Labour's Problem
Scanning through the usual pundits I haven't seen anyone coherently articulate Labour's current electoral problem. I have seen a lot of myopic comments from all factions of the party saying "If only we'd done what I wanted, we would have won!" But no one seems to have put it all together, so I thought I'd better have a go.
1. The Milibandites
"Ed's strategy to unite the Left would have worked if not for the toxic press campaign against him and the vile Tory attempts to whip up English nationalism against the SNP!"
That's nice. It may well be true. Welcome to Britain 2015.
The SNP are not going away. Given levels of trust in the party and the adulation of Sturgeon, they won't be under any serious scrutiny for at least a decade. Their electoral coalition of Scottish Anyone-But-Labour Voters, die-hard separatists and ex-Labour leftwingers is unbeatable as long as it holds together, and considering the current rhetorical positioning of the SNP on the left-right spectrum and the aforementioned lack of scrutiny it's likely to be the Tartan Tory wing that breaks off first.
Scottish Labour's road to recovery, if it exists at all, will take a generation to travel. It's not going to happen in the next five years. And as long as the SNP dominates Scottish politics the Tories will be able to whip up English nationalist sentiment against them. They've discovered it delivers a majority for them and a Labour-blocking landslide for the SNP. Why would they ever stop?
The toxic Tory press are not going away either. They've discovered that the Tories can win a post-1992 majority if they are nasty and hysterical enough. Why would they ever stop? Any future Labour leader will face the same monstering Ed Miliband got. A strategic choice of leader might mitigate this somewhat (Dan Jarvis has built-in anti-tabloid body armor as a former solider), but the difference will be minimal.
This applies to the Media Macro "Labour trashed the economy with public spending!" nonsense as well, incidentally. Yes, Labour left a vacuum during the 2010 leadership contest that the Tories filled with rubbish. It didn't help that the Lib Dems, who knew better, immediately started parroting the Tory line. But Barack Obama can't convince people austerity is wrong, and he's a better communicator than anyone in the Labour Party. The problem is not that Labour failed to make the economic argument coherently, although they did. The problem is that no one can make this argument well enough to make the public and the media believe it.
This is the country Labour needs to win in. Complaining about it is not going to change it.
2. The Bennites
"This is what happens when the Labour Party stands on an incoherent platform of mushy centrism and refuses to stand up for its values! Look how well the SNP did campaigning against austerity in Scotland. We could have won if we were true to Labour's founding principles!"
I'm as cross about Ed Miliband's persistent refusal to wear a red tie as the next Labourite, but this is nonsense.
Many of us had a hypothesis that there was a progressive majority in England and Wales that had been split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems' decision to join a Tory government had reunited it; all Ed needed to do was position Labour on on the center left and wait. This was a good hypothesis. It made me happy. It meant Labour wouldn't have to adopt any positions I disliked.
Elections test political hypotheses. This one just elected a Tory majority government. Here are the vote shares:
Tory: 36.8%
Labour: 30.4%
Green: 3.8%
Plaid Cymru: 0.6%
TUSC: 0.1%
------------
Total: 34.9%
Considering the Liberal Democrats' positioning in this election, I don't think we can really consider them members of the progressive bloc. Likewise Ukip- many of its voters may be anti-austerity but the party is hardly positioning itself on the left.
Even if you give Labour every single anti-austerity vote in England and Wales, they still would have lost this election.
The SNP didn't win as an anti-austerity party, they won as an anti-austerity nationalist party that was the only electable alternative to Labour in most of Scotland. Their strength is built on an electoral coalition that Labour cannot replicate and would not want to.
I think we have to at least provisionally consider the possibility that our hypothesis was wrong.
3. The Blairites
"A traditional leftwing Labour Party went up against a traditional Conservative Party and got the traditional result."
New Labour's landslide victories were built upon two pillars: the ability to project an economic centrism that won over English swing voters and a traditional Labour vote united by eighteen years of Tory misrule. Both of these pillars have now crumbled.
