At sea.
| Date | 22 June 2021 |
| Author | Rutherford, Jonathan |
I finish as Labour loses the Hartlepool byelection. The defeat signals that Labour's fall is far from over. It has been a repeated refrain that Labour has a mountain to climb before it contests the next election. In fact, it must confront an absence at its heart. Labour has no shared understanding of its predicament and the causes of its predicament, and so it has no politics to navigate the turbulent period we are living in.
Labour is at sea and like flotsam is tossed hither and thither by wind and tide. The party lacks an identity and purpose, and it lacks the intellectual and political resources to recover them. Faced with an existential crisis it prioritises policy interventions and promises a 'policy blitz', but these are interim measures to fill out local election leaflets. Without an analysis, without a political narrative and without a strategy, Labour is reduced to guidance by focus groups and Twitter. Each new culture war skirmish blows it further off course.
Labour looks stale and sounds tired. Its tone and language are predictable and lacklustre. These limitations are aggravated by a tendency toward a patronising tone of 'we know best' born of a misplaced belief in the moral superiority of Labour's 'values'. Attempts to project a more patriotic, popular image are hampered by the absence of a wider story of Labour's purpose.
And to deepen its crisis the Conservatives--more nimble, more cynical, more focused on keeping power--are seizing traditional Labour policy areas. They are closing down Labour's room for manoeuvre, leaving the party to try to catch up with its own politics--minimum wage, green industrial revolution, 'levelling up', a new social covenant--while arguing that the Tories don't really mean it, and Labour would do all this better.
Labour's crisis
Labour's crisis has deep sociological and demographic roots in the transformations in work, production and class relations underway since the 1960s. Margaret Thatcher's political destruction of the labour interest accelerated these trends. The 1979 Conservative election strategy, carried over into subsequent years of governing, was shaped by a document called Stepping Stones, written two years earlier by John Hoskyns and Norman S. Strauss. (1) This identified the trade unions as the cause of Britain's 'Sick Society'. Trade union leaders were the main proponents of 'Socialism' and the party's principal adversary. National recovery required a change in the role of the trade...
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