The Here and Now

A friend of mine recently went to Stoke-on-Trent to spend a weekend campaigning for the Labour Party in the upcoming by-election. His feedback to me was brief, sent over by a few text messages. Labour were ‘not seen as patriotic’ and the simple solutions sold by UKIP are resonating, the economic arguments over Brexit were not working. As he put it; ‘The messages about the economy suffering from Brexit were meaningless, when there aren’t decent jobs’.

His last text read: ‘It’s quite sad to realise just how broken the country is”.

The focus groups from Stoke have been revealing. Beyond social norms and habits, voters have little reason to believe in us. We are seen as not even worth listening to and when people did tune in, the leadership are seen as simply incompetent. ‘Weak’, ‘feeble’, ‘no vision’, ‘infighting’, ‘total mess’, ‘joke’.

There was a sense Labour is no longer fighting for working people.

Unsurprisingly, their view of Jeremy Corbyn is a million miles from our memberships’ view. Comments included: ‘If you listen to what he says, he’s just like that white noise in the background, because he hasn’t got any passion, he’s got no presence, really’ — ‘He’s past his sell by date, I think. He’s too old, we need someone younger, don’t we?’ — ‘He should just be sat on a barge somewhere going up and down.’

Jeremy Corbyn now has a negative approval rating from every section of society, including Labour voters from 2015. His current net approval rating is -40%. He is officially the most unpopular opposition leader this country has ever known.

However to lay the blame for Labour’s woes entirely at the feet of Corbyn is wrong. Jeremy Corbyn is simply a symptom of a Left without new ideas. A Left that can only offer moral protest against the economic and cultural ideas of the Right. A Left that has had its grand coalition broken.

Cultural, economic and social changes of globalisation have torn at the threads of collectivism and solidarity that had held us together.

The fact that Corbyn is still supported by the bulk of the Labour Party’s membership speaks of a lack of political will to change, and our comfort in the satisfaction of protest.

The Labour Party and the wider Left need to change to combat the rise of the Right.

In these essays I’ll attempt to lay out some of the fundamental issues that has divided the Left’s electoral coalition, and try and find some solutions to the problems we’re facing.

Lessons from our heartlands

It would be wrong to categorise Copeland and Stoke-on-Trent as one and the same. Though both communities are facing deep-rooted structural and social issues, each seat has its own economic and cultural complexion. Through their similarities and differences, they offer Labour valuable lessons on which we can build.

Stoke-on-Trent in the words of Tristram Hunt, was ‘drastically unprepared for the impacts of globalisation’. Globalisation tore through the potteries, steel works and the North Staffordshire coal industry. The constituency has deep issues of worklessness, poverty and low levels of educational attainment.

The British Nationalist Party at its peak controlled one-sixth of the city's councillors. Nick Griffin called the city “the jewel in the BNP’s crown”. Using the city’s civic collapse as the embers, the BNP fanned the flames of anger towards the political class — playing off community tensions with East European migrants and the Pakistani Kashmiri community.

By 2011 the BNP were eliminated from the City Council. The fight against the Right came from a realisation that Labour could never be complacent.

Labour had to listen to the concerns of local people.

Hope not Hate employed two full-time people to work in Stoke. As in Barking, local action teams were set up to knock on doors each week, to “find out the issues that residents were concerned about and take these issues up for resolution with the council.”

As Margaret Hodge, the MP for Barking explained, ‘attempting to play down the BNP’s potential support, and the reasons for it, simply had the effect of adding to the alienation of those who believed that politicians do not listen to their grievances or understand their concerns.’

Hodge held coffee mornings throughout her constituency where she could listen to the concerns of both white families who had lived in the area for generations and newer migrants. It was a chance to reconnect with her constituents that began an ‘engagement which ended up breaking down barrier’.

Labour’s way back not just in the Barking and Stoke, but across the country, must come from this — listening.

Fundamentally, people’s politics is local.

