Class de-alignment and an emerging political re-alignment? In 1978 the Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote an essay for the now defunct magazine ‘Marxism Today’ entitled ‘The Forward March of Labour Halted’ in which he noted the gradual decline in support for trade unionism and, as a corollary, diminishing levels of what we might describe as ‘class consciousness’ in the United Kingdom, dating back to the 1950s. This essay and others in ‘Marxism Today’ in the 1970s and 1980s (by such intellectual luminaries as Stuart Hall) are generally considered to be the seed-bed from which the flowering of intellectual revisionism of the British Labour tradition dubbed the ‘third way’ later sprouted.

Hobsbawm’s 1978 essay appeared to anticipate the class de-alignment which became much more stark in the coming decades and even the belated response to it from the political wing of the Labour movement (i.e the Labour party) in the form of ‘New Labour.’ Hobsbawm ironically later described New Labour as ‘Thatcherism in trousers.’ Whilst his intellectual peer and fellow ‘Marxism Today’ contributor Stuart Hall was even more scathing:-

Despite these accusations of leftist betrayal, some of the instigators of the putative ‘third way’ clearly saw what they were doing as being not only within the Labour tradition but also within the broader tradition of the left itself. The ‘third way’ was seen by some of its creators as forming part of a dialectic. The thesis of Thatcherism and the antithesis of social-democracy were to be dissolved into the synthesis of centrism, a combination of neo-liberalism and social-democracy into which the ‘combination of globalisation, technological progress and liberalisation empowers the great majority.

This worked well electorally for a while – to put it into perspective I am 38 years of age and the only Labour government I have experienced in my lifetime were the 13 years of ‘New Labour’ – until it didn’t. The aftermath to the world-wide financial crash of 2007/2008 seemed to offer an opportunity for a renewal of Keynesian economics at least, but in the end lead only to fiscal austerity and eventually to a resurgence of right-wing populism.

The general tenor of the revisionism found in ‘Marxism Today’ – influencing the ‘modernisation’ of the Labour party and its reinvention as ‘New Labour’ – was geared towards the argument that the Labour party had become stuck in the past, living off former glories, specifically the post-war era and the creation of the welfare state.

Parallels to the present abound. The centrism of New Labour revanchists is placeless (cosmopolitan) but unfortunately it is not timeless. In fact it has dated, rooted as it is in a way of thinking about politics which made sense only in a time period after the fall of the Berlin wall/collapse of the Soviet Union but before the financial recession of 2007/2008 and the resultant political cataclysms of Brexit/President Trump, which eventually came along in its wake. An era in which a certain kind of liberalism had no ideological rivals, either to its left or to its right. A time when the base metal of the synthesis of social democracy and Thatcherism transmuted itself into the electoral gold of 13 consecutive years of government 1997–2010.

The essence of New Labour centrism was in its pragmatic acceptance that the political centre-ground in the post-Thatcher era had shifted and therefore, as a corollary, the importance of the Labour party shifting with it. The political centre-ground in the post-Brexit era has shifted again and it has become increasingly obvious that the Labour party must therefore shift again too if it wishes to occupy it. Even Jeremy Corbyn, no fan of centrism he, recognises that this is still where elections are won and lost.