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Part 1
The centre-left in the Anglosphere
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TWO
The British Labour Party: back to the wilderness
Rob Manwaring and Matt Beech
Introduction
For a brief period of time in the late 1990s and early 2000s, New Labour seemed to offer a distinctive model for the renewal (or, according to some critics, a betrayal) of social democracy. For 13 years New Labour had seemingly found an electorally successful model that also offered clues for a recalibration of the centre-left in the 21st century. Yet, at the 2010 general election Labour was ingloriously ejected from office, under the unfortunate leadership of Gordon Brown. Brown's tired and exhausted government, battered by the MPs' expenses scandal, secured just 29 per cent of the vote, paving the way for David Cameron for the Conservative Party to secure office in coalition with the Liberal Democrats.
If the 2010 result was lacklustre for Labour, the 2015 general election, under the leadership of Ed Miliband, was far more damaging, in part, because it was unexpected. While Labour did increase its vote share to 30.4 per cent, Cameron secured a 12-seat majority. Since 2015, Labour has suddenly found itself in quite extraordinary territory, with the unexpected election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader. In 2017, the Conservative Party was surging ahead in the polls, and Prime Minister Theresa May took a gamble and called a snap election for 8 June. Corbyn-led Labour performed better than was widely expected, and won an additional 30 seats, forcing a hung Parliament. Labour won 40 per cent of the vote, and the Tories clung to power with the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). Paradoxically, the mood in Labour was upbeat following the election, despite losing its third general election on the trot.
This chapter focuses on the period from 2010 to the 2017 general election to examine why the Labour Party is losing, and on its current trajectory, well may face a prolonged period of exile in the electoral wilderness. As Randall (2003) notes, there are multiple ways of examining centre-left political parties, including materialist, institutional, ideational and electoral strategies. Here, we adopt what Randall calls the synthetic approach, which integrates structural, institutional, ideational and agency factors. This is a comparative study, and this chapter is organised around the three core themes of institutions, ideas and individuals. By focusing on the interaction and symbiotic relationship between these three core elements, we can offer a view as to why the Labour Party is losing, and indeed, may well continue to do so.
In this chapter, we examine the institutional factors that are stymieing a renewal of the party. What is clear is that despite the influx of new members to Labour, both under Miliband and particularly under Corbyn, the core nexus between leader, unions, PLP (the Parliamentary Labour Party) and rank-and-file appears to be at a critical breaking point. The focus on individuals draws attention to the leadership styles of Miliband and Corbyn, and again, are key explanatory factors for Labour's current woes. Finally, the focus on individual factors then examines the extent to which Labour under Brown, Miliband and Corbyn has failed to find a coherent and electorally appealing renewal of the social democratic tradition.
It is also worth setting out here what this chapter adds to the existing literature on the travails of Labour in the post-New Labour era. First, it should be read in conjunction with the other cases in this volume, and is structured to enable comparative insights. (Much of the literature on the Labour Party tends to solely focus on the UK context.) Second, this chapter complements some existing literature, but also includes a distinctive analysis of the failures of the British left. For example, the two key statements of the Miliband period are offered by Goes (2016) and Bale (2015)–both important works. Goes focuses on ideational issues, and Bale has a stronger focus on institutional and electoral factors. Here, we seek to integrate such approaches into our analysis. In addition, while there is much journalistic critique of Labour's plight – much of it interesting – there is less academic material. Further, while the Beckett Report (2016) offers a candid, and no doubt painful, account of the 2015 election loss, it has shortcomings – not least in arguably over-playing structural factors such as the Fixed-term Parliaments Act (2011), and, to some extent, down-playing Miliband's muddled leadership. Finally, using a wider critical lens, and taking in the period that includes Brown, Miliband and Corbyn, we argue that Labour's woes require a deeper analysis than insightful, but one-off, electoral accounts (see, for example, Ross, 2015). The chapter proceeds by examining Labour through the prism of these key themes, and concludes with further reflections of Corbyn's current leadership of the party.
Institutions
When seeking to understand the failure of the British left in general, and the Labour Party in particular since 2010, a sensible place to start is by examining the institutional relationship between the Labour Party and the wider labour movement. The Labour Party is the political wing of the labour movement, and has responsibility for representing the labour movement in the UK Parliament. The elite of the labour movement comprise the first tier of the Labour Party – the Party Leader and Deputy Leader, both of whom are directly elected by party members. When in Opposition, as Labour have been since 2010, the Shadow Cabinet, with its junior Shadow Ministers and parliamentary Private Secretaries, make up the second tier of the elite. The backbenchers of the PLP can then be classed as the third tier. In the 2017 Parliament, Labour has 262 MPs.