Copeland faces the same issues as so many places in England — poor transport links hinder an already remote constituency — mining and iron works closures has led to decline and economic depression. Yet Copeland also offers Labour a path forward. West Cumbria, in the words of Jamie Reed, ‘faced becoming isolated to much of the country based upon a burning platform of shrinking public expenditure and a changing state, yet Cumbria has re-imagined itself as Britain’s Energy Coast’.

As Reed points out, the complex decommissioning of Sellafield has made the area a beachhead to access the international decommission market place. A new nuclear reactor will created tens of thousands of jobs and provide 7% of the country’s electricity in the process. Not only has this led to a boost in the local economy, it has given back to an area a sense of pride, place and purpose. Skilled jobs will need highly trained workers. These new economic opportunities will act as ‘drivers’ for better education, as there will be a ‘market’ for these skills. The sense of place and this economic base, will prevent the social capital drain that has hindered so many of our smaller towns and cities over the past few decades.

I watched the clip of Jeremy Corbyn refusing to say he would support the building of a new nuclear power station, Moorside in Cumbria. Corbyn’s position did not strike me as noble or principled, but flatfooted and dogmatic.

He would accept the loss of 20,000 jobs and the removal of a pillar of community identity and purpose, in a deprived region facing unprecedented challenges, because of an ill-thought out attachment to environmentalist dogma.

If the UK is to meet our future energy needs through secure supply and less dependence on imports — while also reducing CO2 emission — nuclear energy must be part of the solution.

However there is more to this than just pragmatism. Corbyn pontificating on the need for new green energies on the Copeland doorstep, smacks of an educated (often urban) liberal aloofness to the bred & butter concerns of a class romanticised but forgotten by our culture.

I expect my Labour politicians to fight for jobs for their communities and to be hard-headed and realistic to the tough questions we’re facing, be that environmental or not.

Our politics must be grand in vision but always directed towards the local.

Copeland and Stoke tell us that if Labour is grounded in the regional and daily realities of our communities, we can begin to fight back.

Immigration and fairness

The Left struggles to understand the idea of reciprocity and fairness. Equality per se, to many of our own voters, is not fair — what is fair, is reciprocity — getting out what you deserve for putting in.

Margaret Hodge has urged Labour to understand the sense of ‘fairness’ that fuels resentment around immigration. Hodge has argued for rationing housing and benefits, with priority for those who have lived in an area for longest. It was a policy that was seen as ‘fair’ to both the ethnic minority and migrant community and the long-standing white community in Barking. It helped detoxify the argument about the allocation of resources and perceptions of its unfairness.

Labour must understand those we want to represent and reach compromises and solutions with their wishes and anxieties.

It would have been easy to dismiss concerns about the unfair allocation of council resources as simply peoples’ ‘ignorance’. There are two problems with this; firstly, it leads to ‘easy’ solutions, i.e. ‘more money’ — as if ‘anti-austerity’ alone will quell all local cultural/economic concerns.

Secondly, it gives an impression of a dismissiveness to peoples’ concerns. An out-of-touch attitude that has damned Labour before.

There is a truth in the argument that immigration is often a proxy for other issues — lack of resources in housing and social care for example. However as a Party we need to completely alter the way we look at and discuss immigration and the allocation of resources.

The way Labour now talk about immigration is at best removed and economical, at worst, imperious.

For many of our communities, real wages have fallen since 2008. In many of our heartland towns house prices have stagnated or even declined, people there have not accrued wealth relative to those in our cities and the South East. Stable jobs are dwindling, community pillars are crumbling and populations dwindling. Yet if our activists knock on their door and the issue of immigration is raised, we talk GDP.

We talk in ‘net-gains’ — because some may lose while others gain, but as long as the whole number keeps growing it is for the greater good. In the end, Gross Domestic Product will rise.

We know that arguments on the ‘economic trade-off’ on freedom of movement and immigration are not getting through. Many UKIP/Labour swing voters will knowingly prioritised control of immigration/laws over the economy. They won’t accept Single Market access as being important. Why? Because how much worse can things get?

