It is time to judge the British Labour Party (LP) in the context of modern British and European political history. Why? Because the last General Election in the UK was a catastrophe for Labour and because social democracy is on its knees in Western Europe.
Among the (many) distractions of Brexit, included in the heap of arguments about why Labour did so badly in 2019, is that Labour under Corbyn did well in 2017 - and that showed the possibility of future success. In this scenario, it was the cliffs of Brexit that blocked Labour's progression. In reality in 2017 Labour (despite a high vote) fell behind the Tories (with a higher vote) who had to rally behind Teresa May, the worst Prime Minister since Alex Douglas Hume, and who proposed to carry on austerity - after 7 years of Tory cuts. In reality, despite the crisis of the Tories caused by austerity and then the upheaval of a referendum to leave the EU, Labour lost four General Elections in a row. Messrs Brown, Milliband, Corbyn and Corbyn again failed to win the the majority of the British electorate - before and after Brexit. These are the stubborn facts.
There is no doubting that Corbyn's leadership of the LP, coupled with an enormous and young membership, was something very new in Labour's history. And Corbyn was subject to scathing attacks, both inside Labour and out. But to fully understand the context of Labour's defeats in general requires an historical and international approach. It also helps provide a fully coherent understanding of the Corbyn exception.
The British Labour Governments
The first LP access to Parliamentary political power in Britain was 1945. Forty five years after its birth, Labour enacted the most dramatic reform program inside a capitalist system that the world had ever seen. And that was despite war hero Winston Churchill calling Attlee's Labour 'the Gestapo'. (Corbyn's sluice of venom is nothing new.) Attlee's project has never been echoed or expanded ever since. Across Western Europe the 'welfare state' policy emerged as dictators fell, as economies were rebuilt and as the labour-force found its strength. In the UK it was the period between 1945 to 1948 that was the height of social democracy's advance. From that point onward the Labour Party, including the key component of the Trade Union leadership, saw their duty as the defence of the gains of 1945-48.
Naturally over time, these various defensive gains - via Labour Prime Ministers Wilson, Callaghan, Blair and Brown - were scrabbled and, occasionally, pumped up in different parts from the Attlee heritage. PM Wilson led a house building policy that was needed, providing 400,000 new houses a year during his tenure. But the essence remained. Labour, in office, was methodically reduced to the defence of its original 'Welfare State', but experiencing less and less of the original successes and accepting more and more policy manoeuvres designed to win over capital, through more and more compromises.
Under Labour PM's Wilson and Callaghan, British capitalism was already reorganising against industrial development, drawing away from any national investment, still moving from the remnants of imperial wealth to the creation of international finance and tax havens. The response of Wilson and Callaghan was to force a reductive compromise on to unions and workers and their pay. It was the central part of both of their main policies in Parliament.
Under Prime Minister Blair, British social democracy moved again, first by solidifying the downward trend of an increasingly powerless Labour Party membership. A 'middle' direction had already been constructed for Labour's Parliamentary leadership by Anthony Giddens's 'Third Way'. In 2009, Blair publicly declared support for a 'new capitalism'. Labour in Parliament sought its base from public sector workers and managers and new technology capital emerging in the US's West Coast. It offered 'Tory lite' to a declining electorate (who could not tell the difference between the main political parties.) Blair finally fell following his Iraq war debacle and his tangle with the US right.
Prime Minister Brown, who was known mainly for his hatred and envy of Blair - not in a good way - had already made his major 'social democratic ' measure by hooking up crooked, minor firms that had emerged out of the lowest Thatcher swamp, on to key parts of the health and welfare services. His Premiership forced him to buy the world's largest bank in the 2008 crash and was shortly bumped out of office by the next 'Tory lite' PM - who did not hate Blair but admired him.
This is the bones of the social democratic Labour Party in government in the UK. Besides Attlee it has mainly been an unsuccessful failure.
Britain's decisive politics since 1945/8.
Meanwhile massive shifts in British society have occurred since 1945/8, but the politics of these shifts have been adopted by the Tories (with a little help from their friends) who either created some of these shifts or promoted their arrival.
Labour PM Wilson might have argued for 'the white hot heat' of new technology but it was the Tory PM Heath, despite his flagging imperial grandees, that successfully pushed the 1975 UK referendum into the European Common Market. Heath opened its membership while in government in 1973. This was the beginning of a massive effort to remove government taxes as the main means of industrial investment in Britain. Labour's leading ministers supported entry as well as the Tory dream of private investment. The European market would re-create Britain's industrial base, without state dependence, stimulated by Britain's remaining advanced technology which was required by the most developed European nations (advanced technology in aircraft engineering, nuclear energy and high grade vehicles, technologies and 'brain drains' - that had been otherwise been pouring away to the US.)
In the 1980s Tory PM Thatcher destroyed the militant leadership of the trade union movement, sold off state utilities and opened the new, dominant centre of British capitalism, by unleashing the City of London and its access to international wealth. Thatcher also divided the working class socially with the sale of council housing, creating in the south of England a vast new industry of the building, buying and selling of housing, which remains today. Thatcher, long before Trump and now Boris, embedded a section of the working class as part of her political base.
