By the time Thatcher’s reign was finally surrendering to its inner termites, the ‘Poll Tax’ debacle merely underlining the extent to which her insurgent rightism had become counterproductive for both the business class and her party, Labour’s timidity was preventing it from pressing home any advantage handed to it. Thatcher had sought to relieve middle-class taxpayers of as much of the burden of paying for services as possible with the policy of rate-capping. When that initiative reached its limits, the government introduced a Community Charge, a regressive tax that took no account of ability to pay. Here was an issue which suddenly handed Labour majorities, rather than just pluralities, in opinion polls. The voters who had deserted the party to support the SDP–Liberal alliance now appeared ready to return in droves, alongside a swathe of disaffected Conservatives. Labour seemingly had only to remain firm in opposition to the tax in order to preserve the advantage. The problem they faced, however, was that the areas where opposition to the tax was most concentrated were working-class boroughs run by Labour councils. There, the leadership demanded that councils take an unyielding line against non-payment. Just as Neil Kinnock had advocated a ‘dented shield’ strategy for Labour councils struggling to fund local services in the face of rate-capping, urging that local authorities set strictly legal budgets within the parameters set by the government, so Labour now sought to burnish its constitutionalist credentials by prosecuting non-payers. The Tribune, a magazine of the party’s soft Left, argued that those Labour members who supported the non-payment campaign represented the ‘biggest threat’ to Labour’s electoral advantage.
Indeed, Labour’s commanding poll lead was gradually frittered away, but not because of non-payment. Rather, two developments served to consolidate the Tories’ position and allowed alarmed Liberals to return to their party fold. First, John Major replaced Margaret Thatcher as leader, and began to orchestrate a cautious row back from the worst aspects of the Community Charge, while also charting a less confrontational course for the government. While Kinnock attempted to represent Thatcherism-with-a-human-face, he was easily outbid in that necrophilic auction by Major. Second, as in 1982, Britain went to war in Iraq and the response in parliament, the media and much of public opinion was one of jingoistic pride. The majority of Labour MPs, the parliamentary party having rarely passed up on the chance to display its patriotism, were adamantly in favour of the UK’s participation in Desert Storm. Only a few opposed with any vim, and the net result was that Major accumulated the political capital of victory in Baghdad without being even slightly inconvenienced by his opposite number.
Labour went into the 1992 election having purged themselves of left-wing policies, centralised power in the hands of the leadership in order to marginalise constituency activists, and embraced modern methods of communication. With Peter Mandelson and Philip Gould’s Shadow Communications Agency setting the tone, they sought to spell out a moderate Labour message, highlighting the need for investment in public services, above all health. As recession ate away at the Tories’ economic advantage, and the Community Charge continued to provoke resistance, polls tended to put Labour ahead. Everything was surely in place: Kinnock and his allies had cleaned up the party image, expelled the militants, put manners on the Left, dismantled the last trace of ‘municipal socialism’, displayed loyalty in war and constitutional integrity in peace, and now stood ready to welcome back prodigal voters. The Conservatives once again returned to government, with their vote barely changed at 42 per cent. Nothing Kinnock had done was adequate to make Labour palatable to southern middle classes, nor to win back the chunks of their old electoral coalition who had defected to the Liberal/SDP alliance after 1981. The party saw only a miserly, 3.6 per cent increase in their vote share. This, for a party which had done everything, gone to all lengths, to expunge any trace of radicalism and accept the terms of its opponents, was a defining trauma. The country, most members seem to have concluded, was just too right-wing for even the most timid reform agenda. It was not clear whether Labour would ever govern again. Wallowing in a sump of defeat, the party was easy prey for the coming Blairite takeover.
The Unavoidable Dilemmas of Social Democracy
For most of the twentieth century, Labour was the unrivalled mass party of the British working class. Although it never achieved more than two thirds of the working-class vote, no other party of the Left came close to challenging its dominance. Further, barring the Communist Party, which organised a small minority of militants, Labour was the party where most socialists were organised. As such, if the labour movement and their socialist allies largely failed to achieve their far-reaching objectives, the question must be asked as to how Labour has organised and moulded them, and what opportunities it has given members to challenge the status quo.
