PM

I think, in terms of strategy, there is a deeper problem for Labour. The tribal alliance on which it has built itself in the last twenty years is falling apart.

One part of Labour’s base is an emergent salariat which has become more and more progressive, and rebellious, since the 2008 crisis because it is substantially constituted by young people facing a deteriorating future.

Then you’ve got what people often refer to as the “white working class,” but more accurately it’s the multi-ethnic working-class of small towns. Their lives are not getting better and the traditional organizations that held them together are falling apart under neoliberalism.

The Labour thinker Maurice Glasman refers to this dual base as “a working-class dad and a middle-class mum.” They have different outlooks in life and Labour’s strategic problem is how to unite them around the same project.

I think Corbyn understood what a solution to that could be: radical economics. The offer of pro-LGBT, antiracist, and antiwar politics is there for the city salariat with the Labour Party, but the offer to working-class people had to be that the party could change their lives substantially through economic policy. That is why so much effort was expended in the first nine months of Corbyn’s leadership changing Labour’s economic policy.

This did have an effect. They brought forward a new fiscal charter and a proposal for state investment, there was a successful opposition to the government’s welfare reforms, they forced the resignation of Iain Duncan-Smith over disability benefit cuts. None of this would have happened if there had been a different kind of leader.

And they did this despite significant difficulties. Corbyn put together a shadow cabinet comprised of people with varying levels of ability from across the party, and had to do so without the people of high ability from the right of the party who were boycotting.

This shadow cabinet didn’t act as fast as they could have and I don’t think policy was developed as well as it could have been in many places. It didn’t work with Angela Eagle, for instance, who was shadow secretary of state for business and no-one really knows what she has done.

Fundamentally Corbyn was trying to do two things at once. He was trying to win in the party, because headquarters (HQ) and MPs were in rebellion against him, and he was also trying to run an effective opposition.

In my view his biggest mistake, as we will see in the leadership election, was not taking the party HQ. In the future he will need to replace a lot of the staff with people who are willing to do the job needed of them.