Resurrecting Labour?

In a thoughtful and perceptive contribution, Neil Lawson, chair of a Labour Party based think-tank, 'Compass', (publicly associated with Jon Cruddas MP) has made the most useful analysis of Labour's real, post May 7 condition so far. Here is a link to his pamphlet, 'Downfall,' Labour Pamphlet. 

The standard of discussion in the Labour Party more generally about their crisis has been pitiful. Andy Burnham, the front runner for party leader up to now, has gone so far as to declare that the debate about Labour's crisis is already over! His answer to the future? Labour needs to draw from both Ed Miliband AND Tony Blair. Genius. (See the Observer 14 June.)

Bearing in mind Neil Lawson's contribution, let's start at the beginning.

On May 7 just under 15 million Britons voted for the Tories or Ukip. Just under 12 million voted for Labour, the SNP, the Greens and Plaid Cymry. The latter group voted for austerity lite or no austerity at all. 2.4 million voted for the Lib Dems. Even if some would be inclined to add the Lib Dem votes to Labour's pile in this division, common sense surely dictates that the Lib Dem base in Britain has been politically atomised, and was not at all regrouped by its coalition 'compromise' with austerity. Even on May 7 exit polls showed numbers of erstwhile Lib Dems turning to Ukip for example. The Lib Dems have been broken by the May 7 polarisation. They too will struggle to find a new political purpose and will have to use the coming EU referendum as a temporary means of hiding their absent heart.

The above voting breakdown shows that the political balance of forces in society have shifted significantly to the right in society since 2010. The essence of this shift (albeit expressed in terms of the least representative voting system available) is that at the same time as Labour first 'won' a significant sector of the middle classes under Blair (and even marginally increased that position in 2015 under Miliband) Labour has 'lost' 3 million or more working class votes, mainly in England and mainly to Ukip, since the leadership of Blair, Brown and now Miliband. This disaster for Labour is becoming a disaster for the whole of society.

In Lawson's argument he hits some of Labour's real weak spots. He steadfastly and honestly faces the disaster that hit Labour on May 7. He rightly denounces the sectarian character of labourism. Lawson points out the absence of Labour's initiatives towards the campaigns on climate, on housing etc. He notes the general crisis of social democracy across Europe. He insists that neither a 'return' to Blair nor to Attlee is relevant, even if it were available. The weakest part of his comments are the proposals that he makes for thorough going reform of Labour. And some of those weaknesses stem from faulty assumptions in his diagnosis. As those mistakes are seminal to the overall argument about the future of the British Labour Party it is necessary to address them frontally.

In the first place Neil Lawson does not place Labour's problems in the context of the British political crisis as a whole. Despite the Tories only needing to score 34 000 votes per MP they only 'won' a majority of 12. (When the Tories redraw electoral boundaries it is worth knowing that Labour had to score 40 000 per MP on May 7, leave aside the democratic 'deficit' for Ukip and the Greens. Most Labour leaders will not raise this fact in the argument about constituency boundaries of course, as they still have the forlorn hope that they will benefit from it.) The main political event scheduled in Britain for the end of 2015 and 2016 is a referendum on a crisis ridden EU. The leading party of the British establishment, the Tories, are completely vulnerable when it comes to the future of the UK and its relations with the EU. Propped up by the US since it retreated from Suez, the British Tories now find their own ruling class dissolving into the international diaspora of billionaires, leaving them without access to the material sources of wealth which for so long underpinned Britain's political stability and, at the same time, their global protectors are losing wars, status, influence, markets not to mention their major proportion of the wealth of the world.

The British political system and its parties are spent.

Not recognising this context Neil Lawson tells us that in Britain today cultural identity has become as important as class. He develops some thoughts about the cultural role of a successful future Labour Party in this context. In part this is an attempt to recognise the importance of the SNP, but he is making a wider point about cultural and even confessional identity now submerging self identification as working class for millions of people. The old class parties he tells us, are over.

The most 'anti-class' based political party in Britain for the last 85 years has been the Liberals. They, if anything, emerged more shredded than Labour. Neil Lawson correctly describes the decline of the traditional working class movement, but he misunderstands that class politics do not go away because, as it happens, all of the main classes in society have changed dramatically. And while it is true that many working class people are struggling to understand where they belong in modern Britain, that unions only represent a small minority, the new definitions of the class ridden world that people who have to sell their labour have to inhabit, are surfacing once again. So. In the case of the working class people who voted SNP it was as much to do with inequality, with the hope for an economy that served society first and the wealthy second, with the sense that they could define a space where they might be able to create a hopeful new society, as with any sense of national 'identity', that meant they dumped Labour and went for the SNP. Labour were seen as the establishment in Scotland.  

The Scottish example shows something of the evolving contradictions and complexities of 'class consciousness' in our modern world. But to confuse that evolution and development in peoples' minds with the end of the reality in life of the terrible burden of class politics and class economics - which continues to crush the life out of our societies - is a big mistake. A new Labour Party would need to be based on new class politics.

The first attempts at political organisation of the working class, as a class, for itself in Britain, were the Chartists. They called together hand loom weavers in villages, factory workers in towns, mining families off the moors, agricultural workers from the fields, women and men and children, and brought together a force, created an identity capped by a political hope for a new society.

At this very moment in developed countries in Europe like Spain and Greece and Ireland political parties are emerging that seek to allow the working class people and the dispossessed of society to rise up and lead the whole nation.

Neil Lawson makes a point that outside of the Labour Party progressive and radical politics are flourishing. In Scotland the political centre of that process today is obviously the SNP and in England it is the Greens. In both countries in the last election these parties explicitly led the challenge to austerity politics and economics. (One of Neil Lawson's six themes for Labour's renewal is the need for Labour to support a democratic voting system.) During the election the SNP proposed an anti-austerity alliance going into May 7. Labour should have been at the front and centre of that alliance. It should be there today. Including electoral reform there are some interesting suggestions in Neil Lawson's six suggestions for Labour's reform (and others that are exactly a return to 1997.) But the crucial point is missing. Today, now, the Labour Party needs to break definitively with austerity, with big capital's investment strike now impoverishing British industry and infrastructure, with production and energy that poisons our future, with a totally undemocratic voting system, with the costs and dangers of maintaining Britain's (fake) great power status, to face the crisis in the Middle East and Africa in part created by wars we promoted, to break away from the British establishment, and to lead. First lead the mass movement gathering on June 20 against austerity, then help the new working class recompose itself and rise up again to lead all the nations of a Britain that it will help re-make in the name of the future.