Why UK Labour lost? Part 6: New Labour & Blairism

Written By: - Date published: 10:39 am, January 15th, 2020 - 10 comments
Categories: Austerity, Brexit, Jeremy Corbyn, politicans, Politics, uk politics - Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

In 2017 Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and those in Labour who had never accepted Jeremy Corbyn being elected party leader had their speeches prepared. Worst defeat since 1983. “Look, this just shows that Labour can’t get elected if you move too far to the left. You need to have a leader who is moderate, sensible and can win the centre.”

On election night in 2017, UK Labour’s vote increased significantly, getting it to within a stones throw of government. The 9% increase in Labours vote was the largest in the Party’s history, and got Labour to within a percentage point of the Conservatives. The Blairites were in total shock.. Those sanctimonious, condescending speeches about the virtues of centrism never got made. Not on election night. But those who opposed Corbyn, still never accepted him as leader, and used every tactic they could to undermine him. Even tactics that would do long term harm to the party. 

December 13 2019. Labour is defeated in the general election. As the election results come in Alistair Campbell is on the BBC saying this is a defeat not “just for Corbyn, but for the politics he represents.” Campbell’s analysis does not explain Labour’s increased vote in 2017. Nor does he show any atonement for the fact that he and his allies were the primary advocates of Labour taking a more remain position on Brexit.

A few days later Labour Tony Blair made a speech saying Labour had become “a glorified protest movement” with no chance of being elected to government. He added that Labour would be replaced as an electoral force if it didn’t change. This was nothing new from Blair. Again he failed to acknowledge the increase in votes in 2017, and the fact that even in 2019 Labour won more votes than the Party had under his leadership in 2005. Blair’s critique of Corbyn and Labour’s indecisiveness on Brexit is justified. However the remain position Blair advocated Labour take on Brexit was not one that Labour could ever win on. 

 

For those who had been part of the New Labour project, the election of Corbyn never made any sense. In fact for most MPs, or people who had held leadership positions in the party prior to 2015, Corbyn’s leadership and the change within the Party was treated with distain.

The 3rd way crew within Labour had an agenda to push. Since Corbyn’s election they have been working overtime to get rid of him, but more importantly the political change he represented.  The 2019 election loss has given this wing of the Party an opportunity to repeat their tired message with renewed vigour. But their analysis wilfully ignores the 2017 election result, or the impact the 2nd referendum position had on Labour’s vote. After an election people often interpret the results the way they want to interpret them. But to judge the 2019 result without atoning for the 2017 outcome, their arguments lack credibility.

Fact is that the world has moved on from the 1980s and 90s. Politics certainly has. The types of 3rd way or centre/centre right positions that Blair and Campbell think will win just won’t anymore. Change UK, formed by 3rd way MPs from both Labour and Conservative Parties sunk like a stone after being formed in early 2019. The Liberal Democrats result in December 2019, though increasing in votes, was still a very distant 3rd place on 11.4%. And in terms of seats the Lib Dems lost ground, with Party Leader Jo Swinson losing in her own Constituency.

Labour need to accept that after an election they got things wrong and things need to change. But there is little evidence that going back to pre 2015 Labour/New Labour policies and tactics will work. If anything, it’s that which would really harm Labour’s viability as an electoral force.

As a major political party in a democracy, it is normal that there are differences of opinion within Labour. Further there is a place for those more centrist members within the party. However that many of them have showed a) an inability accept the 2015 leadership result and b) have undermined both the leader and party policies do also shoulder much of the blame for the election loss.

In particular, former deputy Labour Leader Tom Watson spent the last few years acting like the faction leader for Labour First, and not a deputy. It was fine for Watson to support a stronger remain position within Labour. It was fine for him to hold different views to Corbyn on various issues. It was not ok for the Deputy leader to act as a faction leader rather than do his job. But thats what he did. Watson recently did an interview with the Guardian talking about the pressure he was under, causing him to leave parliament just before the election. In particular he talks of a death threat he received. Nobody should have to go through that. However, Watson acted in a divisive manner as Deputy Leader and upset and demoralised many Labour supporters.

Image result for Tom Watson

Labour’s former Deputy Leader Tom Watson

Progress and Labour First factions within the Parliamentary Labour Party need to accept they contributed to the loss, as much as Corbyn and his allies. They have been unable to adapt or evolve their politics to the realities of 21st century Britain.

They have failed to understand how a decade of austerity has meant the aspirational or radical centre positioning of the 1990s won’t work. Specifically for younger voters who are now considerably worse off than their parents generation, a social democratic or Keynesian manifesto has considerably more appeal than the 3rd way. They still cannot understand the youth-quake of 2017, nor indeed the strong support for Labour with voters under 40 in the 2019 election. 

The 3rd way factions of Labour have also failed to understand the rise of English Nationalism. Specifically, that the positions they have advocated regarding membership of the European Union have been rejected by the electorate. 

