Uncut « Labour Uncut

Under Corbyn, Labour faces twenty years in the wilderness

11/08/2015, 06:04:39 PM

by John Braggins

I think it’s time for a confession. Not because it’ll be good for my soul, it’s too late for that, but for because in 1980, when as organiser for the Labour party in Camden I took the lead in persuading one of our members to run for leader of the Labour party. When I say I took the lead I mean I drove over to Hampstead and delivered the resolution passed by the GC that night urging Michael Foot to run for leader. At the time Labour had suffered a general election defeat – Jim Callaghan losing out to Thatcher – and Callaghan had stayed on as leader for a further 18 months.

To say that the party drifted during this time would be an understatement, equally to say that 18 months of Thatcher had not changed the political climate for the worse would be another understatement. Like many people around me at the time we thought that what the Labour party needed was a charismatic leader, an orator of great standing, a man of letters who could stand up at the despatch box and take the Tories on, a man who could lead marches and address great rallies.

History, I’m afraid, proved us wrong. We were led into the worst election defeat since 1918 losing three million votes and only just coming head of the newly formed SDP with a manifesto later described as the longest suicide note in history.

Today Jeremy Corbyn stands where Michael Foot stood 35 years ago. If history repeats itself Labour will next win a general election in 2033, or more precisely 2035 given the new five year parliaments. I will be 90 years old (hopefully) my children at retirement age and my grandchildren bringing up their families in a world that has had to accept Tory policies as the norm throughout their life.

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Labour is not a museum. It should be a movement for the future

10/08/2015, 07:00:07 AM

by Pat McFadden

It was back in 1959 that some in Labour first though the old Clause IV was out of date. 1959, before the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the same year the German SPD renounced its Marxist heritage with the adoption of the Bad Godesberg programme. Gaitskill’s attempt to change Clause IV was a response to Labour’s third defeat on the trot. He failed. The party would not give up its statement of aims and values dating from 1918 and the original Clause IV survived until the 1990s.

For some the commitment to “the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange” was a serious statement of intent, a yardstick by which to judge Labour Governments who would inevitably be found wanting when it came to implementation. That’s the thing about leaders, they will always sell you out goes the argument. For others its value was more as heritage, not a statement they expected to be implemented but of value as a kind of holy text.

Before Tony Blair attempted to change Clause IV Jack Straw had raised the issue. If memory serves me right he quoted his constituency chairman citing Yeats’s plea to “tread softly, for you tread on my dreams.” For Clause IV was not only about content. It was part of Labour’s religion. It had a poetic appeal and its very longevity lent it symbolic weight. So when Tony Blair set about changing it both he and the opponents of change understood the importance of the change.

Blair wanted a statement of Labour’s aims that a Labour government could seriously attempt to abide by. No Labour Government was going to nationalise the means of production, distribution and exchange. Secondly, he wanted to communicate to the public, most of whom of course hadn’t read Clause IV, that Labour had changed and was modernising to meet new times. He knew Labour had a problem appealing to voters who believed Labour was wedded to high taxes, dominated by the unions and weak on defence. Many of these voters had parents or grandparents who were Labour but they felt they had moved on from a Labour party that seemed locked in the past.

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Ten hard truths for Labour

07/08/2015, 12:34:57 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. Here’s Jonathan Todd with his top ten.

1. Most people are not interested in politics. At best they see it as irrelevant to them. At worst they are actively hostile. Most politics, therefore, passes most people by most of the time. They only pay attention when things they hadn’t expected happen.

2. People get that Labour cares. Labour did not lose the election because we were insufficiently stout in our defence of the NHS and other causes typically dear to Labour hearts. Most voters expect Labour to care about the NHS and other institutions – like local schools and Sure Start centres – that tend to (but not always) make the world better. Because they expect this from Labour, noting point 1, they don’t really register Labour providing this.