New Labour's economic strategy went like this: run a neoliberal economy dependent on the financial sector and leave it loosely regulated so the banks can make gazillions, and then tax the profits and redistribute the wealth.
The last ten years have shown this strategy to be an abysmal failure. Inequality between both social classes and regions of the country increased rather than decreased under New Labour because despite the best efforts of the government to reduce inequality the fundamental economic structure was constantly pulling in the opposite direction. The unbalanced nature of the economy and the light-touch regulation of the banks left Britain exposed to the global financial crash. When the American banks went down they took British banks with them, and when the financial sector went down it took everything else down with it. The post-tax redistribution of wealth left the vulnerable exposed to a future Tory government. Because tax credits, disability benefits, etc were cash payments to individuals rather than collective cultural institutions like the NHS, it was political child's play for the Coalition to simply stop writing the checks.
The failure of New Labour's economic strategy and its complete disinterest in reviving the economic fortunes of the regions eroded the second pillar into dust. The catastrophic collapse of the Labour vote in Scotland is obvious, but it's also worth taking a look at Peter Mandelson's old seat of Hartlepool.
1983:
Lab - 45.5%
Con - 39.2%
SDP - 15.3%
1992:
Lab - 51.9%
Con - 34.9%
LD - 13.3%
1997:
Lab - 60.7%
Con - 21.3%
LD - 14.1%
2005:
Lab - 51.5%
Con - 11.5%
LD - 30.4%
2010:
Lab - 42.5%
Con - 28.1%
LD - 17.1%
Ukip - 7.0%
BNP - 5.2%
2015:
Lab - 35.6%
Con - 20.91%
Ukip - 28.0%
Independent - 7.5%
1992 is probably a good benchmark for what the Labour vote "should" be in a middling year. 1997 was obviously quite nice (I didn't include 2001, but it's virtually identical). By 2005 the vote had dropped down to 1992 levels. By 2010 it was lower than it had been in the nadir year of 1983. Now it is down to 35%.
If you read only one article about this election, read this profile of Great Grimsby: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n08/james-meek/why-are-you-still-here
Voters are not idiots. The white working class voters of post-industrial South Wales and Northern England are acutely aware that New Labour's economic vision was focused entirely on London and saw them only as mouths to feed from the City's overflowing coffers. This is obviously better than the Tories, who are happy to let them starve, but people don't want handouts. If these voters want Ukip to take them back to the 1950s, it's because that's the last time their towns had decent jobs and functioning communities. If their Scottish equivalents want the SNP to take them to a socialist paradise where money falls out of the sky whenever Nicola Sturgeon plays the bagpipes, it's because there is no credible future on offer from Labour so they might as well vote for the incredible one offered by the SNP.
Tony Blair's electoral coalition depended upon these votes, and also upon the support of unions and leftwing voters willing to grit their teeth and put up with any rightwing policy from Labour to see off a Tory government they had endured for eighteen years. Iraq and a decade of New Labour technocracy destroyed that coalition. It may never be recoverable. The support of the white working class was a legacy of an industrial landscape that no longer exists, a sort of electoral fossil fuel that once exhausted may be burned forever. The unconditional support of the left was a legacy of eighteen years of Thatcherism, and unless Labour wants to let the Tories rule for another twenty years it's not clear how they can regain that either. They won a bit of it back after 2010, but if they lurch right again they risk losing their new activists and the unions as well.
If a fresh-faced, untainted Tony Blair had led the Labour Party in the 2015 election, it's not at all clear he could have won. New Labour's electoral coalition no longer exists.
4. So now what?
God knows.
Some of Labour's current problems will ease with time. Memories of Iraq, the recession, and the exhausted New Labour government will fade. The rise of English nationalism is largely a function of the SNP "threat", and with the Tories at the helm Scotland will either secede or the Tories will "neutralize" the "threat" to please their own voters, rendering their fearmongering less effective. Tory voters continue to die off without replacement. A Tory government with a majority of 7 will give itself plenty of opportunities to self-destruct and plenty of opportunities to demonstrate to the public that it can't be trusted with the NHS, if indeed Labour's rhetoric is true. And having won a majority on a rightwing platform with Cameron at the helm, the Conservatives have no incentive to make any of the reforms they would need to become truly popular. Labour did gain two seats off them, even in this year of disaster.
