What is Labour for?
Labour is a party running on the fumes of nostalgia and self-righteousness. No wonder the electorate reject us.
What is the Labour Party for? This should be a simple question for any member to answer. But I’m not sure I can today.
Labour was established to be the party of a working class that no longer exists. The industrialised classes have long since become atomised. Large organised workplaces aren’t quite obsolete, but in the private sector, they have become rarer and rarer. This has meant organised labour has shrunk significantly as a percentage of the workforce.
The response to this has not been a modernisation of unions. What happened in the 90s was a gobbling up of smaller unions into the big ones. Unite. Unison. GMB. Usdaw, NEU and Community. While smaller unions still exist these hold the lion’s share of membership and all but the NEU are affiliated to the Labour Party. As there became fewer, larger unions, their influence in the party changed. Now it was just a few men (and it was nearly always men) with huge money and thus influence to wield. Some did this well on behalf of their members but for others, it was about their own personal political ideologies and obsessions. Too much uncountered power in the hands of too few people. Not exactly the Socialist way I grew up believing in.
Internally, the unions became professionalised. More and more, union central staff were not people who had risen through the ranks from the shop floor, but people who were white-collar ideologues, wedded to the idea of unionism, but with little experience of the sharp end of need.
Need makes a difference. Need makes you practical and pragmatic. Need allows you to take the values that you live by and apply them not to a theoretical framework but to everyday life.
The ongoing demise of the unions has not made them look again at how they do things in any demonstrable way. You still have union officials playing at revolutionary politics from the comfort of their very comfortable homes. Their approach to lower membership is to try to poach each other’s members - not reach out to the new precariat or work out how to reach into small workplaces. There has been some organising of the gig economy, but nothing like enough to get real density.
This makes a difference to the Labour Party. It used to be the unions who brought in working class voters and leaders to the party. But we now don’t look to people’s knowledge or experience. We ask them to demonstrate their nostalgia instead. We measure the dedication of a Labour leader to unionism by whether they attend the Durham Miner’s Gala - not by how they think about how to innovate conditions for working people.
I started with the unions because so did the Labour Party. The party has far greater problems than its fraught relationship with the unions, but let’s start with that.
Blair could have used his considerable clout to work with the unions to find a new way of working and try to halt their decline. he chose instead to sideline them. It was on his watch that the unions went - ironically - from the centre, where they had been a hold on the party in the 1980s to the left, where they became hotbeds of anti-Blair organising. Brown did little to change this. Miliband owed his victory to the unions and first tried to court them, then following Falkirk, instigated rules meant to dilute their influence. Corbyn was then elected and while he took more interest in relationships with the top of the unions (particularly Unite) he was as uninterested as that leadership in doing things differently than they had in the 1970s.
I’ve framed this through the unions because I think this is an exemplar of what Labour’s problems are. We are stuck in an unworkable past. We believe we are appealing to a public that doesn’t exist, while our constant obsessions are turning off the voters who do.
Labour is not going to stop its personality-based infighting any time soon. Those who believe this result is a hangover from Corbynism won’t be convinced otherwise. Those who believe this is the fault of Starmer will continue to blame him. For myself, I think the problems run deeper than who is at the top. But when Corbyn had a similar result in the local elections I was excoriating. Starmer deserves no less.
The truth is Labour has been on a downward trajectory for many years and that remains unarrested by Starmer. But the buck stops with him. He has now to take significant steps to change the party not simple from the excesses and antisemitism of the Corbyn era, but also from the caution of Miliband and the excesses and hubris of the Blair era.
Labour doesn’t have a narrative about the future. It has a nostalgia for the past. We bang on about fights that were won years ago. We treat Boris Johnson as if he were Margaret Thatcher despite his considerably different economic language. None of this works. We don’t live in those days any more. We can’t keep talking as if we were living in the 70s, 80s or 90s (delete as per your preference of Labour era).
It also has a sense of itself as far better than you are. Labour members believe they *care* more than you do. About everything. You are a hick. A hayseed. A racist, sexist, homophobic TORY. We treat the voters as the enemy. There’s a story in Paul Waugh’s email responding to the results where when a voter tells a canvasser they are voting Tory, the canvasser replies "you’d better check your values”. Labour members all too often hate the real electorate while romanticising a fantasy proletariate.
This is what voters hear from Labour constantly. Dammit, it’s what Labour members hear from each other constantly. While at the same time we are worse than useless at dealing with those who are either guilty of serious and repeated antisemitism or sexism or even sexual abuse. There are people who need to hear these things in the party. But they aren’t generally the ones who get hunted down on social media. The more ordinary members get witch-hunted, the weaker it is when we try to deal with those who are really a problem.
But internal change from what we are is not remotely enough. Not being the Tories is clearly not remotely enough. Harking back to either Blairism or Corbynism is not enough.
Labour needs to sort out its relationship with the voters. It has to bring real people into the party beyond our urban, middle class backbone. It has to have a language that appeals not to segments of society but to everyone.
Labour must go back to basics. It’s a cursed phrase because when John Major said it he meant a set of values that neither those Tories then nor this Labour party now could live up to. But for Labour, the basics should be an understanding of what government is for and what it isn’t. It’s about talking about the things the majority cares about.
That doesn’t mean pandering on immigration. It means talking about those things that immigrants and the British-born have in common. Back to basics. A decent secure home, a decent secure job, a decent, secure future for your family. No matter your age, sex, gender, race these are the things we all care about. These are the things that bring us together.
I have never felt so despondent about the future of the Labour Party. I don’t know if it will survive this Pasokification and at the moment I am not sure it deserves to.
What I’ve been up to
I know it’s been a little while. I needed a bit of a mental health break from - well - everything. But I’m back now and hopefully back to more regular posting.
The play continues to thrive. I am now directing it (gulp) so spending the week reading books on how to do that! If you want to donate to help it get on stage in the best shape possible please give what you can.
In the meantime, here's a lovely video of my musical director Jordan interpreting the theme song.
I wrote for the Times on Labour’s lack of an optimistic narrative.
I was on Midatlantic discussing Biden’s First 100 Days and on Labour for a European Future discussing a year of Keir. And finally, the Zeitgeist Tapes got round to discussing The West Wing.
Reading List
I found this piece, from Insert Strong Message Here on Labour’s changing fortunes in the suburbs quite interesting.
And this from Paul Mason is very interesting as I think he’s sort of struggling with some of the same themes I am.
Questions, comments and arguments are very welcome. Insults will get you summarily blocked on every platform that no longer hosts Donald Trump. I’m at emmaburnell@gmail.com or on Twitter (far too often) at @EmmaBurnell_.
Every member of the labour Party needs to read this. Labour voters, and those who have drifted away, need someone to vote for rather than just putting our crosses next to Labour because that's what we've always done.
Fantastic! Yet Labour was never a party for the working class - even the old vanguard of the Second International recognized that. Labour is just as much a dead-end as the Democrats in the US - both fake left but go right every time, not despite but because of their staff, leaders, and ideology. We need a truly independent working class party grounded in scientific socialism and cognisant of the left's history of failures. Anything less forestalls the revolution unnecessarily.