Summer of Hard Truths
I've not been following the Labour Party's leadership contest although I found this piece by John Harris in The Guardian interesting and I particularly enjoyed the comment from Tristram Hunt that what Labour really needs at the moment is 'a summer of hard truths'.
Desirable as such 'no holds barred' policy debate would be this seems a tad unlikely to me and the Labour hustings feel more like a carefully stage-managed beauty contest, than a serious attempt to find the kind of inspiring leader who can help the party regain its political mojo.
By John Harris - The Guardian
Labour 2020: In the first of a week-long series looking at the questions Labour will need to answer if it’s to win power at the next election, we begin with the state of the party itself – and who it is there to represent.
Labour 2020: In the first of a week-long series looking at the questions Labour will need to answer if it’s to win power at the next election, we begin with the state of the party itself – and who it is there to represent.
Barrow-in-Furness shipyard workers in 1992, when the first Trident submarine was rolled out. Photograph: Denis Thorpe for the Guardian
For the past five years, I have spent a lot of time visiting Labour’s old heartlands. And in the south Welsh valleys, the English north-east and the central belt of Scotland, what has hit home time and again is people’s bafflement about what the Labour party actually is. Its older supporters seem to vote for it merely out of habit; those under 30 have absolutely no idea what is meant to distinguish Labour from its adversaries. In more marginal seats, moreover, mention of the party tends to prompt little more than sighs of indifference.
Right to its roots, Labour and the supposed “movement” some dreamy people still talk about seem to be rotting away. In the days after Margaret Thatcher died, I pitched up with my film-making Guardian colleague John Domokos in Merthyr Tydfil, where we spoke to an 18-year-old woman who couldn’t find a job. Domokos whispered: “Ask her if she knows what a trade union is.” I duly did. “No, I don’t,” she said. “What’s that?” Labour has endured crises, but this kind of profound estrangement is why its post-election troubles feel existential.
To ladle on the pain a bit more, consider this. While Ed Miliband tried to steal the Tories’ old one-nation banner, the Conservatives were on to something altogether cleverer. In 2013 a new ginger group called Renewal proposed that the Tories should reinvent themselves as a party for workers. During the election campaign, David Cameron took up the idea, claiming he was now leading “the party of working people”. As George Osborne’s recent manoeuvres prove, this is exactly how the Conservatives want to reshape politics, pulling the word “worker” away from its residual associations with solidarity, strikes, and all that stuff, and recasting it as the badge you wear when you earn a living, and you resent subsidising anyone who doesn’t.
In a world so topsy-turvy that the Tories are brazenly claiming to be the workers’ party, what is Labour, and who should it represent? These are hardly new questions. Contrary to the more simplistic accounts of the party’s history, even in the days when one could meaningfully talk about the British working class, it rarely voted en bloc, and Labour was always faced with huge quandaries – not least, the depth and breadth of working-class Conservatism. Before the second world war, its more clued-up people were well aware of the need for Labour politics to reach beyond its traditional bases, and speak to those in the new suburbs; from the 1950s to 1990s, this theme increasingly cropped up in party debates – until New Labour belatedly put it at the heart of its approach, and the party’s 1997 manifesto hubristically claimed it was now “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole”.
Outside the Westminster fishbowl, they seem cold and mechanistic, and devoid of any real sense of how people live
By 2005, even though it won, Labour was down to the support of 35.2% of voters, a mere 21.6% of the entire electorate. This year, its vote share was 30.4%, fractionally up from 29% in 2010. Only our crooked electoral system keeps the idea alive that it might somehow speak for a “majority”. Increasingly, the party’s old working-class base is no longer any kind of electoral cornerstone, and more affluent voters are fickle as never before. As well as fretting about the Tories’ workers/shirkers divide, the party’s high-ups are now evidently panicking about an electoral puzzle that perhaps cannot be cracked. Can Labour once again make progress in the English south while reviving itself in Scotland? How does it speak to an “aspirational” crowd in the Midlands and outer London while inspiring the millions of left-behind Ukip voters in the north and east?
