The Rage of the Labour Right
Adam Phillips suggests that our rages disclose what it is we think we are entitled to. We become infuriated when the world doesn’t live up to our largely unconscious assumptions about how it should be for us. What might the fury of Labour’s right-wingers, as well as their media allies, tell us about their entitlement? Their denial about the depths of Corbyn’s support within Labour, their seeming belief that they have a right to be safeguarded against the critical and sometimes harsh words of activists, not to mention against the mere suggestion that they may at some point be answerable to members for their actions, all suggests an almost proprietorial attitude to the party.
They, of course, prefer to see their efforts as an attempt to spare the party electoral oblivion. Labour had lost the 2015 election, as a prominent former advisor to Tony Blair claimed, because it was led by an incompetent left-winger.72 There was always something about this that smacked of wishful thinking: as if the problems facing the Labour Party were reducible to an easily rectifiable political deviation. In fact, as the right-wing commentator Tim Stanley acknowledged,
we live in a post-Cold War world where both Left and Right have already triangulated towards a narrow middle. The Left has swerved far, far to the Right. Labour has dumped nationalisation, industrial democracy, pacifism and socialist internationalism. Given this fact, I fail to buy the argument that only by moving dramatically Rightward can the party become competitive.73
Nonetheless, the logic is clear. If Labour had swung too far to the left, how could electing the most left-wing leader in the party’s history possibly be the solution? In fact, it is evident that for many of Corbyn’s opponents in the Labour Party, even if he was the solution, they would rather not resuscitate the party in that way. As Tony Blair put it with refreshing candour, ‘I wouldn’t want to win on an old-fashioned leftist platform. Even if I thought it was the route to victory, I wouldn’t take it.’74
Blair’s case is exactly as it has always been. In the name of modernity and its outward manifestations – globalisation, technological innovation, ‘change’ – Labour must abandon the shibboleths of ‘the past’, and learn to govern a twenty-first-century society. It must accept markets and harness them, rather than attempting to control them. A party which tries to govern on any other basis is destined for the charnel house. Given this, it is not just a matter of thinking that Corbyn can’t win for Labour, but also of hoping that he never does.
And indeed, as one of Blair’s ideological comrades, Dan Hodges, wrote in the Tory-supporting Telegraph, Labour ‘moderates’ were confessing that they wanted the party to lose under Corbyn:
‘It’s crazy,’ one Labour MP confides to me. ‘The decent people of my constituency and I have to act out this charade. We keep talking to each other about fighting hard for [Labour mayoral candidate Sadiq Khan], and secretly we’re all thinking, “But I hope he loses.”’75
This chronicles the evolution of the positions of Labour’s right-wing zealots. First, the Left can’t win. Second, it shouldn’t win. And third, it would be better to crash Labour than to let it win under a left-wing leadership. It is one small step from this reasoning to outright defection. Here, the Blairites are a little more cautious. While some are more or less open in calling for a split,76 there appears to be a general recognition for now that this can’t work. Polly Toynbee, a veteran SDP splitter, warns that it would fail: ‘Unlike Foot, Corbyn has compromised on Europe and Nato, so there is no single break point.’77 John Rentoul, Blair’s biographer and a vitriolic opponent of the Left, argues,
The conditions for a new centre-left party are less favourable than they were when the Social Democratic Party was launched in 1981 – then, the Conservatives had moved to the right while the London liberal middle class and the media were all for a new party.78
The fact that the historical spectre of the SDP is even raised in this context is indicative of the scale of alarm on the Labour Right. One does not, in the context of the Labour Party, so nakedly dispense with the ‘broad church’ rhetoric and openly dally with the idea of desertion, unless one is scared out of one’s wits. The party’s right-wing has usually found the ‘broad church’ trope a convenient one, dignifying its grip on power and its marginalisation of the Left. And it has long benefited immensely from the matchless tribalism of party culture.
