Archive for April 14th, 2009
14th April 2009
Is Labour a Lost Cause?
It’s difficult now to avoid the growing sense that the British Labour Party is on the cusp of one of its periodic three-term peregrinations to the political wilderness. If an all-consuming economic cataclysm, which, if Brown didn’t exactly create, he certainly didn’t anticipate, and a still lingering anger over Iraq wasn’t enough, then the latest glimpse into the dark heart of New-Labour’s smear machine, will almost certainly consign them to as long a spell in dismal Opposition as the Tories have just endured. What happened, the public is bound to ask, to Brown’s much-loved moral compass? It has presumably fallen down the back of Jacqui Smith’s sofa - hopefully, along with the remote control.
Labour’s problems are deeper than the leadership failings of the current class of 2009, however. When Labour last stared into the political abyss, at the tail end of the 70s, the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm, in his famously prophetic piece - The Forward March of Labour Halted? - charted the sociological roots of Labour’s impending difficulties, in particular the slow demise of the organised, male, industrial working class that had been the backbone of the movement.
New Labour’s electorally successful reponse to this can be summed up in just two words - Middle England. But crucically, Blair, in particular, realised something that Hobsbawm also stressed: that there was a ‘national’ dimension to the task of Labour’s political rehabilitation not just a socio-economic one (there was also a gender dimension too - but the choice of ‘Worcester woman’ as the epithet is also instructive). Labour had failed to be an ‘English’ party - not exactly in the same way as the Tories ceased to be Welsh or Scottish parties in the 1990s - Labour still after all held English seats. But they did not exist in large parts of England - were way behind in the English popular vote - and in some important sense did not chime with ‘English’ values nearly as well as the Tories did - remember John Major’s Betjemanesque extollation of the virtues of warm beer, cycling spinsters, the sound of leather on willow etc.
Under Blair’s leadership, the Mondeo-men of England suspended their disbelief and started to identify with a new political party called New Labour. This development was all the more remarkable as Tony Blair was actually Scottish - a fact he managed to conceal almost as well as Roy Jenkins hid the fact he was Welsh. In toto, just five of the sixteen Labour leaders in history have been both born in England and represented an English seat. Half of them in total have been born in Scotland. Though just one was born in Wales - four have represented Welsh seats.
After a brief interlude of success, under Gordon Brown Labour is once again limping to the finishing line with the huge ball and chain that is its historic credibility gap among English voters clunking along behind. Labour has been historically inept at dealing with issues of nationhood, not least because in a multi-national state in which Labour has uneven support, appeals to patriotism always beg the question as to which nation you owe your allegiance.
This is not a phenomenon confined to Britain. The Maltese Labour Party under Dom Mintoff rejected independence preferring to cling to the coat-tails of a United Kingdom that promptly rejected its application for integration. When independence came in 1964 the MLP stubbornly refused to celebrate it (I can imagine a few diehard Labourites having a ‘pwdu’ as we in Welsh say when our turn comes circa 2030) Then, when the European Community came along, with Malta uniquely placed to benefit from the new opportunities for export, Maltese Labour - like their British counterparts initially- decided to stay outside and chance their luck with what was left of the British Empire. They campaigned for a No vote again in the 2003 EU membership referendum, lost and promptly declared they were ignoring the result. The MLP missed the boat three times in succession - a uniquely unfortunate failing in an island people.
Like the Maltese with their three languages, New Labour was an attempt to square the circle between the competing political (and social and economic) demands of the nations of a not-so United Kingdom. But - because of the asymmetry of power - there is no English Parliament (democratic deficit number one) and yet much power remains undevolved at Westminster (democratic deficit number two) - they have ended up sowing resentment among the English and impatience among the Celts.
For Labour truly to succeed again in England it needs to become more ‘English’. But that would undermine the party in Scotland and Wales. They are now stuck on the horns of that dilemma. But there’s a dilemma here too for the Conservative and Unionist Party: in destroying the Labour Party they are destroying one of the last truly British political institutions left. In that sense, Labour’s political breakdown is the precursor to the break-up of Britain first mooted as a realistic prospect the last time a Labour Government found itself on the rocks.