Without exception, Labour has cleaved to its constitutionalist, electoral roots. It has disowned the radicalism of its members and union affiliates more often than it has allowed them expression. While it has depended on militant members to build and maintain its social movement base, it has excluded them from effective decision-making as far as possible, and in office it has usually taken the lead from civil servants and business. Insofar as it was a coalition between organised labour, socialists and liberals, it has been the union moderates, Fabians and professional liberals who have usually been dominant. It is too simple to characterise Labour as ‘the working-class wing of Liberalism’, but the liberal legacy has usually been dominant.
Labour’s climax, the high point of post-war reform, was achieved in a quite exceptional set of circumstances that were already breaking down by the time the Wilson era was afoot. The availability of business for a class consensus depended both on its need for extensive government intervention to keep capitalism alive and its ability, in the era of national capitalisms, to accept the state as an interlocutor with organised labour. The ability of social democratic governments to deliver reforms in the interests of workers, moreover, depended on an exceptional period of capitalist growth that will probably not be seen again, short of an economic disaster or war that destroys enough capital to create a space for rapid expansion. As soon as that growth no longer obtained, and once the scale of production was sufficiently institutionalised to expose large corporations to competitive pressures that previously had been experienced only by small business, the post-war compromise was doomed.
If it was to survive as a reforming party, Labour needed to find a way to channel popular discontent with the old order – of which it had become the caretaker – into a project to assail the concentrated and increasingly organised power of business. It needed to outflank a popular media that was increasingly dominated by Thatcherism. And it needed to demonstrate that it could offer a new way of doing politics that shrugged off the domesticating constraints of statecraft. Moreover, with the loss of the colonial empire, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalisms and the evident shortcomings in parliamentary democracy, the British state was in need of an overhaul which Labour – being wedded to ‘Britishness’, and the artificial monopoly on left-of-centre political expression that first-past-the-post gave it – was rarely inclined to consider. The Left, for very brief moments, sometimes had the initiative, but never the adequate power, to impose its own solutions. It could never demonstrate sufficient support within the party, let alone in national electoral terms, to transform Labour into a more radical vehicle. And given that the peak of its strategic perspective was the election of Labour governments, it was necessarily trapped by its own logic – a radical-Left programme rarely has enough support, given normal British psephological realities, to win office. Of course, conditions in Britain today are far from normal. However, even if the radical Left was admitted to government, the evidence is that its real problems would begin at that point. For most of the time, the pressure on Labour has been to move in the opposite direction, not just away from socialism, but increasingly away from the sorts of politics that would once have been mainstream – and that pressure has come f
rom within as much as from without.
The problems that Jeremy Corbyn’s team inherits are not just the problems of New Labour’s party managers and whips, not just the problems of an enervated ‘modernising’ project, and not just the problems of a party leadership damaged by the credit crunch. Labour embodies in its make-up and in its traditions a way of doing politics that for the Left has largely been an experience of failure. For Corbyn to take this institution and transform it into a means to make radical inroads on Britain’s power systems would require resources, organisation and opportunities that currently don’t present themselves. This is not to claim that Corbyn can achieve nothing with this experience, or that his supporters will gain nothing from it. But they are best placed to do so if they are sober about the tremendous obstacles facing them.
4
New Labour and Corbyn’s
Route to Power
Division among radicals almost 100 years ago resulted in a twentieth century dominated by Conservatives. I want the twenty-first century to be the century of the radicals.
– Tony Blair, almost a century after
the foundation of the Labour Party1
He’s sold out before he’s even got there … Tax, health, education, unions, full employment, race, immigration … It won’t matter if we win, the bankers and stockbrokers have got us already, by the fucking balls, laughing their heads off.
