Winning and ruling
Some are born chaotic, some achieve chaos and some have chaos thrust upon them.
What is the biggest difference between the Labour and Tory tribes at the moment?
If you were to ask this question of members of each party, they would come up with a plethora of differences they felt to be visceral based on policy, ideology and identity.
But one area that is vastly underexplored is in the approach each side have to power. To gaining it, to holding on to it and to wielding it.
What is also underexplored is how different the approaches are to power depending on if you are looking at the internal politics of a party, a movement or government.
The Tories are united in caring about power. They want power, they fight to get power, they fight to keep power. Their party ranges in ideology from pro-Brexit, little Englanders to One Nation Tory Remainers, but the thing they agree on is that they should be in power and their getting into and staying in power is their priority.
As a result, they give us a chaotic approach to government and governance. Their government project is highly disputed internally, and run at the whim of a man who - in his quest for power internally and externally - tries to appeal to a majority (often by explicitly rejecting a minority) but does so without coherence. Is Boris Johnson a liberal-conservative, comfortable with marching in pink at a Pride parade? Or is he the lead player in the Culture Wars determined to set Brit against Brit in a damaging fight to the bottom where only he comes out on top?
Johnson’s government is often described as a court and his governing style as down to his whim. This has led to chaos as a philosophy and management style. Something that those who advocated for him - such as Dominic Cummings - also agitated for. Cummings wanted chaos at the heart of government. That’s what disruption *is*. The problem he and those like him who were seeking to so disrupt is that government itself has to go on. While they were busy thinking about disrupting the civil service because they felt they would be freer to enrich themselves and others with less regulation, freer to take and hoard power with fewer obstacles and freer to act imperiously with fewer rules they came up against the far greater disruption of Covid.
At that point, reality needed rules. Reality needed stability and good governance. Reality had had quite enough chaos thank you very much. It needed people able to act and think and govern for the short, medium and long term. It did not need any more disruption. But no one in the court of Cummings or Johnson was equipped to do any of that. The country paid a high price for that. And when the vaccine bounce passes, it may be that the Tories find that debt being collected.
But I wouldn’t count on it. And I worry that Labour does. The Tories haven’t lost their ruthless desire for power, even as they have demonstrated they don’t know what to do with it. And for Labour, that desire to show they can govern sometimes leads to a lack of pursuing how much they want to.
The attitude to power in Labour is different and much more complicated. At times, it can almost feel like the desire to be in power is seen by those on the left of the party as a Tory value. That it is better not to want power, as power corrupts - or at least compromises. Better to be pure and happy of heart than burdened with power and the need to exercise it on behalf of others.
However, this is only true of power in the country. The power to govern. What the left is often better at than those on the centre of the party is seizing power within the machinery of Labour and the wider leftist movement. However, their lack of intrinsic desire to govern extends to what happens when they do win power internally. So the party descends into chaos as there is no grip from the top. As Borisism was innately unsuited to cope with the disease of Covid, so too was Corbynism unsuited to cope with the disease of antisemitism. They are, of course, completely different, but the lack of governing grip is the common factor.
When New Labour was remaking the party they realised early on that they had to win the party to win power but that they then had to demonstrate their desire to govern the country to win permission to do so. Once they had dominion over the party and the movement, they switched their attention to winning over the country.
In power, New Labour got complacent or tired or both. They governed, but after the first term, they failed to install a governing principle. Enough has been written about the long term disastrous results of rushing headlong into a spectacularly ill-advised war in Iraq and an overly close relationship with a Bush-led US. Suffice it to say, that it is my contention that the mindset behind these decisions flowed from that sense of needing still to prove that Labour could govern. They never shook off the nervousness they had that the country never quite believed them - despite giving them two landslide margins to do so with.
Blair and his government rarely showed us passion and when they did, it was - more often than not - over areas that were highly contentious with their own side. Iraq of course, but also ID cards, 90-day detention and the sales of arms to autocratic regimes to name but a few. They also omitted to do many things that people had been desperate for a Labour government *for*. They failed utterly to build enough social housing - or to change the regimes to allow councils to do so. They failed to properly regulate finance (preferring to turn a blind eye so they could redistribute the tax income) so when the crash came the UK was particularly exposed to it.
New Labour became technocratic and to an extent visionless. They governed competently in the main, but didn’t stretch the boundaries of the possible anything like enough, or embed change in such ways that it couldn’t be undone pretty easily by the next Tory government.
Meanwhile, they took the eye off the ball within the party and the unions. In fact, they tried to sideline both, and while they managed that to an extent in the moment, here too they were unable to make those changes permanent enough that they couldn’t be undone by their successors.
