Victor Anderson

Labour has lost a lot of elections, and always wondered why. This has led to a whole literature of ‘why Labour lost’, highlights including the “affluent worker” debate, Crosland’s attempted redefinition of socialism, and Hobsbawm’s ‘Forward March of Labour Halted’. Against this background, the discussion so far within the Labour Party about its latest defeat is strikingly unimpressive.

This is particularly true of most of the leadership contenders (all except Corbyn). There has been a whole procession of Blairite clichés, some spoken by the contenders, others by the original Blairites such as Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair himself. Right-wing journalists and columnists have repeated the same responses, dressing themselves up as best friends of the Labour Party eager to give well-meaning advice.

Prominent in all this is the chorus of ‘’Labour was too negative toward ‘wealth-creators’”. But exactly who are the wealth creators? The truth is that it is self-serving exaggeration for rich owners of large businesses to claim that only they are the “wealth-creators”. In fact, most people help to create wealth. Bringing up and educating children creates wealth. Publicly-funded transport networks create wealth. And of course the natural world provides the environmental and material resources which underpin all wealth.

This reality removes any legitimacy from the claim that since the wealthy create the wealth, they deserve to have far more of it than everyone else. That view has often stood in the way of developing a fairer society, and at the general election questions of fairness and social justice came to the fore again. If Labour does not stand up against the distorted story that only the wealthy create wealth, it will have very little role left in politics.

Then there is “anti-business”. However it is obviously simplistic to be either anti- or pro-, because business comes in so many different forms. Ed Miliband’s speech on “predators and producers” was an attempt to set out a balanced picture based on recognition of the enormous variety of activities which come under the heading of “business”.

Criticism of irresponsible fossil fuel companies and of the dysfunctional finance sector is not anti-business. Businesses, like other organisations, need a stable finance system, a stable global climate, and a society that actually functions as a society. And most businesses would welcome new arrangements which take away the unfair privileges of tax-avoiding multinationals and entrenched monopolies.

Like “business”, the word “aspiration” is also a key term for the “modernisers”. But who is aspiring to what? The rich aspire, the poor aspire, and the people in the middle aspire. The aspiration to a secure home and job is every bit as much an aspiration as the desire to shop at John Lewis. Some aspirations can conflict with others, for example the everyday difference between car drivers and people trying to cross a road, or the desire of the banks to make money versus the aspiration of savers to hold on to what they have. Simply talking of “aspiration” does nothing to resolve the thousands of policy problems that derive from all these large and small conflicts of interest.

Another feature of this assault is the notion that Labour ‘modernises’ when it goes back to the thinking of peak Blairism in the mid-1990s. That was a period when Thatcherism had run down public services and the public realm, and those clearly needed to be rebuilt, and to some extent that was achieved. But at that point neoliberalism had not yet brought about the three crises which have followed since 1997.

Any updating of political approaches now has to take into account all three. First the climate crisis, still seen in 1997 principally as a prediction for the future, but which is now increasingly evident in floods, the thinning of the ice caps, and the steady rise in global average temperature. Second, the financial crisis of 2008, brought about very obviously not because of any overspending on public services in the UK but by the excessive deregulation of the finance sector globally. Third, the growth of inequality brought about by technological changes which overall raise the value of capital whilst lowering the value of labour.

Inequality in turn has brought about a very much more differentiated political landscape in Britain, in which apparent pressures on Labour to move to the Right in some areas are counterbalanced by an opposite trend in others, most notably Scotland, and also amongst Green voters. Therefore no simple shift along the left-right spectrum is going to bring Labour any salvation.

It will have to do some thinking, and it will have to take on board the triple crisis of climate, finance, and inequality. It will also have to find a radical response to the public dissatisfaction with current political processes and structures, which have been exacerbated by the election results, which saw a total of 5 million UKIP and Green votes result in only 2 MPs. It will also have to take on board the more useful contributions to post-defeat debate, such as those from John Cruddas in The Observer and John Harris in The Guardian.

The Blairite clichés of “wealth creation”, anti-“anti-business”, and moderate “modernisation”, do not begin to match this moment. Nor does a nostalgic appeal to Labour’s “heart”, although that at least has some authenticity about it.

Labour has to elect itself a new leader. But it should not pretend that the process of doing so can be a substitute for the serious debate which now needs to follow.