3. It’s the economy, stupid. Doubts about Labour’s capacity as custodians of the economy and public finances, as well as Labour’s ability to have mutually productive relations with business, contributed toward this year’s defeat.

4. We need to show we’ve changed on business and the economy. If we accept that only counter intuitive political moves gain real public traction and that concerns about Labour’s economic and fiscal management gravely imperil the prospects of Labour government, Labour should be seeking strongly counter intuitive moves that challenge these negative perceptions. This means more than mouthing platitudes about being pro-business or fiscally responsible. It requires actions that show and reshow this to the public. Till the political professionals are bored stiff and the activist class are blue with frustration. Then the public might hear.

5. The case for a reformed EU needs to be made. While voters are paying little attention to UK politics, they are paying even less to EU politics. For the majority of the time that the UK has been in the EU, pro-Europeans have asked Brits to be part of a successful club. The Germans prosper. The French have fast trains. The Italians are well-dressed. Attachment to these successes has been the bedrock of the UK’s EU membership.

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This polarised leadership contest is ignoring the key lessons from our general election defeat

06/08/2015, 05:52:39 PM

by Daniel Charleston Downes

A common complaint made by public service workers about governments is that the manner in which decisions and policies made are is entirely hegemonic. The secretary of state for health, education or defence rarely has first-hand experience of those sectors they represent and if they do it was often a while ago. Added to which, politics is placed above pragmatism and the experience and knowledge of workers at the coal-face that could give a detailed account of what the problems really are.

In any analysis of the 2015 general election defeat it would follow logically that the best accounts could be given by those that fought and lost marginal seats. Thankfully this is exactly what the Fabians have done in their collected essays Never Again edited by Sally Keeble and Will Straw. This collection gives accounts of seven regions around England where Labour underperformed. It gives insight into what the successes were of CLPs directly involved in their communities and the issues that national policy and leadership were giving candidates on the doorstep.

Whilst the existence of the document itself is cause for much cheer, it appears as if the leadership contenders are coming to the wider debate about the future of the Labour party with their direction already established. Corbyn for example has in his analysis inevitably come to the conclusion that Labour were too right wing and did not provide clear opposition to austerity. This seems counter to all evidence, the near 80% of the electorate that supported a pro-austerity party and the experience of many accounts on the doorsteps. Further it completely ignores the conclusions of the Trades Union Congress survey that showed Labour were generally perceived to have been too soft on both welfare and immigration.

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Ten hard truths for Labour

05/08/2015, 03:07:15 PM

Following Tristram Hunt’s call for “a summer of hard truths” Labour Uncut is running a short series laying them out. Here’s Samuel Dale with his top ten.

1. We need to match Tory spending plans in 2020. Ed Balls ran the tightest and impressive spending controls of any major party in modern political history at the last election. No shadow minister made a single unfunded commitment. But it didn’t matter because you don’t build economic credibility through micro-policies. You build it through a strong macro-economic plan. Labour was promising to spend and borrow more than the Tories. It meant the Tories were free to make billions of pounds worth of unfunded tax cuts, NHS spending and rail fare freezes all while being able to claim they are more responsible than Labour. General elections are a zero sum game. You choose one party over the other. Labour will not gain economic credibility unless it matches Tory spending plans.

2. We need our own cuts. Labour needs to be creative about how it would cut spending to pay off the deficit and reduce debt in this parliament too. We can’t wait until 2020 to rebuild our economic credibility. John McTernan has suggested a possible fire and police service merger to modernise the emergency services. Do we need a whole department for culture, media and sport? Can we divide up contents of the business department? How can we join up pension policy across the Treasury and DWP? Labour has to provide a fairer alternative and show that the Tories are making the wrong political choices even within a tough economic environment. It must start as soon as possible.

3. A collection of popular policies is not a platform for government. The far left are fond of the old trope that renationalising the railways is very popular with the public. But a collection of popular policies is not a platform for Government. Ed Miliband had popular policies on non-doms, freezing energy prices, ending the bedroom tax and cutting tuition fees. In 2005 the Tories banged on about popular welfare and immigration policies. But put it all together and the manifestos were less than the sum of their parts. Voters choose Governments from the mood music rather than specifics.