Progress and Labour First MPs and members in the Party are as much to blame for Labour’s fortunes as those on the left of the Party. But Momentum, and those on the left of the party who predominately backed Jeremy Corbyn, also made a number of mistakes which contributed to the loss. The next post in this series will look at this.

Previous posts in this series

Why UK Labour Lost? Part 1: Historical Context

Why UK Labour lost? Part 2: UK Labour’s strange loyalty to First Past the Post

Why UK Labour lost? Part 3: Its Brexit Innit

Why UK Labour lost? Part 4: Oooo Jeremy Corbyn

Why UK Labour lost? Part 5: Antisemitism

10 comments on “Why UK Labour lost? Part 6: New Labour & Blairism ”

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  1. Climaction 1
    15 January 2020 at 12:13 pm

    Part 6 in what really should be called why it’s everybody else’s fault but Corbyn.

    It’s hilariously naive to point fingers at factions within labour as part of the reason why labour lost and Jeremy Corbyn wasn’t able to govern. If he can’t govern his party, which is aligned with Corbyn against the opposition and which obviously wants to win elections as a whole, how can he govern a country where more than 50% of the population prefer someone else governing?

  2. Dennis Frank 2
    15 January 2020 at 2:24 pm

    As a dispassionate kiwi observer, I view Labour factionalism as a genuine phenomenon. We ought to keep in mind that the Russian Social Democrat Party split in 1903, and leftist politics has been schismatic ever since. Here, in the 1970s, we had the Values Party schism, and then Labour had its own schism post-Rogernomics in the late '80s.

    Expecting Corbyn to corral leftist splitters into one herd is therefore unrealistic. That would only be possible to the extent that faction leaders agreed to collaborate on the basis of common ground. Did they? If not, why not? If so, can anyone spell out the consequent political program in a single sentence?

    If nobody does so in response, you can all draw the conclusion that lack of consensus in Labour resulted in lack of a competitive alternative to `get Brexit done'. Labour had no succinct concise position, right? If you can't summarise it into a sentence, how the hell are you ever gonna distill a winning electoral slogan??!

    Anyway, I'll recycle this link that was posted to Open Mike since it is a superb analysis and essential reading, imo: https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/13/the-center-blows-itself-up-care-and-spite-in-the-brexit-election/

    First, check out the vote by age graphic from YouGov! Then regional Brexitism: " For many working-class Northerners in their sixties, the first vote they ever cast was in the Common Market referendum of 1975, in which a majority of Britons declared in favor of the European project. Most experienced the next forty or so years largely as a sequence of disasters. In 2016 they turned against the “Eurocrats,” then watched in dismay as the entire political class proceeded to engage in endless and increasingly absurd procedural ballet that appeared designed to reverse their decision."

    "The UK is currently home to roughly 312,000 accountants—an extraordinarily high percentage of the working population. (Together with the nearly 150,000 British lawyers, they constitute a significant portion of the total workforce.)" Revenge on the nerds?

    "This simultaneous embrace of markets, and of rules and regulations, represents the soul of what’s sometimes called “centrism.”" Maybe in Britain, but here we call it neoliberalism. The writer seems unaware that the Greens invented progressive centrism in the early '80s, via their slogan `neither left nor right, but in front'. Or maybe he's trying to tacitly assert, in a passive aggressive way, that British politicos were too stupid to get it at the time and have remained inadequate ever since…

  3. Gosman 3
    15 January 2020 at 2:33 pm

    If the analysis here is reflective of what the UK Labour party will go through in their post mortem of the 2019 election then they won't learn anything useful from it. All the major problems either are the fault of external forces like Brexit or because the Labour party wasn't united enough. This is fine by me as it means they will continue to make the same mistakes again.

  4. Dennis Frank 4
    15 January 2020 at 2:54 pm

    Worth pointing to the culture change in Labour: "The problem was that the party quickly began to change, as tens of thousands of older leftists who had quit the party under Blair and hundreds of thousands of young people began to swell the ranks of local chapters known as “Constituency Labour Party” (CLPs)—inspired by the call from Corbyn and his circle to turn the party back into a social movement. This meant making local CLPs forums of democratic debate, and imagining ways to coordinate between the “extra-parliamentary left”—the peace movement, the housing movement, the climate movement—and those working within the system. It was, in short, an attempt to move away from the politics of personality to one of bottom-up, grassroots democracy."

