None of this is to say that Corbyn’s position is assured until the next election. The next chapter will deal with the considerable obstacles he faces. One might say that, even if he were to survive until the 2020 general election, and even if he were to win it, that is where his real problems would begin. However, those attempting to fight yesterday’s battles in the hope of yielding yesterday’s results call to mind Anna Freud’s famous saying that ‘in our dreams, we can have our eggs cooked exactly how we want them, but we can’t eat them’.
2
The Crisis of British Politics
Labour’s Mess
In the BBC series, The Thick of It, hapless opposition leader Nicola Murray tries to win credit from a sceptical electorate by agreeing with a government policy. To appear tough, she decides to agree with a particularly mean-spirited austerity policy, cancelling funding for ‘breakfast clubs’ for primary school children. ‘We are in concurrence with the government,’ she intones, ‘because we are in unity with the British people.’ Just as she announces her support, however, the government backtracks. Her spin doctor, Malcolm Tucker, is furious: ‘Nicola is about to adopt a policy that is so toxic that this stony-hearted government of fucking puppy killers is dropping it?’
Nothing else in popular culture captured so accurately the air of sheer pointless and self-defeating cravenness that has hung around Labour in recent years. Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls declaring, before a general election, that he would reverse none of the spending cuts that the government has introduced. Acting leader Harriet Harman, faced with a draconian welfare bill, whipping Labour MPs into the bold stance of abstaining. Unable to form a government, they couldn’t form an opposition either. Labour had rarely looked this pitiful. And it is this Labour, ideologically vacuous, politically timid, unimaginative, that Jeremy Corbyn set out to change. In the event, this very weakness is what enabled Corbyn to win.
Corbyn’s victory is evidence, then, not of the power of the Left but of the enervation of the Labour Party and of the traditional political centre. It would be a mistake for Corbyn’s supporters to be too impressed by their own sudden feeling of vitality. It is equally a mistake for analysts to take too seriously the reports, red-faced and spittle-lathered, on the strength of Corbynism in the Labour Party. The new left-wing Labour group, Momentum, has attracted considerable support within the party, and recently won the Labour youth elections. Yet, that was on a turnout of 3.5 per cent.1 The group, though talked up in the press the better to monster it, has as yet little clout in the real centres of power in the Labour Party. Constituency members are overwhelmingly supportive of Corbyn, but it would be too hasty to presume that they are all single-mindedly socialist.
On the same day that Corbyn won the Labour leadership, the old stalwart of the Labour Right Tom Watson won the deputy leadership. Diane Abbott was later defeated in the selection race for Labour’s London mayoral candidate by the uninspiring Sadiq Khan, while the elections to the Conference Arrangements Committee that year were lost by the Left.2 There are reasons why these candidates won apart from their politics. Watson is regarded as a decent politician who took on Murdoch and the child abuse scandals. Sadiq Khan is seen as having a certain personal charisma that Abbott lacks. But that is partly the point. Corbyn’s supporters incline to the radical left, but they are by no means as experienced and programmatic in this as, say, the veterans of Eighties Leftism.
How, then, could a current so marginal within the Labour Party, so painfully at a loss for so many years, suddenly find itself swept to the leadership by a fusion of young, radicalised members and supporters with the existing networks of the hard Left? Some of the answers to this question are contingent, and have to do with organisational changes to the Labour Party and tactical mis-steps on the part of its managing elites. Some have to do with the austerity politics which, until Corbyn’s election, enjoyed bipartisan support in the House of Commons. However, the most important factor is also the most intractable – a secular crisis of the labour movement and its grass roots. As Ed Miliband put it in an important piece for the Fabian Society shortly after winning the leadership election: ‘Five million votes were lost by Labour between 1997 and 2010, but four out of the five million didn’t go to the Conservatives,’ he wrote. ‘One-third went to the Liberal Democrats, and most of the rest simply stopped voting. It wasn’t, in the main, the most affluent, professional voters that deserted Labour either,’ he continued. ‘You really don’t need to be a Bennite to believe that this represents a crisis of working-class representation for Labour – and our electability.’3
In this analysis, Miliband was undoubtedly influenced by the arguments of his close advisor Jon Trickett from Labour’s soft Left.4 However, Miliband was not able to reverse the losses. Labour’s vote had crashed to its lowest level since 1918 in the 2010 election, and barely shifted in 2015. Labour’s internal focus-group reports suggest that it may never win these voters back, as they have shifted to the right and are ‘a hair’s breadth from becoming Conservatives’.5 It is an open question how representative such focus groups can be, and neither the British Election Study nor the Beckett Report into the party’s defeat found much evidence for the idea that Labour wasn’t right-wing enough for the voters.6 However, where most analyses converge, it was on the idea that Labour lost first and foremost on the economy. The ‘credit crunch’ had destroyed its reputation in much the same way as ‘Black Wednesday’ had destroyed the reputation of the Conservatives. As it approached the election, Labour seemed able neither to defend its record nor to admit fault.
