by Jonathan Rutherford

This is Labour’s fourth defeat. It has not won an election since 2005 and by the next election it will have been fourteen years out of power. The right of the party blame Corbyn. The left blame Brexit and the media. The party avoids the scale of defeat by immersing itself in speculation about who the new leader will be. Someone cautions that we must listen to the voters. Each defeat the party follows the same predictable path: blame, new leader, listen. But Labour has had ten years in opposition to listen to the voters. Each electoral defeat leads to the same chronic failure to confront the existential crisis of the Party and its steady decline toward political oblivion.

In the wake of a dysfunctional, widely disliked Conservative government and a decade of austerity Labour should have walked into a majority government. Instead it has been politically destroyed. The image of middle-class Trotskyists shouting abuse at Jewish protesters campaigning against anti-semitism is an abiding image. And then there are the twitter storms of hate silencing critics and transgressors, the booing and jeering at journalists under the indulgent eye of the leader. However hurtful it is to dedicated party members who worked so hard in the campaign, a small minority made Labour look like a sectarian bubble of vindictive hatred and self-righteousness.

Both parties offered bribes to the electorate. Neither had a semblance of technical policy development. Labour’s manifesto of state socialism plus free things paid for by the rich lacked any sense of building a country working, sharing and sacrificing together. The huge volume of legislation it promised in five years and the very large funds to be raised from selective taxation defied credibility. Voters just didn’t believe it. Its proposals did not signal ambition so much as the absence of leadership and a failure to develop a political strategy and prioritise.

The working class Leave voters who stopped Corbynism in its tracks have only loaned their vote to the Tories. Labour lost the chance to seize the political zeitgeist when it elected Corbyn as leader, but the Tories do not yet own it. Boris Johnson’s ambition is to reshape the political landscape and achieve a post-neoliberal decade of Conservative government. If Labour is to recover as a national political force and contest Conservative hegemony it will have to change in fundamental ways. This outline of an analysis offers a first attempt to defines the issues and an invitation to start a party wide debate.

Interregnum

When Labour hit its existential crisis after its 2010 defeat its reaction was not to confront its loss of political purpose. Instead it concentrated on better retail policy offers. Crisis was turned into technical policy solutions. The Labour party had become an organisation powerfully invested in its unwillingness and incapacity to change. It was gripped by a mood of torpor which Jon Cruddas, then head of Labour’s 2012–14 Policy Review, described as ‘the dead hand’ blocking reform.

Resistant to new thinking and political renewal, Labour drifted into a second defeat in 2015. And then came the election of Jeremy Corbyn as party leader, then the vote to leave the EU, and then the presidency of Donald Trump. Each event had been inconceivable to the political class. Disorientated and intellectually bereft the Parliamentary Labour Party lacked the wherewithal to respond to the populist moment.

Corbyn’s leadership and the new mass membership ended Labour’s doldrums. In place of better policies the answer to the question of Labour’s purpose would be found in campaigning and activism. But energy and enthusiasm alone do not provide solutions to an existential crisis.

The Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci describes all this in his aphorism: ‘The old is dying and the new cannot yet be born’. In this interregnum the values and authority of the ruling elites lose the support of the people, and large numbers of voters lose their traditional political loyalties. The political forces defending the status quo struggle to overcome what are incurable structural contradictions. The forces seeking to replace them are not developed enough, nor organised enough, to succeed in taking a leading role. Neither have the consent of the people, and so neither is able to determine the political shape of the new period.

The Conservatives backed Brexit and now have the opportunity to break free of the interregnum and its political consensus. They have the consent to try and shape the new post-neoliberal period. During the 2016 referendum, the ex-industrial working class in England made common cause with the provincial middle class to take the country out of the EU. The Conservatives won the 2019 General Election with the same class coalition. If the Conservative Party can cement and lead this coalition it will transform the political landscape of the country and determine the next few decades. It took Margaret Thatcher several years in government, the Falkland War and some luck, to achieve this kind of hegemony.

Before the 2019 election, Labour’s coalition was split between two antagonistic classes — the liberal middle class and the ex-industrial working class that have been at war with each other over Brexit, over regional inequalities, and over the politics of culture and identity. In order to build a new coalition Labour’s new leadership will need to develop an analysis and a politics of class, its geographical distribution and its representation in our democracy.

The liberal middle class

The cultural revolution and university expansion of the 1960s forged a new expanding professional middle class. Unlike the traditional middle class whose allegiance was to local place and nation, it embraced cosmopolitanism and a supranational order. It produced a progressive intelligentsia that was socially liberal, individualistic and, on the whole anti-patrician.

The power of this liberal middle class was concentrated in the large cities, particularly London, and grew out of its control of culture, media, communications and learning. It was the arbiter of values and aesthetic taste in the liberal consensus that opened up national economies to global market forces. In social life its role was often in managing and supervising the lives of working class and low income people.

Today its power and status is threatened. Career prospects are declining and precarious work is replacing traditional middle class jobs. Its young are locked out of the housing market and no longer enjoy the welfare state and free higher education of their parents and grandparents. The growth of populist leftism and green politics is a reaction not only to their diminished economic opportunities and so chance of a better future, but to the loss of the ideal of progress and with it a sense of meaning in life.

The liberal middle class is both victim of global capitalism and enforcer of its cultural and social status hierarchies. Increasingly economically insecure it is caught between the plutocracy of the one per cent and the populist masses. Brexit ignited the slow burning fuse of its disillusion, and its politics increasingly brooks no opposition.

The first significant political challenge to its cultural hegemony has come from the ex-industrial working class it has politically dispossessed through its growing dominance in Labour.

