I know for an absolute fact that my loyal reader has been waiting for my take on today’s shit election results for the Labour Party. Labour lost the Hartlepool by-election, not to a monkey but to a clown, and local election results are also shit. My reader wants answers and s/he wants them now. So, what’s my conclusion? We’re doomed.
My conclusion isn’t based upon political science, if such a thing exists. It’s based more on a combination of Hop House lager and Chilean Malbec. I’ve hated today, just like I have hated every Labour defeat, even the ones when Jeremy ‘Magic Grandpa’ Corbyn was somewhat laughably the leader of the opposition. Look at the evidence of my voting life:
1979 – Lost
1983 – Lost
1987 – Lost
1992 – Lost
1997 – Blair
2001 – Blair
2005 – Blair
2010 – Lost
2015 – Lost
2017 – Lost
2019 – Lost
In my entire life, only two Labour leaders have won general elections: Harold Wilson and Tony Blair. I was born in 1957. The last Labour winner before then was Clement Attlee. And he was out of office in 1951, having given us the NHS and much, much more. Britain, or more specifically England, is a Tory nation.
I have spent much of the day trying to make sense of it all. England’s rustbelt no longer supports the party set up to represent working class people. Instead, large swaths of de-industrialised England supports the party of big business, the rich and powerful; in other words, the establishment. How bad must Labour be to get soundly thrashed by Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson? I don’t know. I don’t even understand the question.
What I do know is that Labour needs to change. It cannot abandon its commitments to the NHS, for equality, for fairness and all the rest of it, but like New Labour in the 1990s, it needs to recognise the country as it is today. A country that has walked away from Europe, yet whose people are still aspirational and ambitious, to have a better life. Boris Johnson lies – he always lies – that his Tory party believes in levelling up the country. Labour needs to understand that people DO want to get on, to do better for themselves and their families. In the days of New Labour, it was about the third way, between capitalism and socialism, where the government supported both individual ambition and the collectivism of the very principles of the NHS.
I celebrate when my friends do well and get on in life, specifically when they have worked hard and played fair to do so. So should Labour. And when we talk of equality, we must always talk of the equality of opportunity, not just making everyone the same regardless of whether they deserve it. Should you get on solely because you are better off and know people with influence and should you get something for nothing if you don’t work at all?
Labour is still a force for good in so many ways. And like Blair before him, Starmer now needs to modernise the party for the modern age. He needs to build a coalition of those who naturally support Labour and those who don’t. This upsets the hard left comrades who want only purity in their politics. above all, Starmer needs to mean it.
Tony Blair didn’t invent New Labour because of expediency: he did so because he believed in it. And in 1997, voters bought into it because they knew he did.
I have always believed that a hard left Labour Party was playing to a small gallery. In Bristol South East, and later Bristol East, Tony Benn was my MP and I saw him at close hand. As a privileged privately educated man, he was infatuated by the ‘struggle’ of the working classes, whose lives he knew nothing about. He had a curiously romantic vision of their day to day existences, which were often grim and miserable. He was great on slogans and rhetoric but not much else. The truth was that Margaret Fucking Thatcher understood the working classes better than he did. Johnson is nothing like Thatcher because she actually believed in stuff whereas Johnson believes in Johnson. But they are still two cheeks of the same arse.
Nothing lasts forever, especially in politics. Labour cannot win the next general election but the Tories can surely lose it because of the unexpected.
I’d urge Keir Starmer to keep his cool. It feels to some that it’s all over for Labour. I know how I felt when John Major squeaked in at the 1992 election. I thought that was probably IT. Five years later, Labour won a landslide. I can’t say I expect that to happen in 2023 but who knows? Labour’s leader is far smarter than some folks think. It may feel like it’s all over but it isn’t, not yet. Don’t stop believin’.
