I don’t love Labour’s loss

by Rick Johansen

I’ve decided that I am going to rejoin the Labour Party, which I left in 2003 when Tony Blair took us into Iraq on the basis of misinformation or lies, depending on which way you look at it. I am not going to pretend I was not a supporter of ‘New’ Labour because I was, seeing it as the only way sufficient votes could be persuaded to vote Labour but surely it’s time now to dump the ‘New’ bit once and for all?

I am going to rejoin Labour in a mindset of deep gloom about its future. Labour big thinker Jon Cruddas says today that the party may be facing “the greatest crisis in its history” and I think he is right on that. And I’d go further: I’d say it was an existential crisis too unless someone can remind us what Labour is actually for.

David Cameron’s unexpected Conservative majority government has given us all plenty to think about, but the election result has given Labour more to think about than most. The party has been pushed back almost entirely into its English big city heartlands and all but been pushed out of Scotland altogether and even in its heartlands the pernicious effects of Ukip threatens Labour still more. That ordinary working people should see Ukip as an alternative to Labour is a frightening glimpse of the mess Labour has made with its complete lack of a vision for the future. But it is no good blaming voters to not voting for them: Labour has to explain what it stands for, what it will do and why.

My first two choices for the Labour leadership were Dan Jarvis and Chuka Umunna and it appears I have cursed them sufficiently to have them withdraw their names from the contest. In a painfully thin remaining field, it’s an easy decision to place my probably unwanted support with Andy Burnham. At least I know who he is, I know he is very able and I know Rupert Murdoch would hate it because of where Burnham is from (Liverpool) and because of his very public and effective support for the Hillsborough campaigners, not a subject over which Murdoch’s Sun has exactly covered itself in glory.

Burnham has not exactly pleased me with two things he said today though. One is that he now says that Labour did overspend before the worldwide financial crash of 2008, which suggests that the fall of Lehman Brothers and the near fall of Lloyds TSB was as a result of having built too many new hospitals and schools and secondly he calls for immigrants to be denied benefits for a number of years when they come to live in this country. So called “benefit tourism” is something which governments need to address, but is it really that serious? No. It’s only as serious as the media would have us believe it. I’ll give Burnham the benefit of the doubt on both issues because it could be that he is attempting to put these issues to bed right at the start of his candidature but I sincerely hope the rest of his manifesto is not to appease the right wing press by wearing Tory clothes.

Cruddas adds that instead of “swerving around what happened 10 days ago”, the new leader should be “prepared to go to the dark places and fundamentally rethink what the Labour Party is for, who it represents, what it’s all about”. That’s it in a nutshell. I don’t want a return to the tomfoolery of the Bennite era that saw Labour condemned to two decades of obscurity and near irrelevance, but neither do I want the son of Blair government either, which for all its many good points never really challenged the balance of power in favour of the many away from the few.

It should not be beyond the wit of the Labour Party to come up with a coherent and positive narrative that the people can buy into. Not based on the politics of envy, but the politics of aspiration which, contrary to reports suggesting otherwise, are shared by people from all classes, not just the middle class. Yes, we need greater equality of opportunity and a meritocratic society where everyone can have the chance to get on.

When Labour lost its mind in the early 1980s and prepared a manifesto for the 1983 election which was rightly described as “the longest suicide note in history”, the party almost died. Rather than arguing right or left, why not argue about right and wrong? If Labour doesn’t, it will spend a very long time in opposition, assuming that it survives at all.

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