Can Labour survive?
| Author | Richards, Steve |
| Position | Roundtable - British Labour Party - Essay |
Renewal has been present since the conception of New Labour in the early 1990s, and has followed its trajectory, with increasing dismay, from insurgency to incumbency. Today there is a distinct feeling that the Labour Party could no longer be the sole or perhaps even primary vehicle for social democratic politics in the twenty-first century.
In this roundtable we cut to the chase to ask whether Labour can survive, and whether we should care. Elisabeth Kubler Ross's Of Death and Dying sets out the sequence of emotions that people tend to go through during the grieving process. Her phases were Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and finally Acceptance. Many of these emotions have been evident in the pages of Renewal over the recent period, as they are at most contemporary gatherings of left activists and intellectuals. There certainly seems to be a fair amount of anger and depression in evidence. But one can well imagine that another round of bargaining will be on the table before anyone accepts that the patient's heart has stopped beating.
Steve Richards
I'll start with my analysis of the current leadership crisis, as it is relevant to the debate we are having. Leadership crises are always more than just about the leader, however flawed that leader happens to be at any given time. They always tell you a great deal about the state a party is in. The reasons why the Labour Party is in crisis are complicated and deep, but one of its symptoms has been a whole series of leadership crises, of which this is just the latest.
If you look back at 2005, the day after Blair or New Labour won that third election there were calls for him to go. An unusual juxtaposition really, a Prime Minister having just won an election victory and being asked to go the next day. Now probably some of you were asking him to go, but that is symptom of a Party ill at ease with itself. You then had the attempted September coup in 2006, which produced the bizarre statement from Tony Blair that he was both going and staying; another extraordinary symptom of a Party in crisis.
You then had Brown's leadership contest, which wasn't a leadership contest: he was, as we know, crowned without a contest. There were, from Brown's perspective, several reasons for that: fear of debate, fear of exposing divisions which he knows exist, fear of being defined in any way at all. And then of course we have had the recent attempted coup in June, preceded by another attempt last September, and then there will be another one this September.
Now this is clearly about Brown but it is about much more than that. It is a Party that lacks a clear sense of purpose, a clear sense of momentum, of what it is about. And that is when you have leadership crises.
Just to prove the point, if you look back at the Conservatives from 1997 onwards, they had a whole series of wacky leadership contests. I remember one of them in which Ken Clarke and John Redwood stood as a joint ticket. Now, they hadn't gone insane--though at their press conference I did wonder--rather, the Party was in a state of crisis. The appointment of Ian Duncan Smith--that was sign of a Party in a real state of crisis. Then there was the coronation of Michael Howard, an utterly bizarre event that happened suddenly in a couple of days. None of this addressed the fundamental crisis about the Tory Party, which was about its inability to adapt to the modern day (and incidentally has not yet been fully resolved).
So, yes: Labour is in crisis, to answer the first part of this question. Probably most of us would agree about its origins though be less clear about how it should be addressed. However, this is where I come on to the second element of this debate, about whether we should care.
On the stages of grief mentioned I recognise virtually all of them in one go today. And I'll tell you why I think this is dangerous. There seems to be an assumption that the Labour Party could die, and even if it is dying, lets bring in and celebrate the proliferation of other parties; let's engage with these increasingly stronger other parties.
And the reason why I'm wary of this is not because it's not a good idea (I think Caroline Lucas for example is a very interesting figure). But I remember (and hasten to add, I witnessed this as a student and not an experienced journalist) the early 1980s and similar things happening then. People in the Labour Party said that 'if David Owen and Shirley Williams want to leave, fine let them leave, let them set up their party and we'll carry on'. We know what happens in these situations where you get a contracting Labour Party, and other groups out there saying 'we can all work together in power, and form a progressive coalition'. It doesn't work like that. Remember all this will happen under the current electoral system, where the Conservatives can get in--they won't change the electoral system--and stay there for eighteen years.
But I can see the conversation moving in this direction. I was presenting The Week in Westminster with Matthew Taylor and Neal Lawson, talking about the future of Labour. Matthew said that from now on 'parties really don't matter that much, people will make decisions on a whole range of things, there is a divide about how you distribute power, but it's not a left/right one'.
Now actually if you look even at the last year and certainly the year to come, I can still make a very strong case for this government. It's weird, Brown is always accused of erecting these very artificial dividing lines, but it seems to me there was a real dividing line in the response to the economic crisis. Labour and the Liberal Democrats were together in recognising the need to intervene in a whole range of different ways, did so, and led the international co-ordination of the response in the economic crisis.
And the Conservatives were against--instinctively so. I still remember the day that Brown very reluctantly nationalised Northern Rock, Cameron and Osborne held a joint conference in which they couldn't contain their excitement: 'this is back to the 1970s, this a total disaster, this shows this government is over', and so on. Actually the government's action had the support of the Financial Times and The Economist and so on. It didn't get the support of Cameron and Osborne.
If you look at this debate about public spending, there is a big difference in the two parties as they go ahead. Of course Labour are going to have to cut like hell, but they are quite open about how they plan to do it over a longer period of time, and less intensively at first. The Conservatives, equally openly, have said they would have started cutting last year as a matter of principle. So there are still profound dividing lines. I don't buy this Matthew Taylor line that they are all roughly the same, this idea we can have great dialogues with David Cameron and George Osborne about the redistribution of power. There is a huge difference still, in spite of all the faults of the government.
Another classic dividing line, which gets no attention at all, is this government's proposal, a really good one, to give training to every sixteen-year-old. I think that will have a profound effect on their lives. One Cabinet Minister was telling me that it's the people in his constituency that leave school at sixteen who end up being poorer than those who stay on, it's absolutely clear. The Conservatives are against the idea on lots of different grounds.
There are, then, still profound differences. But I sense a lapse into thinking that the other lot are pretty much the same, this lot has been a disaster, let's embrace the Greens, Respect or whoever it is. But the fact is under the current electoral system they won't get many seats, Labour won't get many either and the Tories will have a majority of about 220-but that's fine because we'll be in this conversation with them as they redistribute power and will be almost the same as us economically? It won't be like that, but I...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