After all, ‘everyone knows’ – and not wholly without reason – that the SDP split confirmed Thatcher in power for the rest of the 1980s. Breaking up the traditional Labourist electoral coalition into two jagged fractions – middle-class liberals on one side, and the working-class Left on the other – they handed the Tories an indestructible parliamentary majority with which to annihilate one quarter of Leftist potency after another. This is engrained into Labour’s folk memory.
The Blairites have to be panicking to talk like this – and panic they might. They can handle their party losing electoral appeal. Labour shed some 5 million votes, largely from the working-class heartlands, between 1997 and 2010. They can handle being unpopular on major policy issues. Blair was happy to campaign in 2001 on the flagship policy of Private Finance Initiatives, though they were opposed by some 80 per cent of the public, and later staked his leadership on the invasion of Iraq. They can even stand to be out of power in their own party for some time. Ed Miliband’s leadership was not the one the Blairites had sought, yet they did not panic.
What they are now panicking about is that, whereas Miliband at least shared the Blairites’ axioms for judging success or failure, Corbyn does not. As the BBC’s Mark Mardell put it,
Journalists and politicians based at Westminster … measure daily success and failure through a set of unwritten rules reached by instinct rather than reflection … It is often about a tug of war between positive and negative headlines, trials of strength over internal and external opponents, with all the fragility of narrative within a bubble. One of the reasons Mr Corbyn attracts so much opprobrium from those whose orbit circles planet Westminster is he will not accept their measure of his worth.79
Meanwhile, their fetishes are being turned against them. New Labour once idolised modernity, its slick, Britpop-friendly electoral mercenaries extolling the virtues of novelty and change, however vapidly, at every opportunity. Now they appear every bit as dated as Britpop; or as the Oasis frontman Noel Gallagher, whose valiant defence of Blairism raised a universal shrug.80 The ‘modernisation’ demanded by Labour’s millennials and its post-credit crunch supporters has little to do with focus groups and courting Rupert Murdoch.
One can hardly blame Labour’s ‘moderates’ for feeling aggrieved. By their own standards, they achieved an outstanding success. The litany, usually delivered in staccato sentences, is by now well-worn. A national minimum wage. Investment in public services. A raft of new mechanisms to deliver ‘social inclusion’. Ambitious measures to combat rough-sleeping and child poverty. A more tolerant society, with gay rights widely accepted. Again and again, New Labour intellectuals insist, Blair and Brown shaped an agenda that their opponents were forced to accept. They built a ruthless, powerful electoral machine that secured ‘hegemony’ and changed Britain for the better. The Tories were excluded from office for three terms until they finally abandoned an unavailing neo-Thatcherite path, and chose a liberal leadership. Though the New Labour intelligentsia would never put it like this, Cameron was as much Blair’s legacy as Blair was Thatcher’s achievement.
Meanwhile, they assert, the current Labour leadership will overreach and achieve nothing. However legitimate the indictment of austerity politics and inequality, they insist, Corbyn simply can’t win power. Blair’s strategist, Peter Hyman, argues that a left-wing party of the sort that Corbyn would like to lead
could gain the support of 15 per cent to 20 per cent of the public and possibly, with the infrastructure, money and backing of the big trade unions, up to 25 per cent to 28 per cent of the vote. Let’s not forget Michael Foot’s Labour Party got 27.6 per cent of
the vote in 1983. But this is a party that will never be in power.81
At most, the Blairites claim, a Labour Party led from the left can expect to win some arguments, but it can’t win elections; it will never dominate the conversation, or lead, because its social basis is too narrow. Is there anything to this argument? There could be, if the Corbyn leadership only sought to represent its own core support. Jeremy Gilbert of Compass points out,
Corbyn rallied the metropolitan left vote: not just in London, but in the other big cities. This represents consistently about 25 per cent of the electorate, and they now demand representation. The assumption that the hard-Left represents only a negligible minority is wrong; they didn’t disappear. A quarter of the public, if you look at the British Social Attitudes Surveys, are socialists, whereas about 8 to 15 per cent are fascists. It’s interesting to think about why that is invisible and what it implies about the hegemony of liberalism in the media.82
Corbyn, then, has a base, but just not enough to win an election by itself. The ‘moderate’ case, then, is that Labour has to choose between being a left-wing organisation, and being an electorally successful organisation. And, as Peter Mandelson reminded the Blairite faithful in a ‘leaked’ memo written after Corbyn’s success, ‘electability remains the party’s founding purpose from when the trade unions first created the Labour Representation Committee. If we cannot represent people in parliament and government what is the point of the party?’83 There is something to all of this. Labour is an electoralist organisation first and foremost, and always has been. And winning elections does mean building coalitions, since the core vote is never enough. The problem for the ‘moderates’ is this: they aren’t actually anywhere near as good at winning elections as they like to think.