But in a way this is the worst defeat Labour has suffered in decades. In 1983 the solution to their predicament was obvious. This time they were unified and had an impressive ground operation; their problem was positional and neither a move to the right nor a move to the left will solve it. It's all very well to say "Don't mourn, organize," but what do you do when you have organized and it turns out your country just prefers a Tory government?
The solution, if there is one, probably lies in answering the great question facing all Western democracies: how do we restructure our economies to preserve the middle class and offer secure, decent employment to the working class in an era of globalization? ("Education and skills", incidentally, is bollocks- wages are declining as fast for highly educated workers as they are for low skilled workers. The much admired German manufacturing powerhouse depends on wage suppression and an artificially devalued currency. So far no one has demonstrated a model that really works, although some countries like mine perform particularly badly.)
Ed Miliband's Labour never had a coherent vision for how to achieve this, but I had vague hopes they could experiment in government and begin to work toward a solution. Miliband might not have the answers, but at least he had correctly diagnosed the problem. Nothing positive is going to come out of the deadlocked, culture war-ravaged US, so I was counting on Britain to take the lead. So much for that.
Without such a vision, I'm not sure Labour will ever be able to win back the embittered Red Ukip voters, and without them I'm not sure it can win an election. The party performed relatively well in diverse, cosmopolitan London, but winning London isn't enough and won't be for a generation. Labour will never be able to beat Ukip or the Tories on being anti-immigration and hardline rhetoric risks costing them their current base. If they can't close the borders, they need to offer people an alternative solution to their economic fears.
Despite Tony Blair's efforts to turn it into an anodyne social democratic party, Labour is at its heart a party of labor. The fundamental problem confronting Britain is not to do with healthcare funding or free schools or nuclear weapons renewal, it's to do with the structure of the labor market. Solving such problems is Labour's raison d'etre. If they can crack it, they may win another landslide. If they can't, they may be out of government for a generation.
1. The Milibandites
"Ed's strategy to unite the Left would have worked if not for the toxic press campaign against him and the vile Tory attempts to whip up English nationalism against the SNP!"
That's nice. It may well be true. Welcome to Britain 2015.
The SNP are not going away. Given levels of trust in the party and the adulation of Sturgeon, they won't be under any serious scrutiny for at least a decade. Their electoral coalition of Scottish Anyone-But-Labour Voters, die-hard separatists and ex-Labour leftwingers is unbeatable as long as it holds together, and considering the current rhetorical positioning of the SNP on the left-right spectrum and the aforementioned lack of scrutiny it's likely to be the Tartan Tory wing that breaks off first.
Scottish Labour's road to recovery, if it exists at all, will take a generation to travel. It's not going to happen in the next five years. And as long as the SNP dominates Scottish politics the Tories will be able to whip up English nationalist sentiment against them. They've discovered it delivers a majority for them and a Labour-blocking landslide for the SNP. Why would they ever stop?
The toxic Tory press are not going away either. They've discovered that the Tories can win a post-1992 majority if they are nasty and hysterical enough. Why would they ever stop? Any future Labour leader will face the same monstering Ed Miliband got. A strategic choice of leader might mitigate this somewhat (Dan Jarvis has built-in anti-tabloid body armor as a former solider), but the difference will be minimal.
This applies to the Media Macro "Labour trashed the economy with public spending!" nonsense as well, incidentally. Yes, Labour left a vacuum during the 2010 leadership contest that the Tories filled with rubbish. It didn't help that the Lib Dems, who knew better, immediately started parroting the Tory line. But Barack Obama can't convince people austerity is wrong, and he's a better communicator than anyone in the Labour Party. The problem is not that Labour failed to make the economic argument coherently, although they did. The problem is that no one can make this argument well enough to make the public and the media believe it.
This is the country Labour needs to win in. Complaining about it is not going to change it.
