counter-reaction to the 1990s era of spin, PR politics and the idea of politicians trying to please all of the people all of the time. Better, it is said, to have politicians who really say what they think, even at the risk of being divisive, rather than those who try to be all things to all people. Today, as Britain is ravaged by new political and cultural schisms, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard friends or colleagues or columnists yearn aloud for a unifier, a politics less coarse, less bellicose, someone or something that can bring people together. Yet it was exactly that sort of openness, and its accompanying rootlessness, which so many came to revile and which now makes Blair’s approach seem so antiquated and his political personality dismissed as a libertine.

Of course, Blair and Brown said the big tent couldn’t be constructed on a foundation of presentational changes alone; they believed deep policy shifts would be necessary as well. In the same way that the hunt for new voters and appeal is sometimes today considered a unique and grubby affliction of the New Labour years, so likewise the abandonment of certain policies and adoption of others is considered to be a distinct piece of New Labour treachery. Rather, it makes more sense to think of New Labour as the party’s latest attempt to respond to the changing material world around it, in a way that Labour hadn’t done in a comprehensive fashion for a very long time, probably since the revisionist Anthony Crosland attempted to update the Attlee settlement for the 1960s in his seminal work, The Future of Socialism. Blair’s and Brown’s thinking, nursed through the 1980s and ’90s, resulted in the so-called ‘Third Way’, in which the dynamism of the free market was combined with traditional social democratic goals of social justice and fairness.¶ As Blair was himself to say in 1999: ‘It was important for me to try and explain to people what the nature of my political project was about, this idea you could get beyond left and right but have a pro-business, pro-enterprise but also pro-fairness party.’ Decades after it had fallen out of favour, Blair was to reanimate that sentiment to me, saying that the Third Way and New Labour are just rhetorical vehicles ‘to describe an attitude, a way of looking at politics, the label is insignificant. What’s significant is the idea that social democracy has to keep renewing its policy applications and principles.’

This didn’t come out of a vacuum and it was a theme Blair spoke about often, throughout his leadership and after. When I asked him why he thought New Labour was successful he returned to the idea: ‘I think the reason is that we broke this stranglehold that elements of the progressive left had over associating policies which were appropriate at one time with principles for all time. It’s not complicated but it is essential; if you don’t break that stranglehold you have the world changing but you are in the same place over policy.’ In other words, he challenged the view that Labour policy had to be constant, that it would always look the same, and that to deviate from it was heresy, that there was only one road to socialism.

Blair won that argument for only a short time, and perhaps he never could win it in the end, because for most of his party the only road to socialism still runs to and from 1945 and hasn’t changed much since.

1945 AND ALL THAT

Clement Attlee’s 1945–51 government remains the party’s most important administration, one of the three most significant governments of the twentieth century. Its achievements are ones of which the party can be justly proud. Its ability to stir hearts in members of the party is unparalleled, despite the fact that no one even elected to that Parliament remains alive, much less anyone who held ministerial office. In the summer of 2015, I made a film about the seventieth anniversary of that government’s coming to power. As part of that I interviewed Margaret Beckett. She described an occasion when, in 1994, not long after John Smith’s death, she attended the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day in Normandy, as leader of the opposition:

‘We had a ceremony at the cemetery at Bayeux. The Queen was there, President Clinton, the Prime Minister and so on and so on. After the ceremony, the people broke and there was an opportunity for people to mix informally. And I was mobbed … by veterans and their families. I remember looking around and there were lots of people around the Prime Minister of course but I was mobbed. And it’s not just me who thinks that I was, because the Defence Secretary [Malcolm Rifkind] was there and said to everyone a few days later, did Margaret tell you, that she was mobbed by the D-Day veterans? And I thought … that was for Attlee’s government.’ As she told the story, she became quite overcome with tears.

It’s hard to compete with that, and every government before and since hasn’t. It is the only Labour government of the half-dozen or so there have been that has emerged with its reputation intact. Perhaps because of this and because of the strength of its achievement, it has acted as a sort of eternal litmus test against which each and every government since is judged within the Labour movement. It has become Labour lore.**

But just as subsequent Labour governments and prime ministers struggle to compete with its emotional pull, so they struggled to compete with Attlee’s greatest gift: the moment in which he lived, a moment primed for socialism. The total-war strategy articulated by Churchill entailed doing all the things that the Conservatives under Chamberlain and Baldwin had told the country were not possible: nationalising swathes of industry, huge government intervention in every sphere of existence, taking profound stakes in not only the economy but the day-to-day affairs of life. It controlled what you ate, what you did, whether or not your children lived with you, how much you paid for consumer goods, where you worked, whether or not you fought in the war, whether you lived or died. Public expenditure as a proportion of overall national spending and income skyrocketed.†† As a result, the ideological superstructure of the country changed. It was a unique moment and one that couldn’t last.