4. Attracting non-voters will not win elections. No matter how many pilgrimages Labour leaders make to Russell Brand or how many voter registration drives we do, it will not change. The old will turn out to vote in far greater numbers than the young and the middle classes far more than the poor. You can not change the electorate over five years by attracting non-voters to vote Labour. It is a pipe dream.
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Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign is an emotional spasm

05/08/2015, 11:05:12 AM

by Rob Marchant

“You call that statesmanship? I call it an emotional spasm.”

Aneurin Bevan, shadow foreign secretary, 1959 Labour party conference

Bevan’s withering lines, warning the party against unilateral disarmament, illustrate the fact that we are not in a new place. In the face of a public, for whom two world wars were still a very recent memory, the party’s left had “gone off on one”, on defence and other matters – to be fair, a move largely nurtured by Bevan himself – with the result that Labour wandered in the wilderness for thirteen long years.

A similar effect took place in the 1980s under Michael Foot: seventeen more years. The party now teeters on the brink of a third, post-war wilderness period of comparable length.

Whoever wins the leadership in September, it seems clear that our current stay in opposition will eventually have lasted at least a full decade. A sudden Tory meltdown in this parliament looks remote and, objectively speaking, Cameron has made a better fist of being party leader than most in Labour give him credit for. He has, after all, increased his vote – no mean feat for a leader previously forced into Britain’s first formal coalition since the time of Churchill and Attlee.

No, it is time to take a step back. It is now more a question of, will it be just ten years in the wilderness, or will it be fifteen, or twenty? That is what the next few short weeks will decide.

But Labour, currently engaged in a frantic bout of navel-gazing, seems oblivious to this fact. While Uncut still believes he will not win, the surprising success of Jeremy Corbyn’s unplanned campaign points to a part of the Labour family pathologically incapable of learning from its past.

And the worst thing is not so much that it is veering close to repeating its mistakes, but that such a mistake could have considerably worse consequences than previous times.

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What the Labour right should do now

03/08/2015, 11:10:18 AM

by Jonathan Todd

“Emotional landscapes. They puzzle me. The riddle gets solved and you push me up to this state of emergency. How beautiful to be!”

As the UK confronted emergency in the Scottish referendum, I played the Bjork song Jóga obsessively. There is something in the urgency of Bjork’s voice and the tune’s texture that felt of last September’s zeitgeist. And it was beautiful to be in Trafalgar Square at the Better Together rally when Bob Geldof reminded us:

“Before there was a United Nations, before there was a United States, before there was a united anything, there was a United Kingdom.”

It spoke of all that we have been, all that we could be, and all that Alex Salmond would disregard. Hope rooted in pride, resisting Salmond’s insistence that there was nothing to be proud of.

Now Jeremy Corbyn has pushed my party – Labour – to its own emergency. His geography teacher style, like Salmond’s cheeky chap routine, has a cut through of authenticity amid our over spun times. They proffer simple solutions to complex problems, swallowed by demoralised peoples – Scotland under Tory government, Labour after defeat.

They – or at least their supporters – tell people like me that Labour is not our party. That we are “red Tories”, unfaithful socialists, and collaborators in the misery that they would resolve.

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We’ve been here before with Bennites like Corbyn. It will end the same way. In blood and vomit

01/08/2015, 01:07:24 PM

by Paul Richards

Labour’s last double-decade in opposition started with a winter of discontent, and this one starts with a summer of seppuku. What could have been the start of a process of healing after a disastrous election result, is instead descending into viciousness not seen since the early 1980s. There will be those old enough to remember what it was like back then. For those who don’t, it was no tea party.