2. The Bennites
"This is what happens when the Labour Party stands on an incoherent platform of mushy centrism and refuses to stand up for its values! Look how well the SNP did campaigning against austerity in Scotland. We could have won if we were true to Labour's founding principles!"
I'm as cross about Ed Miliband's persistent refusal to wear a red tie as the next Labourite, but this is nonsense.
Many of us had a hypothesis that there was a progressive majority in England and Wales that had been split between Labour and the Liberal Democrats. The Lib Dems' decision to join a Tory government had reunited it; all Ed needed to do was position Labour on on the center left and wait. This was a good hypothesis. It made me happy. It meant Labour wouldn't have to adopt any positions I disliked.
Elections test political hypotheses. This one just elected a Tory majority government. Here are the vote shares:
Tory: 36.8%
Labour: 30.4%
Green: 3.8%
Plaid Cymru: 0.6%
TUSC: 0.1%
------------
Total: 34.9%
Considering the Liberal Democrats' positioning in this election, I don't think we can really consider them members of the progressive bloc. Likewise Ukip- many of its voters may be anti-austerity but the party is hardly positioning itself on the left.
Even if you give Labour every single anti-austerity vote in England and Wales, they still would have lost this election.
The SNP didn't win as an anti-austerity party, they won as an anti-austerity nationalist party that was the only electable alternative to Labour in most of Scotland. Their strength is built on an electoral coalition that Labour cannot replicate and would not want to.
I think we have to at least provisionally consider the possibility that our hypothesis was wrong.
3. The Blairites
"A traditional leftwing Labour Party went up against a traditional Conservative Party and got the traditional result."
New Labour's landslide victories were built upon two pillars: the ability to project an economic centrism that won over English swing voters and a traditional Labour vote united by eighteen years of Tory misrule. Both of these pillars have now crumbled.
New Labour's economic strategy went like this: run a neoliberal economy dependent on the financial sector and leave it loosely regulated so the banks can make gazillions, and then tax the profits and redistribute the wealth.
The last ten years have shown this strategy to be an abysmal failure. Inequality between both social classes and regions of the country increased rather than decreased under New Labour because despite the best efforts of the government to reduce inequality the fundamental economic structure was constantly pulling in the opposite direction. The unbalanced nature of the economy and the light-touch regulation of the banks left Britain exposed to the global financial crash. When the American banks went down they took British banks with them, and when the financial sector went down it took everything else down with it. The post-tax redistribution of wealth left the vulnerable exposed to a future Tory government. Because tax credits, disability benefits, etc were cash payments to individuals rather than collective cultural institutions like the NHS, it was political child's play for the Coalition to simply stop writing the checks.
The failure of New Labour's economic strategy and its complete disinterest in reviving the economic fortunes of the regions eroded the second pillar into dust. The catastrophic collapse of the Labour vote in Scotland is obvious, but it's also worth taking a look at Peter Mandelson's old seat of Hartlepool.
1983:
Lab - 45.5%
Con - 39.2%
SDP - 15.3%
1992:
Lab - 51.9%
Con - 34.9%
LD - 13.3%
1997:
Lab - 60.7%
Con - 21.3%
LD - 14.1%
2005:
Lab - 51.5%
Con - 11.5%
LD - 30.4%
2010:
Lab - 42.5%
Con - 28.1%
LD - 17.1%
Ukip - 7.0%
BNP - 5.2%
2015:
Lab - 35.6%
Con - 20.91%
Ukip - 28.0%
Independent - 7.5%
1992 is probably a good benchmark for what the Labour vote "should" be in a middling year. 1997 was obviously quite nice (I didn't include 2001, but it's virtually identical). By 2005 the vote had dropped down to 1992 levels. By 2010 it was lower than it had been in the nadir year of 1983. Now it is down to 35%.