Even in their reputed ‘golden age’, beginning in the bright summer of 1997, New Labour was the beneficiary of timing and fortune far more than of the strategic genius of Mandelson and company. The Tories had already decisively lost the support of a stratum of ‘secular’ voters who tend to vote with their wallets. Any general election held after the 1992 ERM crisis would have been Labour’s to lose.84 (Admittedly, that is no surety that they would not have lost it; Mandelson’s savvy did not prevent the loss of the 1992 election.) New Labour’s first term in office, between 1997 and 2001, saw their electoral coalition shrink by 3 million voters, largely from the poorest parts of the country. Were it not for the ongoing crisis wracking the Conservative Party, and the oddities of Britain’s electoral system – two factors over which electoral gurus and spinners had little control – such a haemorrhaging of support could have been fatal, leaving Blair another one-term Labour Prime Minister.
Blair’s third general election victory in 2005 was obtained with just over a third of the popular vote, and a total number of votes (9.5 million) similar to that achieved by Ed Miliband (9.35 million) in the disastrous 2015 election, in which Labour finally lost the entirety of Scotland. What was the big difference between a record third election victory and a crushing defeat? The revival of the Conservative vote. The Tories had undergone a detox operation, with a youthful, glabrous-cheeked leader doing his best Blair imitation. The deranged Right had largely decamped to UKIP. A period in coalition government with the Liberals had persuaded middle-ground voters that the Tories were no longer dominated by rancorous flag-wavers and pound-savers. (One might add, since it has become a psephological commonplace, that the credit crunch was ‘Labour’s ERM crisis’, but this is only partially true: Labour decisively lost this argument in retrospect, and it was by no means inevitable that they should have done so.)
What about today? Whatever they think of Corbyn’s electoral chances, the Blairites own electoral prospects are not necessarily better. Polls taken of the prospective Labour candidates before the leadership election found that, of all the candidates, Corbyn was the favourite.85 The ‘moderates’, lacking an appealing message, were also about as charismatic as lavatory soap dispensers. Labour’s poll ratings under Corbyn are poor, but hardly worse than before despite the ongoing media feeding frenzy. There is no reason to believe that any of his lacklustre rivals would be doing any better than Corbyn presently is.
Why might this be, and why have the pundits been so easily impressed by the claims of Labour’s right-wing? Thinking through the electoral arithmetic on the Blairites’ own terms, it was never obvious that the electoral bloc comprising people who think the same way as they do is even close to 25 per cent. The reason this hasn’t been a problem in the past is that elections in Britain’s first-past-the-post system are usually decided by a few hundred thousand ‘median’ voters based in marginal constituencies. As long as Labour could take the votes of the Left for granted, they could focus on serenading the ‘aspirational’ voters of Nuneaton. Even the erosion of ‘heartland’ votes didn’t register, so long as this erosion was happening to mountainous, seemingly unassailable majorities.
What happens, however, when left-leaning electors defect in sufficient numbers and sufficient geographic concentration to pose serious questions about Labour’s medium-term survival? What happens when it is no longer just the odd Labour seat going to George Galloway or Caroline Lucas in sudden unpredictable surges, but the whole of Scotland being lost in a single bloodbath? What happens when votes for left-of-centre rivals surge (the SNP vote trebling, the Green vote quadrupling), millions of potential voters still stay at home, and all of this takes place while the Conservatives reconstitute themselves as a viable centre-Right governing party? This is one of the reasons why Corbynism has emerged in the first place: in that circumstance, Blairite triangulation turns out to be as useful as a paper umbrella, only any good until it starts raining.