So as the Blairites ignored the unions, the left organised within them. They also organized within the party. Whereas this was largely forgotten by late-term Blairites. They assumed they would continue to have their own way, they splintered into fights between Blairites and Brownites (and wasn’t that the vanity of small differences seen from this perspective) and they thought that sidelining the machine was enough. Not only did they refuse to dance with the one who brung them, they saw treating internal politics with disdain as a proof point of their seriousness about governing.
When it came to an actual contest to replace the New Labour leadership of the Party, their preferred candidate of David Miliband carried some of this disdain into his own approach and his unwillingness to properly campaign to the party felt like arrogance to enough members (and certainly to enough in the unions) that he failed to win the prize he thought was his by right.
The party went to the left first slowly under the soft left Ed Miliband and then accelerated under Corbyn. Ed was taking over a tired and dispirited machine that had largely supported his brother and failed to get a proper grip either on it or on the party. Much of what Ed talked about at his most radical are ideas that have become almost commonplace now. First May then Johnson have taken the best of Miliband’s policies and Toryised them. Miliband had vision, but he seemed almost afraid of it at times. His caution felt like both a lack of ambition to lead, but also an unwillingness or inability to lead the party.
Political commentator Steve Richards says that one of the skills a party leader needs is to be a teacher. This is the quality I saw in Ed when I supported him for the leadership. But the truth is, Ed is more of a seminar leader than a teacher. He loves big ideas but lacks the ability to make them seem manageable, understandable and common sense. He wanted to sound revolutionary but often acted with an abundance of caution (I remember a fellow journalist joking with me that you could tell how small a change Ed’s leadership team were promoting was by how big they talked it up). The communication of the ideas he was so passionate about got lost in all the other things a leader does. And he never properly worked out how to delegate those things so everything got governed less well than they could or should have been.
Miliband’s failure wasn’t a big bang moment until the 2015 election when the project imploded far more than had been expected. While there had been plenty of small moments you could point to where it was clear things weren’t working, it wasn’t until they all added up to a Tory majority government that it became clear quite how bad it had got.
Then there was Corbyn.
Corbynism won the party in part because of the failures of what had come before and partly on the strength of the organising in parts of the party other factions had neglected.
Members had tried a compromise with Miliband who had fallen between two stalls and thus failed to please either. Meanwhile, the left had been building up momentum (no pun intended) since the Iraq war and had been waiting for the right moment. They also organised in CLPs where there was never going to be a Labour MP. This was vital because these seats had often been neglected by those who were ambitious for office. If you’re a Labour member in a true blue district, you are probably going to be further to the left as that ideology and pursuing it internally in the party is the only likely reward. And what the left did was learn to count better than the right when it came to internal vote tallies.
Corbyn’s first win was a perfect storm. The other three candidates were just too inured in ‘politics as usual’ to stand out from each other. They were incapable of answering a straight question without reverting to talking points. They ranged from really quite Blairite to really quite Brownite and all of them argued that Miliband had gone too far to the left. The membership was bored and disenchanted with such chiding (and it was chiding rather than leading). Corbyn, despite having been around since the Jurassic era felt like a breath of fresh air. He didn’t sound like a robot. He answered questions. He took stances.
Meanwhile, the party did everything it could to make sure they practically dared the membership into electing Corbyn. The noises from the PLP and - unofficially - from the machinery were goading not persuading. They were patronising and told the electorate they were stupid. Precisely what the same people would later come to argue was one of Corbyn’s key electoral failures in the nation.
I bow to no one in my admiration for Harriet Harman. But her decision as interim leader to whip an abstention on the Welfare Bill was manna from heaven for the Corbynites. So much did his opposition to this cement in the mind of his supporters that he was good on welfare that few even noticed that Labour had almost nothing to say on the issue in the famed 2017 manifesto.
Corbyn won the leadership handsomely and unexpectedly. And from there it all fell apart.
Where Ed Miliband tried to have a governing strategy (albeit one which largely failed), Corbyn never did. They just had a permanent campaign. And for a while, that was quite successful. The left took the General Secretary role, a majority on the NEC and Corbyn’s office employed dozens more staff than LOTO were used to. They supported a number of new loyal leftist MPs into winnable seats (though there have been a number who have since lost either the whip or those seats). Basically, they kept up their campaign to win the Labour Party and everything else came secondary to that.
Some would argue that the 2017 election prove me wrong on that. I don’t think that’s true. 2017 was an unexpected leap forward it’s true. But for it to prove my thesis wrong, it should have been built on in such a way that made a 2019 win a real possibility. Instead, the concentration continued to be on internal power and the relationship with the country curdled.