As the UK is an asymmetric polity with devolved institutions, the labour movement has political representation through Scottish Labour in the Scottish Parliament. In the 2016 Scottish Parliament, Scottish Labour has 23 MSPs (Members of the Scottish Parliament). Welsh Labour represents Labour interests in the National Assembly for Wales, and in the 2017 Welsh Assembly Welsh Labour has 29 AMs (Assembly Members). The London Labour Party represents Labour in the London Assembly, and in the 2017 Assembly it has 12 seats. Labour does not contest elections in Northern Ireland, but the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) is a sister. In the House of Commons, the SDLP has 3 MPs, all of whom take the Labour whip voluntarily, and sit with Labour members. Finally, at the sub-national level, local representatives of the Labour Party are elected as councillors to town, borough, district, city and county councils, many of which are unitary authorities. In England and Wales since 2015 Labour controls 110 local authorities (Local Government Association, 2015). In Scotland since 2012 Labour has run 8 councils and is in a coalition in a further 8 (Curtice, 2012, p 24).
The wider Labour movement comprises affiliated trade unions, socialist societies, registered supporters and party members. In recent years Labour has been successful at engaging young people through social media, and in 2015 they offered younger supporters the reduced fee of just £3 to join. The number of young people who joined and, in particular, the number of young people who joined Labour to vote for Corbyn as leader in the summer of 2015 is evidence of this. Similarly, in July 2016, membership of the Labour Party was estimated to be nearly 600,000, as over 100,000 people had swiftly joined to participate in the leadership election after Angela Eagle initially challenged Jeremy Corbyn (Bush, 2016). In numerical terms, although Labour Party membership is currently at its highest for decades, many new registered supporters have not become regular activists within constituency Labour parties. The phenomenon of the sudden expansion of Labour membership appears to be one where people–especially younger people – have bought in to the leadership election process with the goal of voting for their preferred candidate. While to an extent the institutions of the labour movement are growing in numbers and reaching younger citizens, at the same time, the PLP is riven with bitter divisions. On 28 June 2016 Labour MPs voted by 172 to 40 for a motion of 'no confidence' in Corbyn's leadership (BBC News, 2016). During the 2017 election campaign and shortly after the unexpectedly positive result, there was an uneasy truce within the party. Yet flash points still remain. Corbyn, freshly emboldened from the election, sacked three Shadow Ministers, and there were internal struggles over the internal parliamentary committee.
The referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union (EU) is the most revealing example of the institutional challenges facing the Labour Party. The referendum was won on the issue of immigration (Jonas, 2016). The argument that carried the day was that uncontrolled, mass, low-skill immigration has had a deleterious effect on working-class communities. Brexit revealed a divided UK, with especially deep fissures in the English left over the type of country Labour-inclined voters want to see (Beech, 2016, p 128). This can be understood as the progressive left versus conservative Labour. According to YouGov, 65 per cent of people who voted Labour in the 2015 general election opted for 'Remain' while 35 per cent chose 'Leave' (YouGov, 2016). In a YouGov poll of Labour Party members, 90 per cent responded that they voted 'Remain' and 9 per cent responded that they voted 'Leave' (Curtis, 2016). Brexiteers were more likely to be older, modestly educated and to live in the provinces of England and Wales (Moore, 2016). Brexit has stirred a more conservative vision of the English left in the hearts and minds of many instinctive Labour voters.
The Brexit result demonstrates that there is no shared vision for the good society on the British left. The political identity and values of the vast majority of the PLP, party members and registered supporters is at variance with millions of Labour-inclined voters, especially those from working-class communities. The part that the institutions of the British left has played in its malaise pertains to what can be explained as the values gap, the gap in social values between those voters who have historically been Labour-inclined, and the activists and politicians within the Labour Party. The Labour Party and labour movement has ceased to be a broad church in terms of social values, and is more accurately described as a handful of disputatious political sects. On issues such as membership of the EU, mass immigration from Eastern and South Eastern Europe, the culture of human rights, feminism, gay marriage and patriotism, Labour politicians and activists are firmly progressive (Edwards and Beech, 2016, p 494). But this is not the vision of Labour politics recognised by older voters, non-metropolitan voters and many working-class voters in Labour's heartlands. The values gap argument relates not to economic perspectives where the breadth of opinion within the labour movement is plain for all to see. The socialism of the hard left Corbynites is different from the soft left social democracy of Ed Miliband and his inner circle, which, in turn, was different from the centrism of the Brownite and Blairite centre-left. Labour-inclined voters do not clearly coalesce around one variant of Labour political economy.
The other factor in the values gap argument is that the more conservative vision of the left is alien to Londoners. London Labour is the epitome of cosmopolitanism, and is necessarily progressive. This leads us to the second point–geography matters. A further difficulty for the Labour Party comes, in part, from London's dominance. The nation's capital is a bedrock of the Labour Party, with 45 out of 73 MPs. Its voter base is disproportionally young, wealthier than average, socially liberal and represented (some might say, over-represented) in the mass media. Its voice is therefore loud and it receives multiple platforms in the broadcast and print media to press its case for progressive Labour values. When this progressive left voice reverberates outside of the metropolis, and is received in the Labour heartlands, it is as hard to comprehend as an unknown tongue.