This Is Not 1981
In the last analysis, Corbyn’s victory was decisively enabled not by organisational changes or by ‘infiltration’. Nor was it a result of the dynamism of the Left. In a way, the Left punched well above its real weight to secure this victory. Corbyn won because the Labour Party was weak, and the traditionally dominant party ideologies, and the normally effective modes of political control, had broken down. At the core of this was the degeneration of the union link, which had been hacked away at over years, with the result that the traditionally cautious union bureaucracies seized on a drastic opportunity to reverse their losses. The intellectual and ideological enervation both of the New Labour project and of those who had governed as New Labour ministers meant that Corbyn was able to answer the existential questions posed about Labour’s future far more convincingly than any of his rivals.
It is the denial of this state of affairs that lies behind the fantasy of Labour’s Right that the party’s problems will only be solved by re-enacting the battles of the 1980s. Faced with the Corbyn ascendancy, some seasoned Labour Rightists have reacted with familiar relish. Roy Hattersley, who had spent years ineffectually bemoaning the Blairites, suddenly seems to have recovered his élan. Recounting his travails in right-wing Labour politics in the early eighties, he exhorts Labour ‘moderates’ to take the battle to Corbyn in the spirit of Denis Healey. The battle must be fought ‘all over again’, he declaims. ‘The sooner the fightback begins the better.’86 But anyone looking for Cold War reheats in this manner is wasting their time.
There are a number of reasons that Hattersley, Healey and other hammers of the Left were able to defeat the Left in the early-to-mid-eighties which simply don’t obtain today. One is that the wider climate of opinion was moving sharply to the right at the time, while the Left – whether of Militant or Bennite variety – was far weaker than its national profile allowed it to believe. There is no such pronounced and generalised shift to the right today, and all the movement in the Labour grass roots is to the left. Another is that the soft Left was inordinately belligerent toward the hard Left, and was happy to work with activists and politicians from the right in order to take control of the Labour Party. This profound realignment of forces, culminating in the victory of New Labour, was seen as a necessary modernising
project, junking the unyielding dogmas of the past. Today, the soft Left, having experienced the traumatic years of Blairism, is more likely to achieve some of its objectives with a left-wing leadership, and currently appears to be happy to live with such a leadership. And today’s modernisers are in the Corbyn camp: ‘socialism with an iPad’, as John McDonnell put it.87
And for those not wearing the Cold War blinders, it is patently obvious that ‘left-wing’ means something far more cautious than it used to. Corbyn has sought to steer a careful course, compromising with the right-wing over NATO membership and the European Union. He has called for Labour councils to set legal budgets with deep spending cuts rather than defying the government. His shadow chancellor John McDonnell has dropped early plans for the nationalisation of energy firms, despite how popular such measures would be. There is also the difference made by the breakdown of the traditional media’s ideological monopoly. Whereas the popular press in the early eighties was overwhelmingly right-wing, if not downright Thatcherite, the tabloids exert no such dominance today. However culpable and complicitous national media outlets may be, social media has broken their grip on the national conversation. And there is the very different role of trade unions in today’s Labour politics. Whereas once, powerful right-wing union leaders could be relied on to battle their left-wing counterparts and give ballast to the red-hunters, there is little sign of even relatively right-wing union leaders signing up for sabotage.88 Moreover, this time around there is no SDP to act as a right-wing pressure on the party, and there is little space for such a vehicle. Those looking for centrist politics with no trade union strings attached already have it in the Cameron–Osborne leadership. Finally, in the absence of the USSR, there is simply no groundswell of anti-socialist feeling which could be harnessed to a red-hunting crusade. Unilateral nuclear disarmament was once a policy nostrum associated with ‘fellow travellers’. Today, the majority of the public, and much of the military establishment, favour scrapping it.89
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