    "As such, Corbyn’s own lack of conventional charisma was an asset. Suddenly the left was not only teeming with ideas and vision—four-day work weeks, new democratized forms of public ownership, green industrial revolutions—but there was also a feeling that at least some of these things might, for once, actually happen." https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/01/13/the-center-blows-itself-up-care-and-spite-in-the-brexit-election/

    Given the huge demographic shift that's happening, and the historical momentum in the pipeline that it provides, I can't see Labour centrists prospering from their factionalism! "Centrists, after all, consider themselves pragmatists. For forty years the center had been drifting steadily to starboard. So what if it jumped a ways to port? It might have been abrupt, but it’s not as though anyone was proposing the abolition of the monarchy or the nationalization of heavy industry. They could adjust. A handful even did. The panicked reaction of the majority, however, only makes sense if the threat was on a far deeper level."

    "Most sitting Labour MPs had begun as Labour youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sell-outs."

    The gamble of third-way fakery seems to have been that no authentic alternative could emerge within Labour, and a combination of trickle-down and paternalism would make the sham effective.

    "Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts."

    "One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt."

    "If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labour youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate. This, at least, would help explain the unrelenting nature of the hostility to Corbyn and the youth movement he represented."

    You bet. Labour politics as Game of Thrones melodrama via intergenerational betrayal and exploitation. Eat the young instead of eat the rich. Now Corbyn ought to grandfather himself: take a back-room role & mastermind the relegation of those guilty – not to a gulag, but out to pasture.

    • Ad 4.1
      15 January 2020 at 7:53 pm

      The article concludes:

      – that the Party policy platform was pushed by internal extremist idiots but was far to the left of anything the public could cope with;

      – the leadership had no capacity to bring internal factions together and mismanaged it to make those divisions worse;

      – had no ability to cope with opposing parts of the press and nothing to convert the press that could be;

      – was shit at Brexit from day one and Corbyn himself made it worse;

      – had nothing to unify its disparate supporters;

      – chose a radical, naive, incompetent and feckless leader who couldn't manage his way out of a paper bag;

      – completely lost its base through gross political incompetence and don't look like they will get it back …

      … but instead the article says that's all the fault of the "centrists", whatever they are.

      Corbyn ought to have done what he should have done right after the election: resign, clear out all the wretched staff who were with him, and apologize to every one of the electoral volunteers who slogged their guts out for Labour.

      • Dennis Frank 4.1.1
        15 January 2020 at 8:15 pm

        Those seven items you list seem to be your own subjective take. I took a second look at the author's conclusion and found nothing there corresponding – had to scan up till I found his critique of Corbyn and even then it was ambivalent.

        "Corbyn has been widely criticized for maintaining a “wishy-washy” or indecisive position on Brexit, but from the point of view of the larger movement he represented, his position was about the only one he really could take. The Labour Left, after all, was trying to bring about dramatic social reforms, in much the way Attlee had in 1945 when he called for the creation of the NHS."

        "Ultimately, they were revolutionaries: they aimed to set the ball rolling in the direction of the democratization of all aspects of British society. But they also knew this could only happen if they came into power in informal alliance with more radical, “extra-parliamentary” street movements pushing them ever further to the left. Taking a hardcore Remain position would mean even if they did come into power (which was by no means guaranteed), it could only be in alliance with politicians who ardently opposed this larger project, and, if Brexit was indeed reversed, that they would also be faced with radical street movements not of the left but of the right—outraged Brexiteers and outright fascists pushing in exactly the opposite direction."

        "The last thing Corbyn would ever want was to be forced into a position where he would have to send in riot police to control protests against the suppression of a democratic decision. This was the real reason for the initial dilemma. But eventually he had to come around to support a second vote."

        Sounds to me that, despite the mass Blairite departures, there's still a large rightist faction within, and as leader he had to accommodate them. You may call them centrists. You may even be right to do so!

        But blaming him for not being strong enough as leader to get them into consensus is doing a Gosman. Yesterday I ended up conceding his point (to a degree) but realpolitik must always prevail over splitting (to succeed) – as with Greens/Labour here, collaboration instead of competition. I'd only fault him for being somewhat inept in managing media/public perceptions. No reframing expertise!

        • Ad 4.1.1.1
          15 January 2020 at 8:22 pm

          I was concluding using his points with his shellac of self-serving cant removed.

          You're long enough in the tooth to know what Blair went through inside the Party to get to Number 1. Not only in the internal faction-building, but also massive policy platform changes, and constitutional changes.

          Corbyn and his team objectively didn't have what it takes.

  5. Ad 5
    15 January 2020 at 3:49 pm

    Only successful Labour Prime Minister since Attlee was Tony Blair for 3 terms.

    He rebuilt the party. 14 years in power. Lost with the GFC in 2010.

    Labour need to learn from the winning governments, not from the perpetual political losers.

  6. pat 6
    15 January 2020 at 8:26 pm

    The move to the 'Left' re policy was a non factor in the UK election result. While the policies prescribed may have appealed to many (and upset others) they were not front of mind to the overwhelming majority as they entered the polling booths (those that bothered),,,,the overwhelming factor was Brexit and everything else was subservient to that