The Left constantly rages to ‘prove’ it is correct. Facts, figures, bar charts and graphs. Polls and figures, correlations and causation. “God dammit, cannot you see! Immigration is good for you, it has a net benefit on our economic output!”. Of course it strikes of superiority — ‘my socialism has all your answers, if you were only enlightened enough to realise’

It begs the question, could Labour compromise on freedom of movement? By recognising that 10 workers fighting for every agency job on production lines and in social care, might be an economic boon — but can create friction and resentment that often has cultural manifestations. Unwillingness to acknowledge the challenges that migration brings to working people, leaves the door open for reactionary politics and populism’s easy answers.

The evidence from focus groups in Stoke brutally laid bare the failure of Labour to reconnect. Here Jeremy Corbyn ‘is not seen as a break from Labour’s post John Smith past, he seen as its essence’.

For many of our voters, there was a nagging sense that New Labour never truly cared about reciprocity. That their genuine concerns about the unfairness of welfare fraud — the unfairness of violent criminals getting away with soft sentences — the unfairness that immigrants were taking their jobs and services in localised markets — were just being paid lip-service to.

That Labour deep-down dismissed these concerns, even looked down their nose at these concerns. Corbyn victory in their eyes prove that their suspicions were right.

Corbyn was the seal on the ‘we know best’ attitude of a Party no longer reflecting the concerns of the people it was formed to represent. Forget people’s concern on immigration, on profligate government, on welfare exploitation — ‘obvious socialism’ was the answer.

Integration and the lessons from the past

The last Labour government’s legacy needs to be looked back on with clarity, nuance and without partisan bias. In my opinion, it is true that we never quite healed the wounds of Thatcherism in small towns and ex-industrialised centres across the country — that despite a decade of constant economic growth, a sense of something lost continued to ripple across these communities.

There needs to be an acknowledgement that the post-2004 migrant influx was one of the most dramatic demographic surges in the history of England. Areas of the country that historically had little immigration have seen their communities drastically change. We can no longer play a cost-benefit analysis. We can no longer move the conversation on the doorstep to more ‘comfortable ground’ — low pay, lack of housing, the NHS. To do so is to avoid a genuine discussion about community, identity and nationhood.

Beyond misplaced mugs, our immigration policy in 2015 hit the right notes. Our policies were steeped in social democratic values — strong regulation of markets to avoid the undercutting of wages and conditions — more border control staff to clamp down on exploitation and trafficking — forcing immigrants to learn the English language so not to leave them culturally and socially isolated.

However, culturally the Labour Party seemed distant on the debate.

Many of the voters we rely on saw Labour as ‘not on their side’. The message from many in our white working class base was, ‘Labour doesn’t stand for me anymore’.

Ivan Lewis MP has pointed out that ‘mistrust about our instincts and values on identity and culture-related issues, is one of the key reasons why voters have rejected social democratic parties across Europe.’

Labour must face up to the fact that fair immigration policies, that acknowledges that controlling immigration is a duty of responsible government, that are just and rooted in social democratic values, themselves are not enough.

Episodes such as Emily Thornberry’s ‘image from Rochester’ tweet, showing an image of a working class home draped in the flag, compounded peoples’ fears that Labour has culturally lost touch with its roots. Culturally we’re seen as a Party of metropolitan elitists who are disdainful of those who don’t share our progressive ‘vision’.

Jamie Reed has told us to look across the pond to see what happens when the Left loses its working class base. The Democrats, ‘once the Party of the southern states working class, now find themselves locked out of power in their old ‘heartlands’. Millions of working class vote time and again against their economic interests and vote Republican.

Why? Because they connect ‘culturally’ with the Republicans in the way they no longer do with the Democrats’.

So how do we reconnect?

Naushabah Khan stood for the seat of Rochester and Strood, her home town, as the Labour candidate in 2015. Reflecting on her campaign and Labour’s nationally, she brought up an incident that had struck her. Talking to a gentleman on the doorstep who was frustrated by immigration levels, which he felt was too high and placing undue pressure on the economy. Shah reminded him she herself was the daughter of Asian migrants, he responded ‘yes but I don’t mean you, you can speak English’.

