- Re: Why did Labour lose? Charlie Kimber 4 Archived Message
Posted by Keith-264
on April 20, 2020, 1:45 pm, in reply to "Re: Why did Labour lose? Charlie Kimber 3"
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It is important to remember that 1997-2007 was the era of Tony Blair, with Gordon Brown taking over from 2007-10. The 2015 election was headed by Ed Miliband. The biggest fall is in the DE category where Labour support slumped from 59 percent in 1997 to 39 percent now. The decline from 1997-2010 is remarkably steady between elections—minus 4 percent, minus 7 percent and minus 8 percent. Only Corbyn’s first election in 2017 reversed the trend, seeing a 6 percentage point increase from 2015. The slump in DE support in 2019 was electorally crucial, but it is simply a return to the levels of 2010 and 2015. Again, the C2 level of support fell during the Blair and Brown years. This national picture was reflected locally. Between 2005 and 2015, Labour’s vote share fell by 14 percentage points in Bolsover, 12 in Sedgefield, 10 in Don Valley, nine in Bishop Auckland and eight in Rother Valley. As analyst Peter Kellner writes: In the north east and east midlands, the two regions where Labour’s support has fallen most since 2005, three-quarters of the 8.1 point fall had taken place by 2015 in the north east—and all of the 7.3 point drop in the east midlands, where Labour’s vote share was virtually the same in 2015 and 2019. Labour’s sharp but, in the event, temporary rise in support in 2017 meant that last week’s results generated some huge 2017-19 swings. They obscured Labour’s long-term decline in its heartlands.29 This underlines that Corbyn and his allies should have scrapped the whole Blair legacy. Instead, McDonnell did a chummy interview with Blair’s liar-in-chief Alistair Campbell in GQ magazine, in which he said he would support Campbell’s return to the party. New Labour laid the foundations for 2019. Its veneration of the rich, defence of private firms, lies over Iraq and much else revolted millions. As Aditya Chakrabortty wrote in an article entitled “This Labour Meltdown has been Building for Decades”: “Even as the working class were marginalised politically and destroyed economically, New Labour patronised them into apathy”.30 Working class people saw those who claimed to be their political representatives float off into an alien realm. This created an opening for the rotten politics of Johnson and Farage. In a review of an important book about class, the Marxist author Terry Eagleton wrote in 2017: The class system, then, has remained remarkably unchanged, and in some ways has become more entrenched. What has changed radically…is class representation at the level of national politics. What began to happen with New Labour’s shift to the right was that the working class no longer had anyone in this arena to champion their interests. It is this, not the dissolution of social class itself, that has altered the political landscape.31 Scotland: Not Brexit, but still a crisis for Labour The election in Scotland was very different to the one in England. Here it was not principally Brexit that skewered Labour but the legacy of the 2014 referendum. The SNP gained 13 seats, taking it to 48 of Scotland’s 59 MPs. Labour’s vote was down 8 percentage points—to 18.6 percent. The last time Labour secured less than 20 percent was 1910 and even then it won more than the single MP achieved in 2019. This collapse follows the electoral earthquake of 2015 general election where Labour collapsed from 41 seats to one MP. In 2017, under Corbyn there was a slight recovery in seats won, but on the basis of only a 10,000 increase in the Labour vote across the whole of Scotland. Labour’s decision to campaign with the Tories during the 2014 independence referendum remains toxic, cutting them off from a huge swathe of people, particularly the young. However, again, the roots of the problem go deeper—back to Blair’s time. “The SNP have been the dominant party in Scotland since 2007 and at Westminster since 2015—having won three Scottish Parliament elections and three Westminster elections in a row.”32 Historian Tom Devine has long argued that Labour’s decline in Scotland is a decades-long process: The transformation in the 1990s of old Labour into New Labour, which seemed to embrace a free market philosophy and failed to reverse Thatcherite reforms, triggered much disenchantment among the party’s supporters in Scotland. Surveys taken after the 1999 Holyrood election concluded that less than half the respondents thought that New Labour looked after Scottish interests. Similar evidence covering the period between 1997 and 2001 demonstrated declining support for the proposition that New Labour looked after class and trade union concerns but increasing agreement with the view that the party primarily looked after the concerns of business and the affluent in society.33 Although Scotland saw a very different election to the one in the rest of Britain Labour’s travails also featured an immediate issue (Scottish independence) and a common long-term one (Blairism). Going deeper into the defeat