The decline was also felt in terms of party membership, which had fallen from over 400,000 in 1997 to 156,000 by the end of 2009. The fall was partially reversed in the first months of Miliband’s leadership, rising to 194,000 by December 2010, but only during the Corbyn surge did it increase to anything like previous levels.7 The official labour movement has been in a similar freefall, though over a much longer period, with trade union density falling from over 50 per cent in 1979 to just over a quarter in 2012. The fall has been pronounced in the public sector in recent years as austerity measures and recession have eroded employment, but the worst coverage continues to be in the private sector, where over 85 per cent of workplaces have never seen a union rep – and it is part of a global decline, registered first in the United States but apparent in all the core industrial economies.8 In a weakened condition, unions had put up little resistance to austerity measures, barring a brief flurry of strike action against pension reforms in 2011, after which the rate of strike action fell to the lowest levels on record.9 The labour movement, having become more top-down, more politically timid and more constrained by hostile legislation, has been poorly placed to put up much of a fight – in a way, supporting Corbyn’s candidacy, as the big unions did, was by far the most radical thing they have yet done to address their existential decline.
As its institutions have become more top-heavy, and its social base weakened, the Labour Party has become more right-wing, more managerial and more dominated by middle-class professionals, hostile to the traditional aims of the Left. And just as it adjusted to the post-Thatcher consensus, so in recent years it embraced the austerian agenda of its opponents, offering only to temper its excesses – which, as Miliband discovered, was not enough to attract progressive voters to the polling booths. Instead, Labour ran the risk of what party activist James Doran called ‘Pasokification’, following in the doomed footsteps of its centre-Left sister party in Greece as it administered austerity policies.10
Ironically, this very weakness, which left the Labour Party open to Corbyn’s surge, is now one of the most significant impediments to his success. And Corbyn’s success as yet has shown no tendency to reverse Labour’s difficulties: it may even compound them in the short-term. It is true that throughout his campaign, hundreds of thousands of people signed up as members or registered supporters of the Labour Party. In the days following his success, further tens of thousands joined Labour. The eviden
ce now is that these are sustained increases, and that the majority of the new members remain supportive of Corbyn’s attempt to rebuild Labour from the Left. Yet the fragility of this project is visible in the abysmal poll ratings for Labour, which are not even remotely strong enough among constituencies that it needs to be winning over, particularly young people and ethnic minorities.11 Meanwhile, the constant barrage of attacks on the Labour leader from a coterie of his own MPs, echoed and amplified by a rabid media, ensures that whatever Corbyn attempts to achieve is repeatedly undermined by a series of confected crises.
Democratic Decline
Labour is in trouble, then, but its problems are inseparable from a wider democratic deadlock. In 2000, just as the British electoral system was about to experience its lowest participation rate in history, the political scientist Colin Crouch coined the term ‘post-democracy’.12 From the standpoint of post–Cold War triumphalism, such an emphasis must perforce seem misplaced and unnecessarily gloomy. At what time in history has democracy ever been more globally institutionalised? In this strict and narrow constitutional sense, within the framework of what could be called capitalist democracy, the total number of people who could participate in elections to change their governments was probably greater at the turn of the millennium than it had ever been. So what was there to be gloomy about? The end of history had turned out alright, had it not?
Clearly, there is a great deal more to democracy than the formal existence of party-political competition and representative structures. Mass democracy has always depended upon popular engagement, and that engagement is undergoing a long decline. Parties and representative chambers are only as democratically robust as the power that is invested in them. If the locus of power shifts elsewhere, democratic capacity is lost. Further, for democratic institutions to be viable, they require a healthy degree of participation. Precisely what level of participation counts as healthy is a value judgement, but where there is a significant decline in voting turnout and party membership, there is a prima facie reason to begin asking questions. And this is exactly what we find. As Peter Mair puts it,
Party democracy, which would normally offer a point of connection and site of engagement for citizens and their political leaders, is being enfeebled, with the result that elections and the electoral process become little more than ‘dignified’ parts of the modern democratic constitution. That is, elections have less and less practical effect, because the working, or ‘efficient’ part of the constitution is steadily being relocated elsewhere.13
In the period between 1950 and 1990, there was a steady state of trendless fluctuation in election turnouts across the industrial democracies. After 1990, the average turnout began to fall significantly, from 81.7 per cent in the previous period, to 77.6 per cent in the 1990s, and 75.8 per cent in the 2000s. The trend was most advanced in the UK, where the turnout in the 2001 general election was ‘the lowest level of turnout since the advent of mass democracy’. Most of the record lows in turnout for other nations were recorded in these two decades.14
In the British general election of 2010, average turnout was 65.1 per cent, but the turnout varied across constituencies according to the social classes concentrated in those areas, with a range between 44 per cent and 77 per cent. Generally speaking, the more working-class a constituency, the higher its rate of unemployment, the lower its turnout.15 Unsurprisingly given these trends, Labour has been the biggest loser from declining turnout. Party membership has also slumped across European democracies. In the 1960s, party membership as a proportion of the total population averaged 14 per cent. In the 1990s, the proportion averaged 5 per cent.16