And it struck me. Speaking English opens up doors to engagement in civic activities, and this in turn fosters a sense of belonging to an area that can cut across ethnic lines and unite communities. A positive integrationist stance, encouraging immigrants to speak English and understand British History, institutions and culture, may be a way forward.

All in all this means having an honest debate on the issues that multiculturalism has raised. Now I’ve seen how the Left and many of those within the Labour Party, have scalded anyone who critiques multiculturalism — who dares to mention integration or assimilation.

However this intellectual and emotional obstinance on the matter of integration, only leads us to romanticise multiculturalism.

I look at the inner-London metropolitan community I was brought up in and I see a place where multiculturalism has flourished and enriched our lives. However I know there are areas in this country deeply divided and where communities live separate, parallel lives. Community tension fosters many ills and reactionary politics thrives in many communities that are isolated, but neighbour ‘the other’.

Romanticism is a comfort blanket. If we romanticise our Muslim communities, we can easily ignore the challenges faced by liberal and secular members of those communities who challenge reactionary politics — be it the politics of Sharia councils that challenge our secular values, or the fundamentalism in mosques that challenges the universality of human rights.

If we romanticise the working class, we can easily ignore the cultural and structural dislocation that many working class communities are feeling — and thus can dismiss those who don’t see our progressive vision as simply bigots and xenophobes.

The Left must tackle the issues of community and belonging. Divided communities in places like Bradford, Oldham and Boston will not be healed by virtue signalling from Islington. As Jasper Miles argues in ‘Rebuilding Social Democracy’ — a positive integrationist stance, ‘actively encouraging immigrants to adopt ‘the British way of life', asserting common values and rules, many of which are social democratic principles, through practical measures and applied in no uncertain terms, will lead to stronger and more united communities.’

A New Liberalism — How The Left must change.

In my opinion the Left is becoming increasingly exclusive in its cultural outlook and the language it uses. While at the same time becoming more belligerent and tin-eared to opposing views.

Even as someone naturally sympathetic to liberation movements, I would be worried to watch my tongue in a university debating hall. Current terminology on sexuality and sexual identity has become a minefield. This offers those who can navigate this new arena a license to hold social credence, and unleash righteous fury at those who are ‘transgressive’.

In his polemical essay, Nick Cohen called out the modern-day liberal-Left who talk in a language devoid from the realities of working class life;

‘Imagine how it must feel for a worker in Bruce Springsteen’s Youngstown to hear college-educated liberals condemn “white privilege” when he has a shit job and a miserable life. Or Google the number of times “straight white males” are denounced by public-school educated women in the liberal media and think how that sounds to an ex-miner coughing his guts up in a Yorkshire council flat. Emotionally, as well as rationally, they sense the left, or at least the left they see and hear, is no longer their friend. They are men and women who could be argued with, if the middle classes were willing to treat them decently. You might change their minds. You might even find that they could change yours. Instead of hearing an argument, they see liberals who call the police to suppress not only genuine hate speech that incites violence but any uncouth or “inappropriate” transgression. For too many in the poor neighbourhoods of the west, middle-class liberals have become like their bosses at work. They tell you what you can and can’t think. They warn that you must accept their superiority and you will be in no end of trouble if you do not.’

The Left’s politics has become inward looking. Our social deafness to the issues that are turning our traditional supporter-base to the Right, is ‘compounded by a culture of “correct” political thinking and the moral judgement passed on those who do not comply with it’.

Our universities, once the bastions of liberal Enlightenment values, are now filled with “safe spaces” to protect students from ‘transgressive’ (often conservative) views.

We spend more time proscribing and discussing the rules of political debate than attempting to understand the emotional and structural conditions that cause people to “transgress” them. Too often we explain away conservative views as inherent bigotry or coming from a place of ignorance — for example, they are simply ‘misled’ by the ‘right-wing media’.