Labour ought to pause, and take a few collective deep breaths. In time, it could – could – again represent a decisive swath of these people and places; indeed, if it does not seriously try to, the game really is up. But successful political journeys rarely begin with parties slicing up their electorates and fretting about how to put the pieces back together. In the first instance, parties start to revive themselves by mastering such slippery things as mood, tone and emotion, before starting to tell a convincing story about the country. And at the risk of sending some people into a fit of fury, that story needs to be about a lot more than such current Labourthemes as the deficit, what it is to be “pro-business”, or which party may or may not speak for “workers”.
In suburban cul-de-sacs as much as post-industrial backwaters, you can very occasionally get beyond people’s cynicism about politicians – “they don’t give a monkey’s about what happens down here,” one Labour-Ukip switcher told me in Clacton – and see flashes of what they think the mainstream parties lack. Outside the Westminster fishbowl, they seem cold and mechanistic, and devoid of any real sense of how people live. Even such visceral issues as immigration and “welfare” are too often reduced to dry statistics, particularly on the increasingly rare occasions when politicians are trying to make a progressive(ish) case.
For the past five years, I have spent a lot of time visiting Labour’s old heartlands. And in the south Welsh valleys, the English north-east and the central belt of Scotland, what has hit home time and again is people’s bafflement about what the Labour party actually is. Its older supporters seem to vote for it merely out of habit; those under 30 have absolutely no idea what is meant to distinguish Labour from its adversaries. In more marginal seats, moreover, mention of the party tends to prompt little more than sighs of indifference.
Right to its roots, Labour and the supposed “movement” some dreamy people still talk about seem to be rotting away. In the days after Margaret Thatcher died, I pitched up with my film-making Guardian colleague John Domokos in Merthyr Tydfil, where we spoke to an 18-year-old woman who couldn’t find a job. Domokos whispered: “Ask her if she knows what a trade union is.” I duly did. “No, I don’t,” she said. “What’s that?” Labour has endured crises, but this kind of profound estrangement is why its post-election troubles feel existential.
To ladle on the pain a bit more, consider this. While Ed Miliband tried to steal the Tories’ old one-nation banner, the Conservatives were on to something altogether cleverer. In 2013 a new ginger group called Renewal proposed that the Tories should reinvent themselves as a party for workers. During the election campaign, David Cameron took up the idea, claiming he was now leading “the party of working people”. As George Osborne’s recent manoeuvres prove, this is exactly how the Conservatives want to reshape politics, pulling the word “worker” away from its residual associations with solidarity, strikes, and all that stuff, and recasting it as the badge you wear when you earn a living, and you resent subsidising anyone who doesn’t.
In a world so topsy-turvy that the Tories are brazenly claiming to be the workers’ party, what is Labour, and who should it represent? These are hardly new questions. Contrary to the more simplistic accounts of the party’s history, even in the days when one could meaningfully talk about the British working class, it rarely voted en bloc, and Labour was always faced with huge quandaries – not least, the depth and breadth of working-class Conservatism. Before the second world war, its more clued-up people were well aware of the need for Labour politics to reach beyond its traditional bases, and speak to those in the new suburbs; from the 1950s to 1990s, this theme increasingly cropped up in party debates – until New Labour belatedly put it at the heart of its approach, and the party’s 1997 manifesto hubristically claimed it was now “the political arm of none other than the British people as a whole”.
Outside the Westminster fishbowl, they seem cold and mechanistic, and devoid of any real sense of how people live
By 2005, even though it won, Labour was down to the support of 35.2% of voters, a mere 21.6% of the entire electorate. This year, its vote share was 30.4%, fractionally up from 29% in 2010. Only our crooked electoral system keeps the idea alive that it might somehow speak for a “majority”. Increasingly, the party’s old working-class base is no longer any kind of electoral cornerstone, and more affluent voters are fickle as never before. As well as fretting about the Tories’ workers/shirkers divide, the party’s high-ups are now evidently panicking about an electoral puzzle that perhaps cannot be cracked. Can Labour once again make progress in the English south while reviving itself in Scotland? How does it speak to an “aspirational” crowd in the Midlands and outer London while inspiring the millions of left-behind Ukip voters in the north and east?
Labour ought to pause, and take a few collective deep breaths. In time, it could – could – again represent a decisive swath of these people and places; indeed, if it does not seriously try to, the game really is up. But successful political journeys rarely begin with parties slicing up their electorates and fretting about how to put the pieces back together. In the first instance, parties start to revive themselves by mastering such slippery things as mood, tone and emotion, before starting to tell a convincing story about the country. And at the risk of sending some people into a fit of fury, that story needs to be about a lot more than such current Labourthemes as the deficit, what it is to be “pro-business”, or which party may or may not speak for “workers”.
