This marks the beginning of a series on the Labour leadership race. I’m kicking off by discussing what choosing the right leadership team means, and why it matters.
A Conservative led government first came into power when I was nine years old. The Left in this country has torn itself apart and put itself back together several times, but what hasn’t changed whatsoever is a chronic inability to regain power. Left wing politicians have spent this decade losing, with startling consistency. They have lost four elections, of course, but more than that they have lost the faith which their traditional constituency of working class voters have placed in them for generations, whilst extinguishing any optimism they have the ideas or the stomach to win back power among a whole new generation of voters. So as the Labour Party struggles through another divisive leadership contest, this article is intended to focus the mind for those who are tempted to give up the fight, or return to the easy, ever available path of infighting and purity testing.
Firstly, let’s be clear about what the next few years will look. Here are three areas of particular concern to me.
Law and Order
Boris’ victory means a return to the tried and tested, ever failing ‘tough on crime’, ‘law and order’ approach to justice. That doesn’t just mean more people in prison, but it means more young people (and, disproportionately, young people of colour) being harassed by the police. Never mind the strong correlation between our rotting education system, slashed early learning investment and a broken social security system and increased violent crime from the communities most affected by these changes.
Foreign Aid
Britain looks set to integrate our Department for International Development into the Foreign Office. This piece of bureaucratic reorganization will strip us of our independent, humanitarian orientated government department and aligning it with our foreign policy as with America’s State Department. Aid for trade, aid for influence, a disaster for our standing as anything less than a self-interested, abusive partner of smaller countries. One of our greatest humanitarian instruments, wiped away with the stroke of a pen. This, combined with the relative hawkishness of most major players in government, is a real concern for the
Climate change
The scientific consensus leans heavily towards the conclusion that the government’s current climate schedule (‘Carbon neutral by 2050’) is far too slow. Moreover, given the size of their majority and the eminent corruptibility of the officials we’ve chosen (the Home Secretary being a prime examples link here), the chances of meeting it are slim to none. And indeed, as this election has told us, telling the truth and fulfilling promises has gone from nominally important to literally insignificant. Why bother, after all, when you can pretend to have done what you said and it works just as well. Why bother, indeed, when you have a majority of 80. In truth, the only real threat to this government is likely to be either a localized recession as a result of difficulties extracting ourselves from the EU’s economic and political structure, or a global recession. Either case makes the outlook yet bleaker – although green energy has enormous potential, the reserves of good will and the funding which its continued development and expansion rely on are likely to run dry in the event of further economic hardship. The last thing environmentalists need is to see preventing climate change relegated, once again, to the category of an indulgence which is inappropriate in times of real crisis, i.e a recession. We are looking at another five years of inaction at least. In truth, of course, talking about ‘time running out’ may not be much more than a rhetorically powerful estimation – we may well have run out of time to prevent humanitarian catastrophe on an unimaginable scale in any case. But to the extent we have any power to limit the damage done, there’s little disagreement that the next decade is going to be immensely important.
These are not particularly controversial assumptions about what a Conservative government will look like, nor are they ones the government itself is likely to contest. But is important to be very, very clear about where we are, and what the consequences of losing power for this long will be. It is important because as the Left seeks to re-build, the predominant concern has to be winning power back at the earliest opportunity. And what the 2010s have taught us is that many on the Left would rather a candidate they agree with most often, than one who is mostly to win a general election. We cannot afford such self-indulgence, as the earth chokes and the poorest suffer.
As Labour are the only left-wing party who could take power, we should be watching this leadership contest incredibly closely. It is important that the main, if not only, criteria for who wins that contest is who appeals to and speaks to the northern Labour have lost.
Winning back these voters does not necessarily depend on shifting to the centre, because the centre of UK politics is currently occupied by self-described ‘liberals’, who drove Labour into a broadly anti-Brexit platform which alienated many voters in traditionally Labour seats. It’s not entirely clear what these people actually stand for now that Brexit is definitively happening. There is also a severe cultural divide between the predominantly southern, middle class liberal left and those in the northern, working class Labour heartlands.It is not clear that attempting to pivot hard towards the former group’s platform is a way of enticing the latter.
That being said, we would be wrong to take the idealist view that we don’t need to elect a leader who is media savvy, or charismatic, or even a straightforwardly competent public speaker just so long as they have the correct, left-wing values. That line of thinking has dominated the Momentum wing of the Labour Party for the past five years. Corbyn is a pretty clear example of where the right values, and indeed the right policies, are not enough on their own.
“Buy a proper suit, put on a tie and sing the national anthem”. David Cameron’s infamous jibe early on in Corbyn’s term as leader, though it is jarring and nasty, speaks to something important. Impressions matter. Being, if not likable, then at least difficult to make fun of matters when the media are generally unsympathetic to left wing politics. Boris’ flaws are easily masked by a patrician demeanor and a blubbery Etonian accent because that is a manner people, unfortunately, associate with leadership. That is profoundly unfair, and by no means is that the only way to be seen as a leader, but looking the part and acting the part sadly matter a lot more to the general pubic than most on the Left are willing to accept. The Conservatives have known this for a long time, which perhaps explains why they are the most successful political party in Europe. We would do well to bear this in mind.
Alongside the question of who should lead any left wing resurgence, there is the question of who should retain a prominent role in frontline party politics. Simply put, the Labour Party do not have the luxury of retaining electoral liabilities any longer. Anyone – anyone at all – displaying anti-Semitic tendencies of any kind should be removed from the party and publicly distanced, whether or not you believe the current status quo view that the Labour Party is riddled with anti-Semitism is a fair or balanced assessment. Similarly, anyone who cannot follow the party line or cannot maintain message discipline simply does not have a place in any plan to remove the Conservatives from power. Jonathan Ashworth’s comment undermining Corbyn literally days before a general election are Exhibit A.
There’s a lot more work to do beyond who fronts the Party for the next few years – working with other left/liberal parties, rebuilding an activist base in the North, raising more money from donations and inducing other activist groups to co-operate with Labour are just some of the priorities Labour should be focusing on. But a focus on winning has to far outweigh ideological considerations. Perhaps Jeremy Corbyn would be Prime Minister if he’d been given a fair trial by the media. He wasn’t, he isn’t and neither will the next leader of the Labour Party. There is a higher bar for left wing parties who want to gain power in this country, and it is now time to embrace that reality.
The consequences of a defeat of this magnitude in any election, would always be severe. Our system is set up to allow parties who govern to govern totally, and the chances that a government with this firm majority are ever defeated in the Commons will always going to be slim. Unfortunately, this is not just any election, and there are more reasons to be pessimistic than the defeat itself. Consider the state of the ruling party. The long held, dubious, aesthetic commitment to patriotic ideals within the Conservative Party has now morphed into the kind of sabre rattling jingoism that was once relegated to the back benches and fringe pressure groups. Their far-right fringe of the Tory Party has won the argument.
The road to power begins here. Selecting the right personnel, who can collect with voters and use the next five years to unite the party and start persuading the country that Labour aren’t merely the party of socialism, but the party of competent government. Modern governments hold the lives of millions in their hands – state instruments are powerful, and so regaining power requires building trust in the long term. Selecting a leader who can build trust among a wide enough coalition should be prerogative number one for the Labour Party.