As J D Vance, the former marine-turned-academic author, puts it;

“If you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: you don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe. So your own prejudice is never revealed for what it is.” Now, when liberals encounter people who depart from their moral and ­political standards they condescendingly seek to “educate” rather than empathise. The result is a “liberalism” shorn of its ideological history — a “liberalism” that is a proxy for an uncompromising, cosmopolitan form of identity politics.’

The breakdown of the Left’s electoral coalition in the UK cannot just be seen in the prism of economics alone — of untempered globalisation and de-industrialisation, although these play a part. Culturally, the Left is losing its traditional working class base.

For the Left to become a dominant force in this country again, we need to change. At its crux, ‘political renewal begins with listening to what people have to say, and understanding what matters to them in their everyday lives.’

I wholeheartedly agree with Tristram Hunt when he writes; ‘The founding principles of liberalism were always tolerance and the belief that individuals should be free to choose their idea of the good life. More than that, there was a recognition that this freedom and tolerance must be extended to those who pursue socially conservative or communitarian ideals.

In essence, to rebuild our electoral coalition we need to rediscover our belief in classical liberalism.

Losing my patriotic Labour

Thinking back over a difficult past eighteen months, there was one moment that was particularly hard for me. It was when I first really considered my membership of the Labour Party and wondered if it was the Party for me.

I had come across a statement made by the Stop the War Coalition and endorsed by Jeremy Corbyn, one of the officers of the organisation at the time.

It was a statement that read: “The Stop the War Coalition (StWC) reaffirms its call for an end to the occupation, the return of all British troops in Iraq to this country and recognises once more the legitimacy of the struggle of Iraqis, by whatever means they find necessary, to secure such ends”.

‘By whatever means they find necessary’.

For those who don’t know, let me be clear. This was a statement offering tacit support to an Iraqi resistance that were killing British soldiers. British soldiers who were working alongside Iraqi trade unionists, democrats and civil society activists to build a democratic Iraq. For a long time I struggled to understand why I found this statement so heart-breaking.

Why could I not overlook this, like I had done with many other things he had said and done before?

I now know why.

It was because my patriotism and my love for my country is embedded in our social democratic values and our nation’s internationalism. Patriotic currents have always ran through British socialism and found its expression in institutions and events, many of them entwined in the history of the Labour Party — Britain leading the fight against Fascism in the 1940s; forming a National Health Service and welfare state that is a beacon of social justice across the globe; Britain leading in the international arena, exercising our influence through international institutions, a strong military presence and an independent nuclear deterrent.

The Iraq war was the defining political issue of my generation. We can have differing opinions on the Iraq War, whether it was right or wrong to intervene — but this statement was an attack on the very values on that I felt the Labour Party stood for. The Labour Party to me represents the best of British democratic values and the internationalism and solidarity of the trade union movement. It is what binds me to this Party. Some call it tribalism but to me it goes deeper than that — in essence the Labour Party is entwined with my sense of patriotism.

It is this that I feel we have lost.

I think of the recent legacy of Labour MPs, who led the international community in stopping the slaughter of Kosovan Muslims. Who helped end the civil war in Sierra Leone. Those Labour MPs who argued for action in Afghanistan against the Taliban and ‘who made the moral arguments against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq’. It is our patriotic internationalism that fills me with pride. It is the same internationalism of the ‘Dubs amendment’, and the work of Jo Cox — who pleaded for action to help refugees by offering those who fled refuge, and implementing a no-bomb zone to protect those who stayed.

Yet when I look at Jeremy Corbyn — his comments about the ‘Iraqi resistance’; his support of an Early Day Motion that denied the Kosovan genocide we helped put an end to; his refusal to support airstrikes in 2014 to save Iraqi Kurds pleading for support — the Kurds who were supposedly his ‘comrades’ — I don’t see my Labour Party.

People have said to me that Jeremy Corbyn has taken Labour back to its roots, to the spirit of ‘45.

I think that couldn’t be further from the truth.

After all, it was Clement Attlee and Ernest Bevin who denounced pacifist George Lansbury over his opposition to military action against Mussolini’s imperialism in Abyssinia. It was Clement Attlee’s government that with co-operation with the United States, played a decisive role in creating the institutions of the modern era, including the United Nations and NATO.