Meanwhile, the enormous reorganisation of the nature of work across the UK, from the 1980s onward, was part of the change of international capital and the growth of the movement of finance seen throughout the European west. The process was rapidly encouraged by a succession of Tory governments in Britain. The mobilisation of international wealth, 'service' industries, the relatively dwindling public-sector and its 'outsourcing', selling property and building development, particularly in the south of the UK, all of them defined the new types of jobs. The new jobs were unskilled, with low wages, no unions, and self-paying contracts. This continental wide process was never grasped by social democracy either across Europe or Britain. Instead social democratic parties largely sought yet more new compacts with capitalism, a new capitalism that had little interest in the increasingly desperate offers of the social democrats, barring the opening of access to crooks and the nouveaux riche wide-boys.
Decline of Social Democracy's purchase
These great events and associated movements in the economy and politics that have rolled through the second half of the 20th century and the first third of the 21st in Western Europe, have been broadly untouched by social democratic parties. It is a simple fact that the social democratic proposition, that capitalism and its associated systems can be cajoled, pressurised, influenced or won-over, had its last success in Britain 75 years ago. (Which is not at all the same thing as the huge sacrifices and struggles that erupted as capital's offensive became more and more trenchant. In Britain alone millions actively backed the Miner's strike in the mid 1980s; overthrew Thatcher via the Poll Tax rebellion, and ruined Blair's political future in the movement against the Iraq war.)
The concessions made to social democracy by capitalism in Western Europe have progressively lessened for two main reasons. First, capitalism in Europe and across the world has not just globalised in terms of the extraction of raw materials and forced labour across the globe. They have industrialised global labour and made ownership and sale of wealth the main value of the global system. Naturally this reduces most access by national governments to force concessions (if they are so inclined) from the most substantial capitalist companies, even when these companies are nominally based in their own country. 'There's no alternative' became the dominant slogan of modern political economy.
Second; the decline of traditional political structures and instruments in Western Europe and the weakness of the political institutions when faced with the supposed inevitability of the economic system, produced cynicism among voters - particularly with working class voters. A recent survey led by Cambridge University, involving 4 million people and 3500 surveys across 154 countries, has spelt it out. In 2005 the proportion of those dissatisfied with democracy in the UK was 33%. In 2019 it reached 61%. (The US, meanwhile, has seen a 'dramatic and unexpected' decline in voter dissatisfaction, to above 50%.)
The crash in 2008 showed the only real political intervention that any government could take - apparently, when the various states and governments in the West re-stocked the banks (and the stock markets.) The politicians, especially the social democratic politicians, standing in front of millions whose lives were about to get worse for decades, explained there was no alternative. In other words, when it really came to the crunch, the social democrats were just another shadow of the political right.
(Interestingly, a group of European countries has been bucking this trend, with satisfaction with democracy higher than ever before in Denmark, Switzerland, Norway and the Netherlands. There is a strong argument to connect those results to their highest state social spending over decades by these countries - especially the Scandinavian ones. See Blog 14 January 2020.)
The Corbyn initiative.
Although Corbyn followed the main historical trend of the weakness and decline of social democracy in the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, there was the emergence of a new development based on two new significant shifts in politics and society. In politics, the Corbyn leadership reconstructed the Attlee formula for modern times. In other words they proposed a new balance in society and the economy. This was the first time that British social democracy had acted that way for 70 years. In society, a new youth movement, experiencing the misery of the latest capitalist model in terms of jobs, pay, rights, social-costs, housing, attached itself overwhelmingly to Corbyn's Labour in both General Elections (despite Corbyn's confusion over Brexit.)
It turned out that the two political and social changes were not enough to resist the social bloc created by Boris's Brexit or the deluge of attacks on Corbyn, most effectively from the inside of the parliamentary Labour party itself. Nevertheless, polls consistently support a new model economy - and now there is a majority in the UK for a new type of democracy - something which the Corbyn program barely touched.
Not so much a conclusion ...
The Labour Party is under enormous pressure to pretend it is now unified - as the first step needed to muzzle the Corbyn base. The main candidate for leadership (in the media) is Keir Starmer who tells us he supports everybody in the broad church he is designing. But the political and economic context in Britain forbids anything other than dramatic change in the UK nations, particularly Scotland, its economy (if it is to avoid a satellite of the US, managed by Singapore-on-Thames) and its society, which already echoes a Dickensian quality, particularly for the young. Politics is the first clarifier.
Those that support Corbyn's program need to organise in action for its victory in society. Unifying a fuzzy, silent consensus of the Labour Party - heading for a second rate 'Tory lite' - is an empty goal. If Starmer wins then the base of Labour will need to organise their own faction that is going to fight every battle to establish the new democracy, beyond the traditional, failed, Labour Party of history, a democracy needed to win the breakthrough that Corbyn sought.
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