Ideas
At the heart of Labour's current plight lies an ideational paradox. The spectre that continues to haunt the party is the legacy of New Labour. British Labour has not yet decisively, and in a unified way, answered the question of what the post-New Labour Party stands for. This is not an uncommon phenomenon. As Bale (2010) deftly points out, it took the Conservative Party four leaders and 13 years to reconcile itself to the Thatcherite legacy. The paradox for Labour is that 'New Labour' was built on a broad consensus of ideas and principles, and yet remained quite contradictory (see Gamble, 2010; Manwaring, 2014). Thematically, New Labour was conceived around a new political economy largely accommodating the Thatcherite legacy; a focus on social inclusion (and not inequality); an enabling state; a focus on community; and a shift to equality of opportunity (not outcome) (Driver and Martell, 2000). Of course, these were synthesised most coherently by Anthony Giddens and his extensive writings on the Third Way, and Blair's own Third Way pamphlet. The key issue is that even if some normatively challenged the New Labour consensus, the range of ideas was relatively coherent, and it clearly found electoral support. The fragility and internal contradictions were exposed most fatally by the 2008 global financial crisis (GFC).
Ideationally, neither Brown, Miliband nor Corbyn have yet found a similar winning formula. As Beech (2009) argues, a striking feature of Gordon Brown's time as party leader was a refusal to build an ideological narrative for his government. Indeed, the party's manifesto at the 2010 election, while rich in policy detail, and with a strong focus on rebuilding the British economy, lacked a clear ideational identity. Of all the leaders post-Blair, Brown was most acutely caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of New Labour's ideational legacy and the response to the GFC. Perhaps the strongest point of ideational difference was Brown's, albeit limited, attempt to develop an agenda on democratic renewal (Labour Party, 2010). It remains unclear, however, if Brown had won in 2010 how far this push for devolution and the elusive 'new politics' would have been delivered.
Ideationally, of all three leaders, Ed Miliband remains the most intriguing in his quest to reformulate social democracy. As Goes (2016) critically outlines, Miliband flirted with and was restless with a wide range of ideas and principles during his tenure. Despite his claims, Miliband never quite fully broke with New Labour, yet in his ideational fluctuations we see an attempt to rethink some core principles, including:
• equality (via predistribution)
• the state (via Blue Labour)
• capitalism (via 'producers vs predators')
• class and social cohesion (via 'One Nation').
Brevity forbids a detailed examination of Miliband's ideas here, but the rough contours can be outlined. A defining, and clear, ideational break from New Labour was Miliband's interest in notions of inequality (see Miliband, 2016). Miliband tried to recalibrate policy around tackling structural forms of inequality, and his advisers flirted with Jacob Hacker's notions of predistribution. Simply, this refers to state interventions in the market before traditional redistribution/tax transfers take place, childcare funding being commonly cited as an example. Tactically, this potentially meant a rediscovery of earlier social democratic traditions, but without recourse to a traditional 'tax and spend' approach. Predistribution remains a contested concept, and Miliband both struggled to articulate what it meant and to give it coherent policy expression. Second, Miliband attempted to offer a more sustained critique of capitalism with his focus on 'predators', not producers. The difficulty for Miliband was an ongoing tendency to raise ideas that either lacked coherence or clear policy expression.
Moreover, Miliband's ideational journey had then moved on. Early on he was influenced by the 'Blue Labour' notions most closely associated with Maurice Glasman (Davis, 2011). The insight here was Glasman's critique of the statist tradition in Labour thinking, and its abandonment of community and other sources of collectivist power. Miliband was influenced to some extent by this thinking, and found expression in his adoption of community organising and campaigns such as the 'Living Wage' (the latter co-opted by former Conservative Chancellor George Osborne). Yet, his views on the role of the state were not as clear as New Labour's 'enabling state' motif. As is well documented, Miliband backed away from Blue Labour following Glasman's controversial comments about immigration and engaging with supporters of the English Defence League (EDL). Again, a core ideational problem for Miliband and Labour has been to articulate a clear policy agenda on immigration that appeases working-class people and multiculturalists in London, while respecting the principle of the free movement of people. The vexed issue of Labour's stance on immigration was given full airing with Gordon Brown's ill-fated meeting with Labour voter Gillian Duffy in the run-up to the 2010 election.
The next 'big idea' was to re-claim Disraeli's 'One Nation' label to re-assert a more consensual form of governance, to some extent, more like a German social market model. Yet, as outlined elsewhere, despite much interest in the idea by Jon Cruddas during the policy review, Miliband's own personal commitment to the idea was lukewarm at best. Moreover, as an ideational principle it actually gave few clues for a clear re-formulation of social democracy. In sum, Miliband's ideational journey reflected both a determined effort to engage in new ideas and to break from New Labour orthodoxy, but was beset by inconsistent messages, poor policy proposals and ambivalence from Miliband himself on some of these agendas.
Ideationally, Corbyn is the clearest 'circuit-breaker' from the New Labour ideational model. His politics are much contested, and arguably, the 'radicalism' of his thinking is probably ...