– Neil Kinnock on Tony Blair2
It is, of course, too easy to pin all the blame on the Blairites for the enfeebled Labour Party that Jeremy Corbyn inherited in 2015. But it’s nonetheless striking how reluctant they are to take any responsibility, or reflect on the fact that they more than anyone else prepared the ground for Corbyn’s victory. Asked why she had lost to Corbyn, the Blairite candidate Liz Kendall admitted that her campaign lacked inspiration, suggesting that she had been the ‘eat your greens candidate’.3
The self-serving nature of such a view is obvious: it says nothing about the record of her political tendency, both in and out of office, and represents the leadership election as a vague battle between sensible moderation and vivid exhortation. But if a relatively unknown candidate from the hard Left can be so rapidly propelled from nowhere to the top, at a minimum this demands scrutiny of the formerly dominant faction and what they left behind.
What sort of beast was New Labour? Led by Tony Blair, effectively an SDP viper in the Labour breast, it seemed neither entirely new, nor entirely Labour. Yet, the speed and facility with which Blair and his allies took over the party machinery during a few months in 1994, gutted its constitution, banished even a nominal commitment to socialism (the ‘marketisation’ of Clause Four), at least suggests that this tendency had been incubated within the party for some time. The communitarian moralism abetted by the staccato stock of Blairite conjugations (‘rights and responsibilities’, ‘firm but fair’, ‘fairness not favours’ etc.), was not entirely novel. Nor were the ‘ethical’ pieties, the liberal cynosures or the elevation of ‘nation’ above ‘class’. The Labour Left was outmanoeuvred on every front, resigning itself to the miserable hope that government would at least allow a mitigation of the worst of Toryism, yet it seemed at all points to inhabit roughly the same party as before.
Few left-wingers expected what was to come; that even those policy nostrums with which New Labour defined itself in opposition – for example, opposition to Private Finance Initiatives, resistance to Michael Howard’s anti-immigrant legislation, or reversing the sell-off of Air Traffic Control – would be ditched once government was secured. Far less could they anticipate the vindictive attacks on welfare, targeting single mothers and the disabled, or the revival of that old familiar tincture of moral imperialism in alliance with a right-wing US administration. But there was little sign of organised rebellion against these policies within the party. Did that signify that Labour as it had once existed no longer did, or that the party had just returned to some very old, recognisable Labour roots?
There was at least one thing that could be said for the claim of novelty on Blair’s part. If Labour’s relationship to the working class had always been complicated, New Labour – like the Oedipal child – sought to deny its own vulgar parentage, and disown as far as possible the movement which gave birth to it. Blair often gave the impression that he thought the very formation of Labour as a party separate from Liberalism had been a mistake. He seemed to want to break Labour’s founding relationship with organised labour, and to create a party much like the Democratic Party in the United States to whom the unions could plead for favours like any other client. In that sense, New Labour could be seen simply as the triumph of an old, predominantly middle-class liberal current, previously led by Roy Jenkins. Yet, Blair did not succeed in breaking the union link, and the unions did not act against him. Whatever was new about New Labour, it remained in some vital respects a very traditional social democratic party.
And what should not be missed is that, however much New Labour now stands condemned in the eyes of most Labour members and voters, it once conveyed power and purpose, and intellectual conviction, something that was extremely seductive for the traumatised survivors of four successive Tory election victories. Tens of thousands of members, and many more voters, appear to have been genuinely enthused by New Labour – easy to forget, in an era when Blairite MPs look and sound like dull building society managers.