The new consensus Attlee and his ministers bequeathed held for the next thirty years or so, with both Labour and Conservative governments managing Attlee’s inheritance. But by the late 1970s Labour (and Conservative) governments had found it increasingly difficult to manage that settlement, which was by then decaying. As Britain struggled economically and the rest of the world fell into economic malaise, the traditional Keynesian methods of reflating the economy through public spending were in trouble across the globe. Jim Callaghan, who endured a pretty unsuccessful stint as chancellor and was now prime minister, sounded its death knell. He told the Labour Party conference in 1976: ‘We used to think that you could spend your way out of a recession and increase employment by cutting taxes and boosting government spending. I tell you in all candour that that option no longer exists, and in so far as it ever did exist, it only worked on each occasion since the war by injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy, followed by a higher level of unemployment as the next step.’

The cosy Keynesian postwar balloon was slowly leaking air. As it did so, the social ideas that underpinned it were also dissolving. As we’ve seen, the party’s grip on the working class was never entirely firm but by the 1970s it appeared almost loose. One of the central problems was the idea of greater public spending and, in a portent of things to come, a dissatisfaction with newer streams of more liberal leftist thought focusing on minorities and individual rights. As Denis Healey was to relay to his cabinet colleagues in 1975:

At the Labour clubs, you’ll find there’s an awful lot of support for this policy of cutting public expenditure. They will tell you all about Paddy Murphy up the street who’s got eighteen children, has not worked for years, lives on unemployment benefit, has a colour television and goes to Majorca for his holidays.4

In other words, as the years of postwar plenty gave way to a harsher economic climate, so the social solidarity that had paved the road to 1945 diminished. At the same time, globalisation, membership of the European Economic Community and increasing integration of global markets continued to lessen the power of social democratic governments to enact the policies that they might like: the idea that socialism or social democracy in one country was possible seemed less and less likely. Globalisation, the end of dollar convertibility and the development of a truly international capital market had disrupted the cosy world of 1940s Britain, where socialist or social democratic governments could pursue their dreams of a new Jerusalem without much regard to the rest of the world. The experience of the 1968 devaluation crisis under Wilson and the 1977 IMF crisis under Callaghan was searing to the Labour movement, but also illustrated how powerful international capital flows and financiers had become and how weak national governments now paled when set against them. Blair showed himself alive to these forces early in his leadership. In a university lecture in 1995 he said:

Governments can no longer adopt stimulative policies that boost demand without risk of being punished by markets and higher interest rates. We must recognise that the UK is situated in the middle of the global market for capital, a market which is less subject to regulation today than for many decades. An expansionary fiscal or monetary policy that is at odds with other economies in Europe will not be sustained for very long … to that extent the room for manoeuvre of any government in Britain is already extremely circumscribed.5

Blair and Brown were obsessed with this idea; from their earliest days in office it’s clear now that they were genuinely quite scared of the market reaction against their government. Harriet Harman, in her memoir, recounts a story that is revealing of her bosses’ mindset. As the new Labour government’s social security secretary, she had been tasked with finding several billion pounds’ worth of cuts, so the government could stick to its election pledge of matching Conservative spending plans (something the man who drew them up, Ken Clarke as chancellor, later said he wouldn’t even have done had the Tories been re-elected). This entailed cutting child benefit for new claimants by £6 a week, a move deeply unpopular within the wider Labour Party. She recalls that she went to see Brown to spell out the problems and find a remedy:

But he said it was a manifesto commitment and that it would have to be carried out. If we didn’t, it would send a signal that we weren’t going to be financially prudent in the way we’d promised, it would cause instability in the money markets, there would be a loss of confidence, the government would fall, and I would be responsible for bringing down the first Labour government for eighteen years … Our government still felt fragile to me, I couldn’t do anything to threaten it.6

In retrospect, this seems quite incredible. The Labour administration was only a year old, elected with a stonking majority, the economy was booming, the markets were sanguine, the world economy was enjoying stability and growth, but a Labour chancellor and cabinet minister were worried that a £6 a week cut in benefits for lone parents might be the issue on which the government’s fortunes turned and which risked sending money markets into a spin. Perhaps Brown was over-egging the pudding to get his way, but what is striking reading the accounts of the time is just how commonplace fears like this were.