Brexit and Blairism, the lack of struggle and the concessions to the right alone do not capture what happened at the election. There are more fundamental factors. The most important of all is Labourism itself. Whether right-wing or left-wing, Labour governments believe in change within the existing parliamentary system and state structure. Yet, as we know from every previous British Labour government and the recent experience of reformist governments such as Syriza in Greece and the Socialist Party in France, the state and the global financial institutions will not meekly allow fundamental change. The state is geared towards running capitalism and helping big business. Crucially, that means facilitating the exploitation of workers that is at the heart of the system. A vast tangle of laws legitimise capitalists’ right to own property and make profits—while the police, the army and the secret service protect them. State bodies are filled with unelected officials who share broadly the same interests as the bankers who will try to break a left-wing government. While financial institutions blackmail Labour with investment strikes and market crashes, top civil servants, generals, cops and spies will sabotage the government from inside the state. In the 1970s sections of the bosses and the politicians were terrified by the scale of workers’ struggle in Britain. A leading Tory called Ian Gilmour, then the shadow defence secretary, wrote a book offering his perspective. “Majority rule is a device,” he argued. “Democracy is a means to an end not an end in itself. If it is leading to an end that is undesirable, then there is a theoretical case for ending it.” No such measures proved necessary. But the threat has not gone away. A “senior serving general” told the Sunday Times newspaper that if Corbyn became prime minister, there would be “the very real prospect” of “a mutiny”. Elements in the military would use “whatever means possible, fair or foul,” he said. Corbyn’s cothinkers insisted they knew all this. Hilary Wainwright said in 2018, “Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell understand the non-neutral nature of the state.” So the job was to build “the kind of counter-power that will be necessary in the face of the City, the power of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), the power of the state, the power of media and their allies within the Parliamentary Labour Party and sometimes within the unions”.34 If this was supposed to be the task, it certainly did not happen. Corbyn and McDonnell tried to woo the City and the CBI, not develop a counter-power to them. They compromised with the bosses’ allies in the Parliamentary Labour Party. This was absolutely in tune with a party for which parliament always disciplines extra-parliamentary activity. The retreats over Brexit and antisemitism, the lack of focus on struggle, the support for the British state rather than Scottish independence and the government of Blair can all be presented as individual episodes or mistakes. But, in truth, they are all symptoms of Labourism. In opposition, it means seeking unity with the Labour right to win an election. In government it means trying to placate those forces that will try to destroy it. Younger people who were attracted to Corbyn had never seen the election of a British Labour government with a left-wing manifesto. For many of them, this argument will have seemed remote, a matter to be dealt with later. Meanwhile, the former revolutionaries and older activists who unconditionally backed Corbyn went through a deliberate forgetting of what they know about capitalism, the state and reformism. But the issue has not gone away and Corbyn was defeated even before the test of office. The defeat of 2019 was both a result of particular and immediate political choices over Brexit and other issues but also a sharp reassertion of the limitations of reformism itself. In this sense it does indeed hold lessons for the movement around Bernie Sanders or those around Podemos in the Spanish state. Labourism imprisons activists within the iron cage of parliamentary forms. The contest that has been taking place to decide Labour’s next leader has been dominated by one great question—who can help us win an election? The central issue was not that of policy or raising the level of struggle, but who could do best next time around. The Labour right unashamedly adopt such an approach; the Labour left do it more carefully. The 2015 election loss for Labour led wholly unexpectedly to victory for probably the most left-wing leader the party has ever had. It tested the idea that if only Labour had a proper socialist in charge and a left manifesto then victory would follow—and then major changes in society. The 2017 result gave a further fillip to this idea. However, the 2019 defeat, and the demoralisation for many Labour supporters it has caused, will be used to drive Labour rightwards. The answer is not to hanker after a return to full Corbynism but to focus on the power of resistance by ordinary people outside parliament, in their workplaces and in the streets. [Notes won't copy] |