The Bennites’ strategy was simple: to set up a series of positions on everything – Nato, the EEC, Trident, the monarchy, the civil service, the Lords, the banks, the media, and businesses – and then denounce anyone who deviated from this position as ‘a Tory’. This epithet didn’t include the actual Tories, but instead any Labour party member, MP or trade unionist who didn’t agree with state control of Marks & Spencer, kicking out the Americans, and support for Sinn Fein. Denis Healey? Tory. Barbara Castle? Tory. Harold Wilson? Tory.

A booklet was circulated amongst local activists called How to deselect your MP, which explained how to use the new rulebook to get rid of any Labour MP who failed to meet the same ideological tests. It was waved under the nose of any MP who dared to support non-Bennites for the national executive or vote for non-Bennite motions at the GC. These were times of fear and loathing, when Labour Party meetings were unpleasant places to be, characterised as small groups of activists firing resolutions at each other from across the room.

The greatest opprobrium was reserved for anyone who had served in the treacherous Wilson and Callaghan governments. Ministers were traitors, and should be treated with contempt. In his memoir, Denis Healey recalls Jim Callaghan being subject to a “barrage of the most offensive personal abuse both in public speeches, and perhaps even more wounding, in the private meetings of the National Executive Committee.” This was a former Labour home secretary, chancellor of the exchequer, foreign secretary, prime minister and leader of the Labour party: being bawled at by nonentities, paper-sellers and placemen.

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Jeremy Corbyn, George McGovern and winning by default

31/07/2015, 06:37:03 PM

by David Butler

A party is selecting a new leader and is using, for the first time, an open selection process. The early front-runners from the moderate wing of the party, who have dominated the party in the previous decades, have faltered and disappointed. Others, young and dynamic politicians, have refused to run for personal and political reasons. Instead, the insurgent, an outsider candidate from the left of the party is gaining momentum. He is backed by a wave of younger activists who are disappointed by the party’s previous period in government with its compromises and controversial war and are idealistic for a new settlement. As the campaign progressed, the moderates try to rally around a candidate, any candidate, to stop the insurgent left. However, it is too late. The insurgent suddenly finds himself party leader.

The year is 1972 and George McGovern has just become the Democratic nominee for President.

On his way to the nomination, McGovern defeated the combined talents of three leading party moderates, Senator Edmund Muskie, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey and Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson. George J. Mitchell, a Muskie staffer and later Muskie’s successor as Senator, reflected afterwards that “Muskie’s appeal was to reason, to legislative accomplishment, to sort of general policies in the best interest of the country. The primary electorate was interested in emotion, passion, strong views on every issue, and the general election candidate who tries to navigate a nomination process by not being clear on very hot button issues finds it difficult in the nominating process”.

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Irascible Liz needs to learn from mellow Jez

31/07/2015, 10:54:24 AM

by Kevin Meagher

If I was Liz Kendall, cast as the uber-pragmatist in this Labour leadership contest and with a difficult message of “wake-up-and-smell-the-coffee” to sell to the party’s suspicious grassroots, I would look across the ideological divide at Jeremy Corbyn and emulate how he’s running his campaign.

Not by suddenly adopting a policy on Bolivian miners, but by observing the quiet and courteous manner with which he pitches unfettered socialism to a bruised party that wants to believe, but in its heart of hearts knows that some accommodations with the electorate are inevitable.

That’s the centre of gravity of the Labour membership. This is a party that wants to know its politics still means something and aren’t going to be endlessly triangulate away by, as it sees them, careerist politicians. However, purists aside, the party also knows that politics is the art of the possible. So members are there to be courted. To be convinced. To have their would-be leaders calmly explain how Labour moves forward from the mess it’s in, while remaining true to its heritage and values.

All of which is to observe that Liz Kendall’s campaign is so utterly tin-eared and so wide of the mark, that it seems to be taking place in a parallel universe. Whereas Corbyn is sweet reason, Kendall’s camp seems intent on adopting the traditional tactic of the hard left: simplistic homilising at 100 decibels.

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