Left for Dead?

It is true that Blair rightly identified the social conservatism of many of his voters (something often ignored by the current Labour leadership) and acted accordingly. But often that sat uncomfortably with New Labour’s deep economic liberalism and laissez-faire approach to globalisation – for example, the 2004 decision to allow untrammelled migration from eastern European accession states to the EU was thought permissible because it pleased Blair’s economic liberalism – but no matter what safeguards he put in place in the form of ID cards or extra police, he seemed little able to assure his voters. Rather, as so often, he found himself in the worst of all worlds, annoying every constituency of opinion. His traditional working-class voters were irritated by his openness to migration while his culturally liberal middle-class voters were lured to the Lib Dems and others on the basis of the draconian social policies Blair instituted to compensate. This helps explains the hollowing of the Labour vote, to only 35 per cent by 2005 – bleeding in every direction, to the authoritarian right and the liberal left. Both offending strands of Blair’s thought became more pronounced and problematic as time proceeded. Even for critical friends of New Labour this is difficult territory. All the more difficult because it isn’t where Blair began, as Jon Cruddas explained to me:

‘The danger is we get further away from it and we look at it more and more in the one-dimensional sense through the rearview mirror: New Labour was this or that. I remember going into Downing Street the day after we won in ’97 and at that stage there wasn’t one Downing Street, there were many Downing Streets – more liberal Downing Streets, more communitarian, more European, more Eurosceptic, people who wanted a more systematic labour market structure, or refinancing the public services or tax policy – but what I’m trying to get at is that it was a lot more plural political project than people give it credit for especially across the left now. The question is how it’s shrunk over time – which is very dangerous in terms of the collective memory of the left and the Labour Party, but it has lost nuance, and the character of it has diminished over time. In turn, Blair changed over time: compare the speeches of 1995–6 to 2004–5 – they are very different characters. The arc between those speeches explains that change in dynamics. It lost its ethical components primarily and became quite a dystopian liberal sink-or-swim agenda by the end. Where you can trace it back to is his philosophical reference points, his spiritual and ethical history, who he studied with at Oxford, his letters and communications in Opposition. You can trace a more thoughtful ethical and moral dynamic to a social democratic agenda, and over time it became empty, and more economistic and instrumentalised and cold – it lost its soul over time.’

In other words, to begin with New Labour retained a starkly moral component, a strong critique of and distaste for the worship of Mammon and the individualism of the Thatcher and Major years. Blair, whose political philosophy, like that of the early Labour Party leaders, was far more influenced by the teachings of Mark and Matthew than Marx and Engels, felt comfortable on this terrain and even invoked scripture. He told a Labour conference in the mid-1990s:

‘Socialism for me was never about nationalisation, or the power of the state, not just about economics, or even politics. It is a moral purpose to life. It is how I try to live my life. How you try to live yours. The simple truths: I’m worth no more than anyone else; I am my brother’s keeper; I will not walk by on the other side. We are not simply people set in isolation from one another, face to face with eternity, but members of the same family, same community, same human race. This is my socialism.’

He said this at his second conference as party leader. On the platform, as a special guest, was Mary Wilson, the widow of the recently deceased Harold, who had once said that ‘the Labour movement is a moral crusade or it is nothing’. Wilson was right. The link, physical, intellectual and ethical, from New Labour to old was there for all to see. It was only later, in the mid-2000s, that Blair appeared to choose to sever that link, in that his philosophy had mutated into something quite alien to Labour tradition. In that, Blair sowed the seeds for the trashing of his own reputation, the Blairites’ loss of Labour’s crown and eventually even Britain’s repudiation of the sort of moderate, centrist politics that Blair had so hoped to permanently embed.

LET’S SEE WHAT YOU COULD HAVE WON …

In pure Labour terms, the party from its inception had the trappings of religion. We live in an age characterised by a caustic suspicion of politicians and their motives, yet we have not to go back too far into history to see a missionary evangelism about politics and a particular fervour associated with socialism and the Labour Party. It is not for nothing called ‘the Labour movement’. That movement and ideological crusade was at its zenith in Attlee’s 1945–51 administration. Imagine a contemporary politician of any stripe speaking with the moral and political certainty, if not the evangelical overtones, of his deputy prime minister, Herbert Morrison: ‘The good Socialist works with religious zeal for the redemption of mankind from the evils of poverty and ignorance. … He is conscious of the beauty of the ideal … he works … for the deliverance of the human spirit from the enslavement of material things.’11

It’s hard to imagine Peter Mandelson’s grandfather as Moses but there we are. And such a sentiment was not unusual. At Labour’s birth, and for much of the twentieth century, for many people it was nothing less than an article of faith that a Labour government, and ergo the use of state power, would positively influence their lives. A fusion of class attachment and group thinking led to a solid conviction among a significant portion of the population in the importance of voting Labour. The state could and would tame capitalism and help build that new Jerusalem for the working class. Over time, however, that faith, in both Labour as an entity but perhaps more crucially in the state’s capacity to ameliorate social conditions, has eroded. Time and again, up and down the country, I’ve heard voters tell me some variant of the same thing, as one elderly lady in Manchester explained: ‘I’ve voted Labour always. It’s just what we did. My mum told me, we were poor so we voted Labour, for our own kind. The rich vote Tory and we don’t.’ These are not unique insights, they’re sentiments the like of which would have been repeated countless times in families up and down the country for decades, including in my own family. Yet, unfortunately for Labour, what she went on to tell me has become an all too common addition: ‘I don’t vote Labour any more. Doesn’t matter who gets in. Nothing ever changes.’ Leave London or any of the big cities and this sense of powerlessness among voters is as palpable as it is ubiquitous, especially among Labour voters.

