What should Labour do next?
I’m just starting to sober up after a week of Christmas boozing and drowning my sorrows after last Thursday’s catastrophe. In this brief moment of clarity I wanted to get some notes down on what the fuck Labour does next. We have many options, none of them certain to work, so let's review them.
Win back the white working-class?
White working class people in small towns aren’t voting Labour anymore. This isn’t a problem caused by Jeremy Corbyn or unique to the UK, however the election shows that it’s particularly acute right here, right now.
The Labour Party was founded as the political representatives of the working class and whatever we were doing in the last election was not representing the views of the working class. There's no way we can win the support of the working class to form a government to tackle the problems of housing, social care, education, etc. whilst also telling working class people that they're stupid and racist. That's neither accurate nor a good strategy.
The obvious solution is to go full Blue Labour, i.e. find a Labour leader who is pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, happy to do speeches in front of the St George’s Cross and willing to indulge people in their casual suspicion of foreigners and benefits claimants in order to win back the support of the voters that the Tories just won, which allowed them to demolish Labour's red wall.
I guess in this scenario people like me, i.e. metropolitan, university educated, under 40, craft beer drinking (I’m literally writing this in the Brixton Craft Beer Co while drinking a pint of Earl Grey IPA), vegan burger eating, podcast listening, liberal socialists are just supposed to go fuck ourselves. Or we’re supposed to vote for a Labour leader who says “people are right to be concerned about how much Polish they hear on the bus” because the candidate for the other side has even more contempt for us. I call this the Joe Biden strategy: vote for this awful person because he might win and he’s less awful than the right wing candidate.
Of course there are those who think that Labour is remiss for not representing the views of the white, Northern man drinking Ruddles Best in a Wetherspoons, who thinks most Muslims aren’t properly British, immigrants are taking our jobs and not working them (to be fair that guy was from East London like me), that London is a fallen city because they made the mistake of being tolerant and that the measure of a strong leader is the number of countries they're willing to reduce to nuclear ash in a fit of pique. (If this sounds overly reductive, I just described myself as vegan despite loving meat because it fits my personal stereotype).
To the charge of Labour not representing lazy Northern stereotypes: you’re probably right, but the issue with politicians who pander to popular prejudices in order to educate people is that for some reason they never get around to educating people out of their prejudices but are really keen on the pandering. All this means I'm not keen on the above.
Being very pro-EU?
An alternative view is that Labour should be more anti-Brexit and pro-EU. Jeremy Corbyn was at best lukewarm warm to the EU and it cost him votes. 16.1 million votes is more than enough to form a government so being the party of the people opposed to Boris Johnson’s plan to literally drive a forklift through our economy is not a bad strategy, as everyone likes the guy at a party who said “I told you so” after a badly planned, drunken chinese lantern launch results in a car being set on fire. (I know this from personal experience.)
Seriously, there is a lot to be said for being socially liberal, open (whatever that means, but I think you know, wink wink), pro-business in a sort of “unfettered capitalism is bad but surely not everyone who wants to start a company is awful” sort of way. Also the alliance of people who hate Brexit + people who hate the Tories is a strong one.
On the other hand there are easier ways to hand the right-wing papers the perfect chance to paint the Labour Party as the enemies of ordinary, decent, salt-of-the-Earth people. Having John McDonnell urinate on The Cenotaph for one. This position would go down well with the #FBPE crowd, (an excellent bunch of people who think that everyone not gagging to make Lord Andrew Adonis leader of the Labour Party is vaguely suspect) but I'm not sure who else it wins over. Many Remainers voted for Boris and his very hard Brexit.
There are not enough people living in the right places for Labour to win an election under First Past the Post as a Remain Party. Most Remainers are clustered in cities where Labour is already strong and not in the towns Labour needs to win. Also, most people who endorse the idea of going back to 1997 usually talk about being realistic in their offering, meeting voters where they are and doing what it takes to win. Reconciling this with opposing the result of a referendum frankly doesn’t make sense. So making Labour a Remain party is not going to work.
Some horrible combination of the above
Doing full Blue Labour or being a strongly Remain party are both good ideals, what we’re likely to get is the crappiest execution of them. Just like Corbyn is the crap execution of every Owen Jones column ever written, what we’re likely to get next will be the crap version of whatever we want. In our heads, a speech that acknowledges people’s concerns about immigration whilst also accepting the crucial role that immigrants play in our society may sound like a transcendent Jed Bartlet monologue, but it will actually sound like a politician giving a vague politician answer that pleases no-one whilst said politician simultaneously trips up over their own shoes.
If there was a smooth operator in the Labour Party who had the pop culture cool of Tony Blair, whilst also having the dogged principles of Clement Attlee, the intellectual clout of Gordon Brown and the media savvy of Harold Wilson they would have come to the fore by now. Wanting Keir Starmer to be that person doesn’t make it true. The Labour Party isn’t well organised enough to suppress a brilliant leader if they existed. Please remember that whatever you want from a Labour leader in your imagination you’ll get the Tesco Value version of that vision, and like Tesco’s value toilet paper, it will fall apart under use. I speak from literal and metaphorical experience.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love the Labour Party to get good at politics again. I just want to inform those who think that the solution to Labour’s current woes is to make a full throated defence of Britain’s EU membership, whilst also fighting and winning a culture war in Britain’s Small towns that this won’t work and the amount of glue they’ve sniffing is doing some bad to their brains.
What should Labour do next?
Whoever we choose as the next Labour leader will get monstered anyway. We could find the blandest, most inoffensive, loveable children’s TV presenter and the right-wing media will convince everyone that they’re a dangerous Marxist who wants to nationalise your Gran, whilst also being a feminist culture warrior who wants to make your dad your mum, replace the Queen with Sandi Toksvig and spend their entire time in government apologising for the British Empire. The Labour Party could make Alan Sugar leader and some people would still think he’s dangerously left-wing.
If anyone wants to be Labour leader given everything I have said, then fair play to them. I don’t want to do it. If someone really thinks they can thread the needle of working-class Labour heartland, metropolitan liberals and swing voters whilst also taking on the right-wing media establishment then they’re welcome to have a crack at it.
What we shouldn’t go for is someone who really appeals to one part of the coalition and believe the rest should just fall in line because they should. We tried that and it didn’t go so well. Just because the metropolitan liberals have had a crack winning power by doing things that they like and being rude about people who think differently, doesn’t mean it’s now time for someone else to piss off a different part of the Labour coalition by ignoring them.
It’s not simple enough just do Blue Labour, or just be pro-EU, or just being a sensible centrist, or just be a socialist. Labour needs to appeal simultaneously to lots of different people in lots of different places to win power and it’s time we started reckoning with the complexities of that. So, as I have said before ,let’s hear some ideas of how we get out of his hole. That’s what Labour should do now.
Labour Party picture taken by Andrew Skudder and used under creative commons.