If you read only one article about this election, read this profile of Great Grimsby: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n08/james-meek/why-are-you-still-here
Voters are not idiots. The white working class voters of post-industrial South Wales and Northern England are acutely aware that New Labour's economic vision was focused entirely on London and saw them only as mouths to feed from the City's overflowing coffers. This is obviously better than the Tories, who are happy to let them starve, but people don't want handouts. If these voters want Ukip to take them back to the 1950s, it's because that's the last time their towns had decent jobs and functioning communities. If their Scottish equivalents want the SNP to take them to a socialist paradise where money falls out of the sky whenever Nicola Sturgeon plays the bagpipes, it's because there is no credible future on offer from Labour so they might as well vote for the incredible one offered by the SNP.
Tony Blair's electoral coalition depended upon these votes, and also upon the support of unions and leftwing voters willing to grit their teeth and put up with any rightwing policy from Labour to see off a Tory government they had endured for eighteen years. Iraq and a decade of New Labour technocracy destroyed that coalition. It may never be recoverable. The support of the white working class was a legacy of an industrial landscape that no longer exists, a sort of electoral fossil fuel that once exhausted may be burned forever. The unconditional support of the left was a legacy of eighteen years of Thatcherism, and unless Labour wants to let the Tories rule for another twenty years it's not clear how they can regain that either. They won a bit of it back after 2010, but if they lurch right again they risk losing their new activists and the unions as well.
If a fresh-faced, untainted Tony Blair had led the Labour Party in the 2015 election, it's not at all clear he could have won. New Labour's electoral coalition no longer exists.
4. So now what?
God knows.
Some of Labour's current problems will ease with time. Memories of Iraq, the recession, and the exhausted New Labour government will fade. The rise of English nationalism is largely a function of the SNP "threat", and with the Tories at the helm Scotland will either secede or the Tories will "neutralize" the "threat" to please their own voters, rendering their fearmongering less effective. Tory voters continue to die off without replacement. A Tory government with a majority of 7 will give itself plenty of opportunities to self-destruct and plenty of opportunities to demonstrate to the public that it can't be trusted with the NHS, if indeed Labour's rhetoric is true. And having won a majority on a rightwing platform with Cameron at the helm, the Conservatives have no incentive to make any of the reforms they would need to become truly popular. Labour did gain two seats off them, even in this year of disaster.
But in a way this is the worst defeat Labour has suffered in decades. In 1983 the solution to their predicament was obvious. This time they were unified and had an impressive ground operation; their problem was positional and neither a move to the right nor a move to the left will solve it. It's all very well to say "Don't mourn, organize," but what do you do when you have organized and it turns out your country just prefers a Tory government?
The solution, if there is one, probably lies in answering the great question facing all Western democracies: how do we restructure our economies to preserve the middle class and offer secure, decent employment to the working class in an era of globalization? ("Education and skills", incidentally, is bollocks- wages are declining as fast for highly educated workers as they are for low skilled workers. The much admired German manufacturing powerhouse depends on wage suppression and an artificially devalued currency. So far no one has demonstrated a model that really works, although some countries like mine perform particularly badly.)
Ed Miliband's Labour never had a coherent vision for how to achieve this, but I had vague hopes they could experiment in government and begin to work toward a solution. Miliband might not have the answers, but at least he had correctly diagnosed the problem. Nothing positive is going to come out of the deadlocked, culture war-ravaged US, so I was counting on Britain to take the lead. So much for that.
Without such a vision, I'm not sure Labour will ever be able to win back the embittered Red Ukip voters, and without them I'm not sure it can win an election. The party performed relatively well in diverse, cosmopolitan London, but winning London isn't enough and won't be for a generation. Labour will never be able to beat Ukip or the Tories on being anti-immigration and hardline rhetoric risks costing them their current base. If they can't close the borders, they need to offer people an alternative solution to their economic fears.
Despite Tony Blair's efforts to turn it into an anodyne social democratic party, Labour is at its heart a party of labor. The fundamental problem confronting Britain is not to do with healthcare funding or free schools or nuclear weapons renewal, it's to do with the structure of the labor market. Solving such problems is Labour's raison d'etre. If they can crack it, they may win another landslide. If they can't, they may be out of government for a generation.