So why have I run through the history of Labour’s various recent leader’s relationship to and failures with power? Not, I promise, just to torture you this rainy and sad weekend.
Keir Starmer’s leadership is at a crossroads. His top two communications people are leaving (full disclosure: Stephanie Driver, who will be taking over as Director of Communications is my immediate predecessor in my Fabian Society role. I hope she will take the advice in this email in the spirit it is intended). Labour lost in Hartlepool and tallied only 1.6% of the vote in Chesham and Amersham. Noises coming from the Batley and Spen by-election are not great. There has been a lot of criticism (including from me) of Labour’s communications. This may be the last chance Starmer has to turn them around.
First of all, I would address the fact that we have a separate comms team for the leader and the party. These should be working much closer together. Partly to ensure consistency of message but also to ensure that the party is not simply focused on the leader alone.
This is not a slight on Starmer. It’s saying that if Labour are keen to get into power we have a harder job to do so than the Tories and that will require a broader skillset. The Tories play on the easy setting - we don’t. So we need to bring much more firepower to the table.
Labour must have a laser-like focus on winning power. But cannot simply devote all their energy to it. That’s a tough dichotomy that will only be fixed by being ruthless in pursuit of the best possible front bench to display the different qualities that Labour needs to assure the electorate that we are ready, willing, able and hungry for the job of running the country.
Keir needs to be that teacher that Richards talks about. That means being less of a technocrat and more of a passionate advocate. Seeing some passion from him and nous from his team will be essential. Blair wasn’t elected because he was a technocrat. But he would have struggled if he didn’t know how to appoint them and manage them well.
But what Blair didn’t do that Starmer must is nurture a huge, wide cross-factional pool of talent that can take the fight to the Tories and the inspiration to the country - at the same time.
It is right to highlight Tory failures. But this should always, always, always be followed by a pivot to what Labour would, could and will do better.
And we need to narrow our focus to our very top policies and then talk about them nonstop. Talk about them until the very words make us feel sick. Like there are ashes in our mouths. Stop trying, publicly at least, to have a thousand answers to a thousand questions. Have five answers and use them no matter what is asked.
If you do this, you will be mercilessly mocked by the hyper online. Ignore them. The Tories did and look what it did for them. The Got Brexit Done (well sort of…) and won the election.
The party Starmer inherited was in a dreadful state. Who made it so is contested, but wherever you sit in the party it is agreed that it was in a state. It may be that Starmer is only ever going to be the man to rebuild the machine - not the one to properly wield it. But at the moment even that feels stalled, incremental, slow and bafflingly piecemeal. Where is the urgency? Where is the change.
Starmer has had a terrible time to start. He was forced to try to mend a broken machine in a time when we were in unprecendent danger. As the world opens up again, he now has to be bold and radical in the party, while inspiring and reassuring the country. It will be a hell of a tightrope walk.
Power isn’t easy - but my God wanting it is essential. Make it clear to the voting public that you wake up knowing that and go to bed craving it. That you aren’t the leader of the opposition, but the next Prime Minister.
Make them believe it. Make yourself.
What I’ve been up to
TICKETS FOR NO CURE FOR LOVE ARE NOW ON SALE!
Inspired by the music of Leonard Cohen, this piece examines the truth behind love songs. Can love ever be like that? Would we want it to be? Does love age with us or do we always fall like teenagers?
Join musicians Scott and Rose backstage at the Broadstairs Folk Festival as they try to discover if there is - in fact - a cure for love.
This is a rare show about love, sex and romance between older people. We're jaded, but we still have appetites, hopes, dreams and romantic aspirations. But if we haven't found them yet - are we being realistic about what we want?
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Speaking of Steve Richards, he kindly referenced this newsletter when responding to a message I sent him on his Rock N Roll Politics Podcast. Do listen to the whole thing, but if you are in a hurry, the part with my message is at about 54 minutes.
I wrote for the The Article on the shoddiness of GB News.
I was on Midatlantic discussing the G7 and Biden/Putin Summits, China and the Daniel Morgan inquiry.
On the 23rd June, I will be chairing a fringe event for the Labour Party Women’s Conference for Labour Business. Speakers include Bridget Phillipson and Seema Malhotra. You can register to join the event here.
Reading List
I found this by Douglas Coupland - on Generation X getting old fascinating. I am 13 years younger than Coupland and 5 years older than the geriatric millennials he talks of. I’ve never really know which generation I belong to. Maybe I’ll claim the best of both.
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_.