In suburban cul-de-sacs as much as post-industrial backwaters, you can very occasionally get beyond people’s cynicism about politicians – “they don’t give a monkey’s about what happens down here,” one Labour-Ukip switcher told me in Clacton – and see flashes of what they think the mainstream parties lack. Outside the Westminster fishbowl, they seem cold and mechanistic, and devoid of any real sense of how people live. Even such visceral issues as immigration and “welfare” are too often reduced to dry statistics, particularly on the increasingly rare occasions when politicians are trying to make a progressive(ish) case.
‘George Osborne’s (centre) recent manoeuvres prove this is exactly how the Conservatives want to reshape politics, pulling the word ‘worker’ from its residual associations.’ Photograph: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images
As the great grey millstone that is Labour’s name still attests, paid employment is too often assumed to completely define people’s sense of who they are. But in the near future, as the population ages, Labour policy will have to be as much about caring as grafting. To answer the man in Clacton’s point, ideas of place and belonging will have to get a look in if blighted towns, villages and city neighbourhoods are not to go on embodying people’s distance from power.
It will require a deep rethink, but this is Labour’s only viable future: as well as wealth and work, emphasising family, time, care and home. As the Tories pursue their cunning version of divide and rule, the party should lose its cringe abut whether there might be strong communitarian ideas inherent in modern conceptions of all the UK’s constituent nations, including England – a country with a rising sense of itself, which demands serious thought about an idea of “civic” nationhood à la Scotland (and, quite possibly, its own dedicated Labour party). Reflecting that, as well as what it might change, Labour should finally think seriously about what needs to be conserved and protected: the town centre, the green-belt fields, the bus route, the pub. For much of the past 20 years, the party has failed to speak that language. It has tended to reduce equality and fairness to a mess of tax policies and financial enticements. Now its vision ought to be much, much richer.
As the great grey millstone that is Labour’s name still attests, paid employment is too often assumed to completely define people’s sense of who they are. But in the near future, as the population ages, Labour policy will have to be as much about caring as grafting. To answer the man in Clacton’s point, ideas of place and belonging will have to get a look in if blighted towns, villages and city neighbourhoods are not to go on embodying people’s distance from power.
It will require a deep rethink, but this is Labour’s only viable future: as well as wealth and work, emphasising family, time, care and home. As the Tories pursue their cunning version of divide and rule, the party should lose its cringe abut whether there might be strong communitarian ideas inherent in modern conceptions of all the UK’s constituent nations, including England – a country with a rising sense of itself, which demands serious thought about an idea of “civic” nationhood à la Scotland (and, quite possibly, its own dedicated Labour party). Reflecting that, as well as what it might change, Labour should finally think seriously about what needs to be conserved and protected: the town centre, the green-belt fields, the bus route, the pub. For much of the past 20 years, the party has failed to speak that language. It has tended to reduce equality and fairness to a mess of tax policies and financial enticements. Now its vision ought to be much, much richer.
Tristram Hunt: ‘Labour needs a summer of hard truths’
Unfortunately, even if Labour’s current contenders have their talents, its domination by professionalised politicians always threatens to render even its more promising messages tinny and forced. I am not sure Yvette Cooper, Andy Burnham or Liz Kendall are the kind of people who can represent much beyond the rise of a remote political class. The most successful UK politicians of recent years – Tony Blair, Alex Salmond, Nicola Sturgeon, Nigel Farage – have proved that speaking to and for millions of voters requires a sense of vision and an approach rooted in culture as much as dry politics. Unfortunately, whether or not Labour can provide those things does not seem to be a question this generation is going to be able to answer.
Whoever wins the leadership election will have to outwardly talk up their chances in 2020, though in reality any proper revival will take much longer. If it is to eventually win and claim a mandate, Labour will have to at least start to figure out how it can convincingly speak to an electorate from which it feels woefully disconnected. A sense of how to at least start that process ought to be the current contest’s minimum requirement. The voting closes on 10 September; time, as you may have noticed, is fast slipping away.
