There are many words with which you could use to describe the age in which we are living. I’ll use two: shit show. Whether it is Dominic Cummings playing games with a Brexit most people believed was long over in order to extend the culture wars that have infected our country, the government’s disastrous handling of the COVID-19 pandemic and now the willingness of a government of millionaires to allow millions of children to go hungry this winter. This is not the kinder, gentler country so many of us dream of, but it’s what happens when Labour loses.
Labour thoroughly deserved to lose last December’s general election. To many of us, including lifelong Labour supporters and members like me, a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn was neither likely or even desirable. The latter point is probably more important than the former because, I have heard it said, that any Labour government would be better than a populist right wing nationalist government nominally led by a liar and a shyster like Boris Johnson and literally run by an unelected advisor like Dominic Cummings. Somehow, I can’t believe that a Labour government, led by a serial backbencher armed with nothing more than the failed hard left politics of the 1980s which led to 18 long years of opposition, and including the likes of Diane Abbott, Richard Burgon, Rebecca Long Bailey, Ian Lavery and Laura Pidcock, would have been any better than Johnson’s cabinet of the untalented. But it doesn’t matter. The electorate made its decision and we are where we are.
And where we are is a horrible place. A country where tens of millions were paid to a ferry company with no ferries, £12 billion handed to a private company led by a crony, Tory peer Dido Harding with no NHS experience, to run a disastrously inept track and trace system, over half a billion quid of taxpayers’ money is lavished on people who can already afford to eat out to “Eat out to help out’ but cannot scrape together a trifling £20 million to feed hungry children.
This is just a small excerpt of Britain’s shit show, a living nightmare that goes on and on and is likely to go on and on given the imminent arrival of mass unemployment, the like of which we have never seen. There is no obvious reason for hope. So, let’s repeat what I said earlier: this is what happens when Labour loses.
The reasons why Labour lost are many and varied. The prospect of Jeremy Corbyn headed the list, but so did Brexit, immigration and the perception that Labour would crash the economy. And the offer Labour gave the country was not so much a manifesto but an uncosted wish list. Critically, the middle class hipsters who controlled Corbyn’s Labour saw no need to build a wide coalition with the electorate. Instead of reaching out beyond its working class base, and the affluent chattering classes, to the ambitious and the aspirational, Corbyn appeared to run for Number Ten on the basis of the politics of envy. No effort was made to understand those of us who want the next generation to do better than we did. They did not recognise that people like to earn more money, they aspire to own a house and, yes, they want to get on in life. No political party that doesn’t embrace the aspirational can ever hope to gain the trust of the electorate and frankly does not deserve to.
The people who surrounded Corbyn, the upper class posh boys and girls like Seumas Milne, James Schneider, Jon Lansman, as well as the aristocratic Andrew Murray and his daughter Laura, looked inwards and demanded purity. They sought to build a ‘political movement’ rather than a Labour government. In gifting Boris Johnson a landslide victory, the people who would suffer would be the very people who depend on Labour, not those who quite fancy a hard left political party.
Does this mean Labour should seek to moderate its views in order to achieve victory? Tony Blair didn’t modify his views in 1997, 2001 and 2005 when he led ‘New Labour’ to victory. New Labour was what he genuinely believed in and he was able to persuade voters to support it. Corbyn and co represented a relatively small section of politics and so his ideas, resurrected from the disastrous Tony Benn years, were torn apart at the ballot box.
If New Labour did anything wrong, it probably didn’t do enough to solidify its legacy. It was all too easy for the 2010 Tory government of David Cameron, in which some Lib Dems had jobs, and the subsequent governments of Theresa May and now Cummings and Johnson, to tear down the remains of Labour’s achievements. Keir Starmer’s manifesto for 2024 will not be a New Labour manifesto, because things have changed so much since 1997, but it will need to be far more radical and it will need to carry the people with it.
Labour will need to do more to address inequality than by merely tweaking the benefits system. It will need to address the education system that naturally favours the rich, something that is even more acute during the COVID-19 crisis. There’s no point in saying any more than that just now because we are four years away from the next election and the Britain of today won’t be the Britain of tomorrow. But whatever happens, Labour’s main aim must be to win. That does not mean to compromise its principles and core beliefs. On the contrary, Labour needs to build on them with a package people can believe in, on the basis of fairness and equality.
I doubt that anyone is really enjoy this current shit show. But we have it because Dominic Cummings and Boris Johnson offered a prospectus, albeit one that merely said ‘Get Brexit done’, that appealed to voters far more than the rantings of an elderly crank who had never had an original idea in his life.
It is pure conjecture to suggest things today would have been better or worse under Corbyn. We can all have a view on it, but the image of Corbyn, Abbott or Burgon standing alongside Chris Whitty and Patrick Vallance at a COVID-19 press conference, does not make me feel any better than having Johnson, Dominic Raab and Priti Patel standing there. In truth, we are comparing with bad with bad.
The crank hard left will never compromise on their so called principles. It is all about the taking part in politics that matters to them and not the winning of elections.
My old MP, Tony Benn, as a product of the upper classes, was always fascinated by what he saw as the romance of the working class struggle, a world he knew nothing about, nor really understood. The same is true of the upper class comrades who surrounded Corbyn. Benn, like them, would never compromise on anything, never mind acknowledge that someone might have a better idea than him. I was at a public meeting at Holymead Junior School on Wick Road, Brislington the night before the 1983 general election, where Benn was accompanied by the actor Bill ‘Compo’ Owen. Both speakers appeared confident that Michael Foot was on his way to a remarkable victory over the hated Margaret Thatcher. The opinion polls, they insisted, were wrong. At the conclusion of the speeches, both men received a raucous standing ovation from the packed hall. But surely no one there, not even Benn nor Owen could have really meant it. Most of us knew Labour would be wiped out, as it was, handing Tony Benn’s Bristol East constituency to a rabid right wing Tory Jonathan Sayeed, as Thatcher won with a landslide 144 seat House of Commons majority. Doubtless, the comrades felt Labour had ‘won the argument’, as the Corbynistas insisted their man had done as they handed Boris Johnson an 80 seat majority last December. Some win, some argument.
Ultimately, we get the government we deserve because that’s the government we vote for. We knew Johnson was a liar, a shyster and a huckster, who was totally unfit to be prime minister, but still we (well, not me) still handed him the keys to Number 10. In the same way, five years of Corbyn as leader was the fault of those of us in the Labour Party who allowed it to happen. I hold my hands up because I should have done more to ensure Labour chose a better leader. In the end, it couldn’t have chosen a worse one.
It’s not enough to say, ‘Johnson out’ unless there is a serious alternative to his shit show of a government. The only possible alternative will be Labour. And Labour will only win if it provides change we can believe in.