And, extraordinarily, to some extent Labour brought this on itself. Throughout the New Labour years, the refrain was the same: that voters simply had to accept this new world. Do or die. Sink or swim. This was hardly inspiring talk for a party whose essential aim since its inception had been to reform industrial capitalism and alter its character. Here, 105 years after the party’s birth, its most successful electoral leader was offering it a vision of society that was less a shining city on a hill, but rather a burning one.

This repeated insistence that perpetual change was on the way and that national governments could do little to alter its path did more than just demoralise Labour’s party faithful. It helped erode the very basis of Labour’s raison d’être, in the public’s collective psyche. If even the Labour prime minister was of the view that nothing could or indeed should stand in the way of global economic forces, then what was the point of their supposed gatekeepers? Why not replace them with stewards of the free market who were true believers and ultimately had more credibility, i.e. the Conservative Party? And, true enough, as soon as Labour’s economic credibility was damaged beyond repair in the late 2000s, that is precisely what the public did.

Worse, with Labour’s retreat from the state, others have filled the vacuum. Across Europe, a similar phenomenon has occurred. Voters who have become sick and tired of social democratic politicians telling them what they can no longer do have decided to fill that space with politicians on the far right. If you take Nigel Farage’s UKIP, or Marine Le Pen’s Front National or Donald Trump, one thing unites them: their unabashed enthusiasm for state power and the pitch to voters that contrary to what they’ve been told, another world is possible. While many liberals may find the populists’ rhetoric dark and distasteful, one reason it appeals is its political and economic certainty. There is no hands-up expression of woe, no plea to global forces outside our control – all of this cast of characters offer safety and security to the dominant tribe in their respective societies: we will protect you, and your family, and we’ll use the state to do it. Whether that translates into deportation, stronger border controls, or promises of greater economic self-sufficiency, the underlying theme is the same: that of state power; that voting for some – any – sort of political change must be better than voting for parties that offer none at all. This is why the prospect of ‘taking back control’ was so potent in the Brexit referendum – it was speaking to a powerlessness that politicians, especially of the centre left, had for too long cultivated. In Scotland, in a different case, lost Labour voters turned to nationalism rather than populism but the phenomenon was essentially the same: a group of politicians expressing the belief that alternatives were possible, that the future was not set in stone. What, social democracy’s antagonists in every case implicitly and explicitly argued, do you have to lose? As Sheri Berman told me: ‘The decline of the centre left is one of the most important pre-conditions for the rise of the populist right. Not in a narrow way that people have currently focused on – that traditional left-leaning voters have shifted over to the right. That’s too simplistic. Something more profound is that in the course of the last decade, the centre left (not necessarily the far left) has lost the ability to speak effectively to the two main challenges that are facing European and American society: economic challenges and social or cultural challenges. The left has lost its voice on both these things, and so it has left the space open for parties to move in with answers to these types of things. Without the decline of the centre left both across Europe and in the US, you’d never had a political space for the rise of populism.’

It is in this where late Blair loses his connection with Labour leaders before him. He too often presented the laws of economics as if they were the laws of physics. Politics became boring and hopeless, trapped by its own confines. It removed the magic of possibility on which politics must rest. Jeremy Corbyn’s biggest virtue is perhaps that, under him, that has been restored. And if Berman is right (as I think she is) that the populism of our own age can be attributed to the decline of the centre left, and its modern inability to speak to voters, then Corbyn’s achievement to arrest that decline is all the more important. It is vital, then, to understand what he has done, just who, exactly, this rather curious man is and how he came to be there in the first place.

* I think children to begin with are natural authoritarians, responding to one leader is all they know.

† Not least because she was cold too!

‡ I’ve got to the age of 28 without any so I’m pretty sure they think I’m infertile.

§ To my sadness and frustration, one of Michael Gove’s first acts as education secretary was to abolish the scheme.

¶ Note, not necessarily equality, of which more later.

** Yet it is forgotten now just how disappointing many socialists found the government at the time, how shoddy they thought it had become, how irritated they were with the compromises they had to make. The Conservatives have no equivalent – it would be like judging Theresa May against the actions of Macmillan or Baldwin.

†† By 1943 it accounted for 54 per cent of GDP, against 24 per cent in 1938. It turned out that total war was extraordinarily egalitarian.

‡‡ So-called for Finance Minister Roger Douglas. He was a Labour minister by the way.

§§ This is a vast area and an important one. There is no doubt that Blair’s foreign policy helped incubate the leftist revival that was to occur in the 2010s. However, I do not go into the details of the foreign policy decisions in any great detail in this book. It seems to me to have been very well documented elsewhere.

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