Attlee’s proudest act was to join Churchill’s war room and it was his sense of progressive patriotism and ‘social democratic sense of citizenship’, that guided him. It was his role in the national government, alongside ministers such as Ernest Bevin, Stafford Cripps and Arthur Greenwood, that ‘put all fears about Labour’s patriotism to the sword’.

Most Labour voters are proud of the United Kingdom. Like most people they are aware that they are fortunate to live and be raised in a country that is a democratic and free nation-state. They are proud of what the country stands for, our common law liberties, our armed forces, and our achievements in the world.

I don’t think Jeremy Corbyn is proud to be British. I don’t think the Labour Party is a patriotic Party anymore. And if he is losing me — with all my own cosmopolitan and counter-cultural instincts, just imagine what he is doing to our heartlands.

At the recent London Young Labour AGM, a young man stood up as a candidate to be our new chair. In his speech he explained that he was a refugee to this country, who arrived in the UK as a small child. He said he was proud to grow up British and proclaimed that he believed ‘Britain was the greatest country on the earth’. Laughter rippled around the room. We laugh at people who say they are proud to be British.

So how do we change?

The Left must find our patriotic voice once again. I believe that we cannot allow patriotism to be defined in a narrow, backward looking and divisive way.

Our patriotism may have a distinct complexion and texture unique to ourselves, but the colours run the same.

My patriotism is found in our great institutions of the State. To walk through Parliament is to marvel at the parliamentary democracy that we offered the world. My national pride is born from my understanding of how lucky I am to live in a nation that enshrines our rights — our right to protest past Whitehall, our right to cast our ballot, our right to write. Britain’s outward looking liberalism that has helped shaped the modern world.

I believe it is in the lessons of ‘45 that we learn the seeds of Labour’s future growth. If within our search for a fairer and just society, we cannot find a patriotic narrative that speaks of nation-building and common endeavour — we don’t deserve to win. An unpatriotic Labour is an unelectable Labour.

Brexit and a new vision for the country

I caused much consternation among my friendship circle when I argued that the Labour leadership was right to order the Party to vote to trigger Article 50. Let this from Wes Streeting explain why I agreed with that stance;

I know many remain voters would have preferred Labour MPs like me to take to the trenches this week and oppose the triggering article 50 at every twist and turn. But we have to face the facts: a majority of voters in a majority of constituencies voted to leave the EU.

I wish it wasn’t so. I put plenty of shoe leather into campaigning for a different result and I still believe we would be stronger, safer and better off inside the EU. But imagine for a moment what would have happened the morning after the House of Commons blocked the result of a referendum in which 33.5 million people had voted.

Britain would have been plunged into a constitutional crisis. People would have taken to the streets. Riots would have been a distinct possibility. Theresa May would have been forced to call a general election in which remain or leave would be the only question.

And the result would not have been the overturning of the referendum result, it would be a very different Parliament committed to the hardest of hard Brexits.

Let me be absolutely clear. I do not doubt the integrity or passion of any of those people ringing MPs pleading with us to vote a different way. But if people think that overturning a vote at the ballot box by a vote in the parliamentary lobbies would reverse the outcome — I am afraid they are kidding themselves.’

However accepting this does not mean we accept Theresa May’s vision for Brexit.

Let me be clear — leaving the Custom’s Union and the Single Market or leaving the EU without a deal will do unimaginable damage to our economy and to our Union.

This is the Brexit path being laid before us by May’s government. At the moment the Conservative-Right can do as they please without the fear of electoral defeat reigning in their excesses.

Our response to Brexit negotiations must be clearheaded, disciplined and above else pragmatic. We cannot afford to capitulate — through weak leadership or nascent eurosceptism — to a ‘Brexit at any cost’ that we know will severely harm our national interest and our workers’ interest.

Where do we go from here?