The ex-industrial working class

The ex-industrial working class is a class whose recent historical experience of the changing forms of capitalist production in Britain’s old industrial heartlands has been sharp and severe. In the transition to a new kind of economy the way of life sustained by the old economy collapses. Insecure, low paid, often demeaning work and the stagnation of wages leads to widespread economic insecurity. The decimation of unions in the private sector, the empty churches and chapels, the loss of a shared national identity and of traditions of solidarity and mutual self-help fragmented traditional industrial working class cultures.

In the worst affected places, life carries on but the symbols and customs that once gave it meaning are gone. Norms of regular work and marriage which once provided stability and a pathway into adulthood are destroyed. Families and their relationships come apart. Feelings of isolation and exclusion become endemic. There is a dramatic rise in levels of chronic pain and illness such as diabetes, depression and anxiety.

These are symptoms of the decades long, social disintegration of the industrial working class. Children are a particularly sensitive indicator of social conditions. NHS Digital, part of the Government Statistical Service, reports up to 1 in 7 children in the poorest fifth of families display symptoms of mental illness compared to 1 in 20 in the richest homes. Those most at risk are white British children living in low income households.

Globalisation and economic change has not only restructured class. It has divided the economy between the globally integrated cities characterised by extremes of wealth and poverty, and the rest of the country. As geographer Philip McCann puts it, ‘on many levels the UK economy is internally decoupling, dislocating and disconnecting.’ Regions outside London and the South East are experiencing forms of economic underdevelopment and have productivity levels similar to levels in Central and Eastern Europe. London has pulled away from the rest of the country. New geographic and educational fault-lines are superimposing themselves on the old cleavage of class, reconfiguring the cross-class coalitions that once underpinned both the Labour and Conservative parties.

Oligopoly

The neglect of regional economies and the dominance of London have been accompanied by the decay of British democracy into a political oligopoly. During the neoliberal settlement of the last decades a trans-partisan elite has monopolised political power. The liberal right controls the economy, the liberal left culture. Both Conservative and Labour have become dominated by sectional class interests. For Labour it is the socially liberal progressive middle class concentrated in London. For the Conservatives it is an economically liberal rentier class faction.

Both parties have been tied to a liberal contractual view of society. Instead of mutual loyalties binding human beings into families, groups and nations, Labour sees the individual and the state and the Conservatives see the individual and the market. They have very little to say about the families and social relationships we are born into, nor about cultural and religious inheritances. Both overlook the most basic bonds that hold individuals together in a society.

The French economist Thomas Piketty offers an explanation for this decay of democracy into oligopoly. He analyses election data from France, the US and Britain to argue that each country has evolved from a class based party system into what he calls a ‘multiple elite’ party system. It is monopolised by higher educated voters who support the left and high income voters who support the right.

During the 1950s and 60s the more educated electorate systematically voted more for the right. By the end of the first decade of the new century there had been a complete reversal. The more educated electorate systematically now vote more for the left. This reversal has taken place in a gradual manner over more than half a century and Piketty suggests it appears to be extremely robust. The UKs 2019 election confirms his analysis.

What next?

These changing class relations now threaten the existence of the Labour Party as a national political force. It can no longer claim to be the party of the working class. It is becoming a free floating, values based party of the university educated and better off concentrated in the large cities, particularly London. Those around Boris Johnson understood this fact and gambled he could realign British politics. He has done so, but he must still consolidate Conservative hegemony.

Forty years ago in 1979 the left failed to grasp a similar political moment in Margaret Thatchers election victory. It ignored historian Eric Hobsbawm when he warned that the forward march of organised labour in the post war years had come to a halt. And it dismissed Stuart Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism and its transformation of the country.

Leading this refusal to recognise the radically changing nature of society and economy was the hard left faction that in the 1980s took Labour to the brink of self-destruction. Its sectarian dogmatism made Labour unelectable and so ceded decades to Conservative government and neoliberal economics. In 2015 its ageing cadres, buoyed up by the hopes and energy of young graduates, found themselves in charge of a hollowed out and intellectually bankrupt Labour party. Together they have driven it over the cliff.

What is Labour’s purpose in this period of radical social and economic change? Corbynism never had a viable answer to Labour’s existential crisis. It simply delayed the reckoning. There can be no return to the dead hand of Labour’s centrist politics. It failed spectacularly to develop new thinking and ideas. The soft left fared little better.

The next leadership of the party will need to initiate a wide-ranging political and philosophical renewal of the party as the first step toward re-establishing Labour’s place in national politics. Its central task will be to build a post-industrial electoral coalition that can speak for England and Wales. Labour has lost Scotland to the SNP and so it will need a strategy for remaking the union of the UK. To achieve this it will need to develop an analysis of the present conjuncture and a wide ranging debate that reshapes the language, mood and tone of Labour’s politics and culture, its campaigning priorities, its electoral strategies, and its policy priorities and formation.

We have known since at least 2010 that a national popular politics is radical on the economy, patriotic, and more conservative on security, defence, social and cultural issues. For the great majority of voters politics is not about assessing the policies of one party against another. It begins with the question ‘where do people like me fit in?’ And then, ‘which party is for people like us?’ Globalisation and the transition from an industrial economy has left millions uncertain how to answer these two questions. Labour under Corbyn misread the mood of the country. The Conservatives have broken out of this interregnum with the ambition to define the new post-neoliberal settlement.

Can Labour, a party grown suspicious of the language of patriotism and the nation, uninterested in people’s need for a sense of belonging, unable to talk about England and the English, and unwilling to openly value family and work, develop a politics that is able to counter the threat of Tory hegemony and win back the country? There’s the question that defines whether the party lives or dies as a national political force.