New Labour in Theory and Practice
New Labour strategists and intellectuals are sometimes given to borrowing the language and concepts of the Sardinian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Among the key ideas they took from Gramsci was the concept of ‘hegemony’, which is a form of power that goes beyond force and violence. A hegemonic group doesn’t just dominate, it sets a moral agenda, it is ideologically persuasive, and it draws others toward it by taking their interests into account. In Gramsci’s terms, this was intended to be an explanation for how industrial workers could win leadership in a broad class alliance with peasants and others. But for New Labour intellectuals, it came to refer to a narrow party-political objective, of shaping an electoral agenda and winning a parliamentary majority. The justifications for New Labour as a successful ‘hegemonic’ project4 coming from the likes of former health secretary John Reid and former Blair speech-writer Peter Hyman are not, in this sense, a one-off. The intellectual origins of New Labour can be traced, in part, to an assortment of soft-Left intellectuals, many of them either residing in the Communist Party or in its orbit, and usually writing for the journal Marxism Today.5
These ranged from heavyweights such as cultural theorist Stuart Hall and historian Eric Hobsbawm, to figures such as management guru Charles Leadbeater and policy adviser Geoff Mulgan. Espousing a version of Gramscian Marxism, they tended to argue that the foundations of the old Left – which they derided as economistic, class-reductionist, expecting militant revival at every turn – had been eroded in the post-war world and were now being blown away by global capitalism. Even at the peak of socialist consciousness, they argued, the British working class had never been as unanimously left-wing as its continental equivalents. And now with the rise of consumerist individualism, the decline of trade union organisation and the decay of the old social democratic order, the radical Right was expanding the fill the spaces that neither socialism nor social democracy seemed able to. Thatcherism could tap into certain popular pleasures in the market, while mobilising popular discontent with the social democratic state.
In all, they noted, a great shift in capitalist civilisation had taken place. Economies were now global rather than national, the mass media was increasingly tending toward twenty-four-hour coverage, the working class was fragmenting and identities were increasingly plural. These changes, they collectively labelled ‘New Times’.6 And in these ‘New Times’, a Left that stuck to the old remedies could not win ‘hegemony’ in the working class, let alone command across a broad class alliance for socialism. It was on this basis that they led a vitriolic charge against the hard Left, se
eking their exclusion in a realignment of forces for a modernised Left.7
Though much of what the Marxism Today intellectuals said was luminous and prescient, above all when it came with Hall’s suave, seductive and assured voice, at least a similar quotient was charlatanry, bullshit and self-fulfilling prophesy. The critique of the Left’s cultural obliviousness, the theorisation of a new capitalism and the role of consumption and new forms of individualism in it, segued often into a kind of cheerleading for this new state of affairs and the bold energies it seemed to unleash. If Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques could recognise the danger of a Labour Government embracing a ‘brand of New Times’ that was just a ‘slightly cleaned up’ version of the radical Right, this was in part because their own intellectual project was a little too entranced by Thatcherite dynamism, and a great deal too scornful of Thatcher’s most belligerent opponents. And although these same intellectuals would later reject New Labour as a form of warmed-over Thatcherism, it is well to remember that they had initially welcomed Blair and his reforming zeal.8
What became the intellectual foundation of New Labour, then, was in some respects a dilute rip-off of the most vacuous elements of ‘New Times’ thinking – above all the celebration of designer global capitalism. And indeed, some of the leading figures from that intellectual milieu, such as Mulgan and Leadbeater, were integrated into the New Labour policymaking elite. Another crucial phase of New Labour thinking was pivoted on the ideas associated with the sociologist Anthony Giddens and his prospectus for a ‘Third Way’, ‘beyond left and right’. For Giddens, the centre-Left had to abandon ideas of redistribution, and the traditional uses of welfare. It had to abandon equality for meritocracy, wherein the role of the state would be to attack the forms of exclusion that prevented people from participating fully in meritocratic competition. It had to embrace consumption as a key means by which people organised their identities. It had to accept globalisation as a necessary process, while seeking to manage the risks. Perhaps Giddens’s most distinctive contribution was to argue that the relationship between the welfare state and the class structure had fundamentally changed. ‘Welfare dependency’, that reactionary old cliché, was dusted down in Giddens’s account and given a centre-Left gloss. Instead of welfare being a safety net to prevent poverty in the event of market failure, it had increasingly become an impediment to people getting out of poverty, and a means of social exclusion. Welfare thus had to be reformed in order to lever people out of this dependency and into paid work. One of the key ideas embraced by Tony Blair in an effort to stress the novelty of New Labour, therefore, was that of ‘workfare’ – an idea that came with a distinctive note of moralism, as the emphasis shifted from welfare as a citizenship right, to welfare as a privilege gained in exchange for proving certain moral bona fides such as a willingness to work.
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