Owen Smith’s comments criticising Conservative MPs for invoking “the memory of Agincourt, mini-Union Jack’s clutched in their sweaty hands, like Prommers on parade” — smacks of the very worst of our tenancies to mock and deride Leave voters. Virtue-signalling to the New European will not be enough.

We cannot simply point to the catastrophic waste of May’s Brexit approach and expect that will be enough to win over our doubters. We must offer a credible alternative that is relevant to the concerns of those we need to win over.

We cannot offer competing visions of the country to our different constituencies. We must build a new coalition — comfortably holding the 48% of Remainers by not dipping into fatalism or defeatism — then building up by winning over those who had made a ‘cost/benefit analysis and concluded better out than in’.

I am resolute in my belief that the majority of our electorate are pragmatic. The low tax, light regulation, offshore free market little Britain the Brexiteers have in mind is not a vision supported by the majority.

So how do we fight back?

Firstly, we cannot allow the Brexiteers to turn our debate around negotiations into a cultural fight to the death.

The Brexiteer Right is terrified of having this debate. They will attempt to shut dissent down by attacking the messenger not the message — just look at the attacks on Tony Blair after his speech — his argument weren’t contested but his character was — Blair, another ‘arrogant snob’, trying to undo ‘the will of the people’ et cetera.

We must not allow them to dismiss us as snivelling and unpatriotic ‘liberal elites’. Therefore our campaign must be based in the language of pragmatism, nationhood and the common good.

We must bridge Party lines and try and win support from Conservatives. We must be honest on immigration and there must be robust agreements on immigration from outside of the EU.

Our approach must involve concrete single demands — that are supported by practical actions and proposals — that can win the support of those who hold the balance of power — Leave voters and the 185 Conservative MPs who voted to remain.

In my opinion we should argue for a transitional arrangement with our EU partners that keeps us in the European Economic Area (EEA) and lets us continue to enjoy full access to the single market from outside the EU.

By following Brexit at any cost, our nation’s fate is in the hands of the Conservative’s Rightward fringe and ideologues.

Yet Theresa May’s course opens up an opportunity for Labour to turn its focus back to the concerns of the majority. We can build a new coalition built on a pragmatic and patriotic centre-ground. However, Labours change of direction — as I have outlined in the rest of this essay — must be swift and committed.

Here’s a rallying cry from Jonathan Rutherford that I want to share;

‘Instead of hedging its bets, lamenting Brexit, and echoing each dire forecast of impending disaster Labour must stand foursquare for the labour interest in the restoration of a self-governing, trading nation. With a credible leadership, a nation building politics that incorporates the cultural and the economic is the only means by which it can bridge the divisions within its coalition and reconnect to the country. It is the only feasible way for Labour to become an effective opposition that can hold the government to account, and once again have the credibility of a government in waiting. It is also its patriotic duty.’

…

Briefly I will mention Labour’s current leader, and I will not mince my words. After Corbyn’s attack on Tony Blair for not ‘respecting the result’ of the EU referendum , there should be no doubt in our minds that Corbyn is equivocal at best when it comes to a ‘Brexit at any cost’.

Ideologically he has been opposed to the European Union his entire career. If you think he would compromise on his eurosceptic ideological viewpoint, for the greater good of the working people of the UK, you simply do not understand the intellectual tradition of which he comes from.

His inability to lead the Parliamentary Labour Party, and offer clear and direct leadership on the biggest constitutional issue this country has faced since the Second World War, says one thing — we deserve better. It’s time we make up our mind.

Corbyn’s legacy so far and the lessons learnt

Some early cheerleaders of Jeremy Corbyn who were more measured and ‘realistic’ in their prognosis. He may not be perfect, they argued, but at least he will ‘change the terms of debate’. He would open up new ideas and shift the political discourse of this country in a more left-wing direction. He would, they argued, shift the Overton Window.

The fact that this was an argument often thrown from the cushions of relative affluence, would not be missed by our voters.

Our voters, many of whom are facing tax-credit cuts, the bedroom tax and food bank queues — needed a Labour government as soon as possible.

We will not be thanked for going on a decade long journey to attempt to shift the ‘Overton Window’..

