Since Labour’s election defeat in December, the party has managed to agree on one thing: that a “period of reflection” is necessary. But while everyone accepts reflection is required, there are, predictably, wildly varying ideas about what form it should take.
One option is to lament the kind of party Labour has become. On BBC’s Politics Live, communications consultant Deborah Mattinson asserted that Labour, apparently once the “pie-and-a-pint party”, was now beholden to the whims of north London quinoa munchers. (Never mind that you can get a quinoa salad in any Wetherspoon pub.) Well-worn as this spiel is, Labour’s base still consists of the kind of people you’d broadly expect: workers, students, renters, the disabled and unemployed.
Reflection of this kind can easily become self-flagellation, as demonstrated by Lisa Nandy on Newsnight’s Labour leadership hustings. A common viewpoint on the Labour right – one that Nandy, despite being identified with the soft left, appears to share – is that the party has been insufficiently hard on itself in the weeks since the election. What it must do now, the argument goes, is renounce and repent for its excesses of ambition. Some, like Sadiq Khan, suggest Labour simply deserved to lose. It’s unlikely that this performative self-abasement wins any real respect from sceptical voters. Indeed, for all the pretence of delivering hard truths to a party that refuses to face them, it’s more a case of playing to the media gallery.
All this has been part of the pageantry of Labour election defeats for decades. When Labour lost three successive elections in the 1950s, its revisionist right wing sought unsuccessfully to drop Sidney Webb’s clause IV, with its famous reference to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange”. Another generation of revisionists finally did away with it, after a string of four election losses, in 1995. Heavy on symbolism, Tony Blair’s “clause IV moment” entered the political lexicon but probably had less to do with Labour’s landslide win two years later than Black Wednesday, which had already wrecked the Tories’ reputation for economic competence.
Demands for Labour to move right are a perennial reflex reaction in the wake of election losses. They often bear little relation to the concrete circumstances of specific defeats: after the 2015 election, for instance, Labour was again being urged to shift right, this time on public spending, migration and social security – even though the party had spent the previous five years emphasising its toughness in exactly those areas. And the party responded to its defeat by abstaining on the Tories’ welfare bill at its second reading that July – in order to show voters, as Harriet Harman, the interim leader at the time, put it, that the party was “listening” to them.
The Labour left’s idea of reflection following the defeats of 2010 and 2015 differed greatly from that of the right. It meant defending the more progressive achievements of the Blair and Brown governments – rejecting Tory fallacies about their supposed fiscal profligacy and, in the case of 48 MPs, defying the whip to vote against the welfare bill. But it also meant faulting other aspects of New Labour such as private finance initiatives, the introduction of university tuition fees, and the catastrophic invasion and occupation of Iraq. The left argued that during 13 years of Labour government an opportunity for a more far-reaching transformation had been passed up and that the party had become dangerously remote from its supporters, a diagnosis borne out by the events of subsequent years.
Genuine reflection today, after yet another defeat, requires a good-faith assessment of what Corbynism did right and wrong – how its failings might be addressed and its positive achievements built on. Jeremy Corbyn had some success in challenging pro-austerity narratives, forcing the Tories to abandon their own position, at least rhetorically. But after 2017, when Labour almost made a shock breakthrough, the party’s left wing tended to assume that the hard work of persuasion was done – badly underestimating just how far popular political expectations had been lowered over the preceding 40 years.
No one can be in any doubt, then, that Labour has to earn public consent for any ambitious programme of social reform. The party thus needs to consider how it builds support for such a programme among the people it aspires to represent, and how to make it relevant to their specific needs. The reversal between the elections of 2017 and 2019 was sudden, but long-term trends were also at work: for four decades, the labour movement has been steadily disappearing from everyday working-class life across much of the UK, with old loyalties dissipating. Nandy seems to see the significance of this, but she appears more comfortable with identifying problems than proposing solutions.
Labour’s community organising unit has made a tentative start on repairing Labour’s links to its base, and may have helped stem some losses in December. However, its success cannot be judged in electoral terms alone: community organising is also about facilitating a direct dialogue between the party and the people, one that isn’t conducted via the distorting prism of media preoccupations.
The danger now is that the party neglects its fledgling community work and instead, traumatised by its recent treatment in the press, tacks right in the flailing pursuit of more favourable headlines. A bruised party membership, still stinging from a bad defeat, may be tempted to go along with this. But having lost under leaders from the party’s right, centre and left in the past decade, there are no quick fixes for Labour’s present predicament.
• Tom Blackburn is a founding editor of New Socialist