But there is another feature of modern democracies that is relevant here, and that is the heightened electoral volatility of those who do still vote. If, as Mair argues, elections no longer count as much as they did, then the likelihood of strong party identifications declines, and choices become more likely to be based on factors other than tribal filiation. And, indeed, this is what one finds. Across European democracies, without exception, there has been a marked decline in strong party identification between the 1960s and the 1990s.17
What explains these trends? One way to approach this is to ask why it is that people are decreasingly inclined to participate in the system. Traditionally, abstention is viewed as a matter of ‘apathy’. People decline to vote or join political parties, not from dissatisfaction, but from a sense of sufficient security and contentment in their consumer lifestyle that they have no motivation to vote. This was, in fact, the response of New Labour to a series of low electoral turnouts in 1998 – people stayed at home from contentment rather than disaffection. How well did this perspective explain the record low turnout in 2001? In part, the patterns of voting decline could be explained by the peculiarities of the electoral system. As Pippa Norris pointed out,
Voting tumbled most sharply in safe Labour seats – places like Liverpool Wavertree, Stockport, Bootle – while falling far less in marginal Conservative seats such as Norfolk North and Hexham, where parties had greater motivation to mobilize support and voters had more incentive to feel that casting a ballot could make a difference to the outcome.18
But the broader picture was one of demoralisation and at most ‘lukewarm support’ for the government. One study found that for the first time the majority, some 62 per cent, of non-voters were deliberate abstainers – their non-vote counted as a rejection of the choice on offer. The same patterns are found repeatedly in subsequent elections with, one study suggests, all of non-voting in the 2005 general election accounted for by deliberate abstention.19 The turnout never recovered to previous levels, and was never higher than 65 per cent. In both 2001 and 2005, non-voters constituted a larger share of the electorate than the vote for the winning party. A local study of non-voters by the University of York found that 80 per cent of those who didn’t vote in 2005 cited a lack of difference between the major parties. As one respondent put it: ‘Parties are all brands nowadays. Brands of the same product.’20 In 2015, BBC News interviewed likely non-voters and found a pervasive sense of broken trust and cynicism: ‘they’re all the same’, and ‘it won’t make any difference’, just two of the more typical responses.21
The biggest non-voters are typically those who are most likely to vote Labour: younger voters, poorer voters, and those from ethnic minorities. In the 2010 general election, only half of men aged 18–24 voted, while 39 per cent of women from the same age range voted. Younger black and Asian voters in particular began to peel away from Labour in the 2005 general election, an election overshadowed by the war in Iraq. And it is likely that while many of those who did vote abandoned Labour for other parties such as the Liberal Democrats or, in a few localities, Respect, perhaps less than half of those voters actually turned out. By 2015, only 33 per cent of black and Asian voters considered themselves certain to vote, compared to 52 per cent of white voters.22
The evidence is overwhelming. There is a political withdrawal across the board, it is most pronounced among those who were already least enfranchised, and the biggest resultant losses in the UK have been sustained by the Labour Party. What accounts for this? If non-voters see themselves as being in protest against a system that seems unintelligible, distant and impervious to their concerns, what is the real basis for their alienation? To ask this is to ask something about what electoral participation is for. In the nineteenth century struggles over democracy, the concern of those who sought to prevent it was that it would lead to the erosion of the principle of private property. The reason that elites ultimately opted to extend the franchise to workers, however, was that they came to regard it as the easiest way of managing social disturbances. By committing, through a long and deliberately protracted process, to redistribute a proportion of wealth and power, they might avoid challenges to that power by other means. As Earl Grey, proposing the reforms, suggested: ‘I am reforming to preserve, not to overthrow.’23
One way of characterising this state of affairs is to
say that parliamentary democracy offers the possibility of some form of class compromise which ameliorates the conditions of those without property, while protecting the institution. In modern parlance, this is given a banal gloss in the form of Clinton’s slogan on the key to electoral success: ‘it’s the economy, stupid’. Where there appears to be stable growth and employment, governments are popular, and political volatility is minimised. But this is to treat the economy as merely a technical factor in governing. In this view, the goal of efficient government would be to make investors as happy as possible, and watch the wealth and contentment pile up. But the economy is inherently political. It works, insofar as it does, through a tacit compromise between owners and wage-earners. Despite the hallelujahs and hosannahs for ‘wealth creators’ that politicians of centre-Right and centre-Left are inclined to engage in, businesses only bother to generate prosperity if the circumstances are acceptably profitable to them.24 Employees, meanwhile, have to at least implicitly agree to the conditions that are necessary for profit-making. Stable governments are those which are able to secure a compromise between classes on the conditions of future growth.
In post-war Britain, it fell to a Labour government to begin the work of rebuilding a stable profit regime in which the state mediated between politically organised expressions of business and wage-earners. This class truce was accepted by the Conservative Party, which did little to undo it once in office. This was the high point of social democracy and, for approximately a quarter of a century, the peace held. Profits rose, but wages also rose in line with productivity, while a welfare state made up for the failures of the market with a social wage. For the duration of this period, electoral participation and party identifications remained strong, with turnout peaking in 1950 at 83.9 per cent, even if party membership showed a slight tendency to fall.
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