As Rob Ford has pointed out, after eighteen months of Corbyn’s leadership, we have seen a dramatic shift in the terms of debate. The NHS in a crisis caused by the Tories underfunding, yet more people believe Theresa May and the Conservatives would do a better job than Labour managing the NHS.

We now stare down the barrel of leaving not just the European Union, but the Single Market and the Customs Union too. The ending of freedom of movement at any cost is now a central tenement of government policy.

‘Policies voters consistently associated with Corbyn are either his most unpopular (end of Trident, the reform of NATO), or ones they care least about (train re-nationalisation).’ Not only has Jeremy Corbyn been shown to be a deeply unpopular leader, dragging a Parliamentary Party to electoral oblivion — he has been harmful to Left-wing policies as a whole. He has helped embolden the Right and his weakness has offered them the opportunity to drag the Overton Window over their lawn.

After the 2015 election, Jon Cruddas called it right. Labour he argued, is “largely a party of progressive, social liberals who value principles such as equality, sustainability, and social justice. It is losing connection with large parts of the voter population who are either pragmatists in their voting habits or social conservatives who value family, work, fairness and their country.” It adds: “Labour is becoming dangerously out of touch with the electorate and … unwilling to acknowledge this growing estrangement.”

In my mind, the initial Corbynmania seemed to prove this hypothesis. For many I knew it would take more time for them to see where the Left was heading.

If you thought Jeremy Corbyn would win over working class voters that have moved away from Labour, you have been proven to be demonstratively flawed in your analysis.

Looking solely at the working class vote (C2DE demographics) from September 2015. Labour has fallen 17 points in the national voting intentions. Corbyn’s personal net favourability among working class voters has gone from an initial -8 points, to -40. Our 5 point lead among working class voters has dropped to a -19 point deficit.

The foolish thing to say now is that Labour’s vote has hit its floor. That with Corbyn at the helm we may cling on to our 20% of the vote as our tribal-wall holds.

That fact that I even typing this shows the extent of the situation we are in.

My message to Corbynistas would be this — ‘You ain’t seen nothing yet’.

The Tories have gone easy on Corbyn over the past 18 months, and we moderates know it.

The Conservatives they will have a list of Corbyn’s past comments, statements and gestures long enough to crash the Guido Fawkes website.

Their attacks will hit Labour’s vote where it hurts the most. Our traditional voting base will doubt his most basic instincts of patriotism. There will be a generation of Labour voters to the core, who will not be able to overlook his comments on the IRA and other terror organisation.

I’ve had the painful experience of speaking to a Labour voter of 30 years who told me not a day goes by when she doesn’t think of the day she witnessed the Warrington bombing. She cannot bring herself to vote Labour any more, though it breaks her heart.

On the other side of our coalition I see us losing support in our new metropolitan heartlands. Even some of those who were first excited by his leadership have slid to the Liberal Democrats after realising Corbyn is ‘less of a latter-day Charles Kennedy, but a slightly more affable George Galloway’.

However, this is not a time to despair.

The only thing stopping us from changing course is a lack of political will and that can change.

The Left can fight back if it makes the necessary compromises and hard-slogging work to reconnect with the whole of the country — our football league towns, our rural areas and mill towns, our docklands and our suburbs.

There are valuable lessons to learn from the past 18 months.

We’ve found that moral protest and outcry at Tory austerity is not enough.

We’ve seen how when we are not at the forefront — coherent and credible to the majority — offering alternatives that are practical, affordable as well as radical — we allow our opposition to control the terms of the debate.

Once Labour take a step back from reflecting the views of the people we seek to represent — once we talk in a language removed from their day to day experience — we cannot throw our hands in the air when they go elsewhere.

We must rebuild on the basic principles that that unite the Left’s electoral coalition — the belief collective action — through government — in creating that fairer society. We must understand the most of electorate are driven by pragmatic concerns and are not convinced by ideology.

We need a new radicalism to reflect this.

If we learn from the lessons I have outlined in this essay. I think the Left can win again.